This fall, in a large meeting room located inside of the bowls of MVRDV’s orange monstrous staircase at TU Delft, you could hear a pin drop. The crowd of 20-something highly international postgrad architecture students collectively held their breath for an instant. In thinking about potential topics to review we were discussing contraposing in writing and devil’s advocacy when out of the blue one of the students seemed to suggest reviewing the positive sides of ISIS. It was one of many fruitful moments of doubt and tension in the preparation of this issue of VOLUME. (The other awkward moment briefly occurred a little earlier when I asked how many students still read magazines …only two…)

It all started with 3 Beiruti’s joining Archis RSVP event #06 Amman/Ramallah in 2004 which two years later lead to Archis RSVP event #10 Beirut, dedicated to “Unbuilt”, on destruction as a deliberate act of design. Since then, we’ve established a network, friendships, a body of work. Now we went back for the first time since Covid, amid a financial decline and in the aftermath of the ammonium nitrate blast of August 2020.

The succession of Roberto Gargiani at EPFL in Lausanne [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne] ignited a polemic about the role of history in architecture teaching. From the comfort of their personal environments noted theorists/historians Jean-Louis Cohen, Fabrizio Gallanti, Françoise Fromonot and Philip Ursprung talk about the prospects and relevance of history in architectural education. 

In revisiting Volume’s (pre)history In Volume 58: The Legacy, we conducted an interview with Hans van Dijk, editor-in-chief of Volume’s predecessor Archis during the 1980s. An exchange on the role of architecture criticism in general and the magazine in particular at the time. The sad news that Hans van Dijk passed away August 26, 2021 transforms this exchange between colleagues in search of motives and motivations into a testimony of what architecture criticism once stood for and what it may potentially be capable of today.

When humans invent things, for the first 30 years they call those things 'technology'. Then, when it's successful, they begin to call them 'infrastructure'.

Ever since the first edition in Vienna, multiple souls have coexisted within the term Media Architecture: the aesthetic as much as the theoretical, the interactive as well as the political.

With the world finally discussing solutions to avoid climate disaster, media artist Andrea Polli already has two decades of experience under her belt. Situated at the intersection of technology, science, and art her artistic practice explores the materialization of elusive atmospheres, transforming the ephemeral into media architectures. Andrea Polli discussed with Denisse Vega de Santiago.

Since the first edition in 2010, the Media Architecture Biennale has managed to take advantage of the ambiguity of the term ‘media architecture’, elusively shapeshifting across technological developments and urban applications – yet always keeping the same strong attitude: the relentless self-inquiry across the borders, thresholds, and reach of the field.

How to hand over the baton from one editor-in-chief to the next? Is there a script, a protocol, a convention? Your new man, Stephan Petermann and I decided to give it some time; to jointly walk the entire distance of one issue. Great idea, but what about the subject? It should combine the briefing and debriefing so we agreed on ‘the legacy’. To avoid simplistic boasting or navel-gazing we decided to dive into Volume’s pre-history, starting in 1929 and stopping where Volume started.

We publish some of the correspondence of Non-Professional Practice, a series which was sparked by 3 years of conversations at Harvard GSD, and by Sol’s advice to “learn to say ‘Fuck you’ to the world once in a while”. Artists, curators, writers, architects, designers, and students speaking to practice as a form of constant interrogation of the self, of failure and experimentation, of leaps and stumbles, of adaptation and restlessness.

Imagine, the revolution has broken out and architecture has nailed its colours to the mast. It has opted for change.  Architects have laid out the facts about the inequality in land ownership, inheritance law, capital accumulation, and the resulting segregation, an inequality they have observed first-hand for many years, have helped shape or even profited from. These experiences from direct spatial practice now lend legitimacy to the revolution. 

We're sharing the experiences of Rodrigo Tomás and his firm RETA, the topic of Reinier de Graaf’s forthcoming novel The Masterplan, to be published in the fall of 2020.

At the 2018 Venice Biennale the Unfolding Pavilion was praised as one of the best exhibitions to visit. With one catch: the Biennale knew nothing about it. Now that they are about to launch the new exhibition on December 17th, Francesco Degl’Innocenti talks to the minds behind the initiative – Daniel Tudor Munteanu, Davide Tommaso Ferrando and Sara Favargiotti – about the genesis, the physiology and the future mutations of this curatorial parasite.

If there is a system change today, it is the way default solutions are being questioned and powers are forced to move. If not away, then at least in a direction they previously thought unthinkable. 

Rem Koolhaas cross interviewed by Christophe van Gerrewey, Arjen Oosterman and Christophe Catsaros on Countryside, The Future, the pandemic and architecture. Rotterdam, June 26th, 2020.