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!

Our next issue #56 Playbor will be released soon. In the meantime, we publish a series of texts exploring the data produced by international surveys on people's work related feelings. This article focuses on burnout.

The question of the colonial/postcolonial heritage is complicated in the case of Bangladesh for a simple reason. After the British rule ended we had to deal with the Pakistan – Indian split, and this is more determining for our present condition.

In the Archizoom gallery of the EPFL, Lausanne, this fall ‘Faraway So Close’ is on show, presenting the work of Kashef Chowdhury. Christophe Catsaros sat with its curator, Niklaus Graber to discuss the relevance of this work and subject.

In the Western imagination, Bangladesh is more likely to conjure up images of human and environmental disasters than of quality tropical architecture. Two years ago, the Rohingya exodus was just another in a long list of catastrophes that had punctuated the history of a country with a population greater than that of Russia and a land area barely larger than that of Greece.

Curated by Itinerant Office, the book ‘ATLAS of emerging practices: being an architect in the 21st century’ has just been launched at the New Generations Festival in Rome. Volume editor Francesco Degl'Innocenti sat down with Itinerant Office founder Gianpiero Venturini, to discuss the findings of their research on the European context, and break a few misconceptions about the profession.

How do we live forever? Cultural memory is something which binds individuals together across time and space, creating the sense that although mortal, there is a greater continuity persisting both in the pre-life and after-life.

The establishment of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in 2003 marked a profound shift in the custodial objectives of UNESCO as an organisation and the mechanisms it utilises preserve global culture. Since the introduction of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (WCH) in 1972, Unesco policy had, to that point, been driven and dominated by a single, concise, and ultimately incomplete mandate; namely, the evaluation and preservation of material structures.

In the hierarchy of major themes that shaped the modern spirit in architecture, hygiene, the imperative of a more salubrious habitat and city, is undeniably at the top of the list. With the book 'X-Ray Architecture', Beatriz Colomina, historian and theoretician of architecture and teacher at Princeton, chooses to make this a structuring principle, more to do with the fear of death and the repressed unconscious than the spirit of innovation. Is modern architecture as hysterical as that of the Baroque period?

One thing gentrification thrives on is heritage. Whether it is the grand redbrick houses of a run-down neighbourhood, or the rich and diverse culture of working-class areas, the middle-class drivers of gentrification are attracted by a sense of history. But as much as gentrification fetishizes heritage, it consumes it, mutates it, and sometimes destroys it.