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.

“Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centered vision”, The Guardian headlined on March 12, 2021. For years, the tech giant had attempted to gain a foothold in smart city development, via its ‘urban intelligence’ spinoff Sidewalk Labs.

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.

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.

Taking the Country’s Side is an exhibition exploring “the complex relationship between architecture and agriculture over the past 10,000 years.” Curator Stéphane Marot's position may be comparable with the one Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley developed in their Istanbul Design Biennial for Are We Human? show, exploring 200,000 years of design. Design is not something new but deeply human and therefore present from day 1 of human’s presence on Earth. Christophe Catsaros sat with Sébastien Marot to discuss the contexts of this exhibition, the concerns and problems it shows and the message of hope it ends with.

Eventually, Susy found a job in an industrial warehouse. The company, one of the fastest growing online supermarkets in the country. A company which of course she’d never heard of before.

In parallel to Volume #56 Playbor, we publish a series of texts exploring the different aspects of work conditions. This article focuses on the distribution, the measure and the appreciation of the leisure time, in an age where the line between work and leisure is thinning.

Currently, union membership is declining all across the OECD and in most other regions in the world while anti-union sentiment and legislation have become commonplace giving workers few, if any, means to collectively bargain with increasingly large and diffuse firms. At the same time, zero hour contract models and the platformization of labor have fragmented and deconstructed many of the labor protections that unions have made possible which has, in turn, destabilised the conditions for social solidarity that once made collective bargaining effective.

In addition to the interview published in Volume 56, we release some more material from that conversation that we couldn’t include in print. Enjoy!