Architecture and Culture, Vol. 7, Issue no. 1, March 2019

"Tolerance lies at the crux between the contingencies of context and autonomous production".

Academic journal publishing worldwide has become increasingly watched over and policed by funding bodies and institutions demanding that scholarship be seen to have direct and maximized impact for economic gain or return. As Wendy Brown notes, "the move to judge every academic endeavour by its uptake in non academic venues (commerce, state agencies, NGOs), as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) does, is [...] damaging" because "academic practices have been transformed by neoliberal economization". This monitoring, counting, measuring and quantifying frames assessment of the validity of architectural research and limits the exchange between architectural practice and publishing.  Within academic institutions, organizational adjacencies of disciplines create conditions of more or less tolerance in judging the value of a wide and diverse range of architectural outputs and the limits of the form/s original and creative architectural research may appear beyond a building design or a traditional 7,000 word scholarly journal article about a building's history or performance that is double-blind reviewed by expert peers in architecture. 

In an effort to recover architectural publishing as a more liberal, yet rigorous, space of production and imagination, this issue of  Architecture and Culture seeks to reveal nuances in publishing and associated academic practices which might exceed or distil conventional and accepted disciplinary limitations. It seeks to instigate more open-ended relationships, interpretations and iterations between theory and practice – between textuality, visuality and aurality – to sway between and across more or less disciplinarity with empathy and insight.  Contributions are sought  from a range of cultural and geographical positions and perspectives that examine any aspect of the discourse, practice and research of architecture as an exploration of spaces of tolerance. 

Contributions might address, but are not limited to, the following themes: 

  •  Disciplinary tolerances and constraints- environmental, cultural, aesthetic and philosophical 
  •  Spatial and temporal tolerance in the architectural project as research inquiry or conceptual field- compression, extension, timescale, site
  •  Physical and digital tolerances- in material assemblages, production, between drawing and building, purity and impurity 
  •  Tolerant practices and zero tolerance - material, spatial, cultural, interdisciplinary, iteration, adjustment, alteration in production and thinking
  •  The capacity and agency of terms of reference such as: instruction, specification, revision, refinement, supersede, feedback, approval, completion
  •  Social, cultural and political tolerance and threats - control of information, image, author, reader 
  •  Extremities, margins and marginality
  •  Acceptable levels of deviation, divergence, variation, imprecision, 

Submissions are sought that involve ungendering, unacculturating (in disciplinary terms) and hybridising the architectural writer, editor, reviewer, and reader, and re-tooling the instruments and tactics of architectural scholarship. We welcome contributions with formats that reflect on or revisit significant hybrid architectural publication within the discipline (such as Hedjuk, Gideon, Le Corbusier, Venturi Scott Brown) and formats that experiment with alternative forms to the conventional journal article such as:                                                                                 

  • a single drawing designed to be situated on a printed or e-page
  • a series of drawings specified to be published as a sequence or at a series of intervals
  • a design project- 1000 words + images (iterations and/or interpretation)
  • a still image designed to be situated on a printed or e-page
  • a visual essay specified to be published as a sequence over up to 8 pages or as a series of intervals
  • an audio essay of up to 8 minutes length
  • a poem or a script
  • a moving image or film of up to 8 minutes length

In order to create a space of tolerance in architectural publication,  Justine Clark and Paul Walker consider 'processes of "interpretation", rather than "judgement"' and suggest critics and reviewers engage in 'a more complex understanding of the role of "intention of the work"'. If the intention of the work is to explore audio, audiovisual or hypermedia as a form of communication then the work needs to be understood  as '"a way of making", even of world-making' delivered in 'a productive and creative practice'. In this spirit, submissions for this issue will be reviewed as a project of interpretation and imagination delivered in the spirit of tolerance within interdisciplinary peer review. 

Rather than read this moment in architectural scholarship as a crisis of critical production we argue that tolerance in interdisciplinary research in architecture offers a sustainable, intellectual and sensorial enrichment to architectural knowledge and its exchange inside and outside the discipline. The professional academic and researcher opens up their work to readers and viewers of differing levels and appearances of scholarship to cultivate more diverse and productive conversations and parallels 'between speakers, listeners, givers and receivers' for "[…] an open and vast space with room enough for all kinds of manoeuvring".

Production schedule

  • Call for Papers October 2017
  • Response 15 January 2018 
  • Editors selection  February 2018
  • Peer Reviewing March-June 2018
  • Authors Revisions July-September 2018
  • Editorial checking October-November 2018
  • Copy to publisher 1 December 2018
  • Issue publication March 2019

For author instructions, please go to 'Instructions for Authors' at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rfac20

Upload submissions at:  http://www.editorialmanager.com/archcult/

If you have any queries or require further information, please contact:

Igea Troiani  [email protected]

Suzanne Ewing  [email protected]

Editorial Information

This issue is edited by Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing 

Igea Troiani (PhD) is an architect, academic and independent filmmaker. Her portfolio of research experience is in architectural history and theory and is in three areas: 1) The Social Production of Architecture (in modern architectural history and contemporary education and practice); 2) Architecture, nature, neoliberalism and labour (mainly on unfinished buildings and architectural production in a neoliberal age) and; 3) New modes of Architectural Scholarship (including filmmaking and exhibition design as research outputs).  In addition to her written publications, she writes theory as film and has, since 2004, made films on the politics of architectural production, most recently under her production company Caryatid Films. She  co-curates design exhibitions as research outputs with her practice-partner in Original Field of Architecture (Oxford) Andrew Dawson.

Suzanne Ewing is an architect and academic based at the University of Edinburgh, and currently Head of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Working at the intersection of humanities and design research, her publications include Architecture and Field/Work (Routledge, 2010), and articles on practices of architectural education, constructing site, and design tactics which navigate contemporary metropolitan fragilities. She is working with Igea Troiani on a book, Visual Research Methods in Architecture (Intellect, 2018) which includes a range of distinctive practices positioned in relation to visual methods practiced in ethnography, anthropology, visual culture and media studies.