“Can contemporary architectural research learn anything from the military principle of incitatory operations?” asked Eyal Weizman in Volume #16: Engineering Society. Today, almost a decade later, with military operations taking place in the five continents and radical groups increasingly gaining power, Weizman’s inquiry still feels relevant.

Eight years ago, Volume dedicated issue 16 to Social Engineering. It was like swearing in the church, a no go zone, radioactive stuff. Would the mild form of social engineering advocated by Ernsten and Janmaat in V16 be a way to go? To mediate between global and local, between neighborhood and country, between the self and the collective?

Gaming is an interesting field of experimentation in simulating the urban environment. It also has the potential to help in the design of buildings and cities. Among the promising aspects of gaming are the decentralized and local processes that are currently applied in the latest generation of multiuser games.

As the newly crowned Architect of Change, Barack Obama must convince and inspire a wide range of groups, factions and movements. His inauguration address attempted to reunite what the preceding administration left fragmented and to address each and every group in order to underline that Obama is the president for all Americans. Brendan McGetrick dissects the wordsmith’s architecture.

Connection is a popular motif in design: all types of infrastructure – bridges, pathways, transportation, service systems and applications – wish to tie into the urban fabric to make things productive. However, there is also an opposite tendency: the act of disconnection. Amelia Borg and Timothy Moore ponder how one can physically remove themselves from the communication of things.

In April 2010 Cloud Lab visited the Asada Synergistic Intelligence Project, a part of the Japanese Science and Technology Agency’s ERATO project. In an anonymous meeting room surrounded by cubicles we met with Hiroshi Ishiguro to talk about the future of robotics, space and communications.

The conflicting processes, which can both define or change borders and which classify who is ‘inside’ of Europe or who stays ‘outside’ of Europe can be labeled with the concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’. The ongoing demarcation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ characterize debates on multiple levels, such as negotiations on EU enlargement and on definitions of citizenship, immigration and participation in decision-making.


The Ganges River is India’s largest and most densely populated water basin. A lifeline to millions of people and carrying enormous celestial significance, the river is also severely polluted and suffers from dramatic droughts and floods. Vere van Gool spoke with Anthony Acciavatti to discuss the decade he spent navigating the Ganges and the new reading he was able to construct of this sacred river.

Volume #48: The Research Turn contains the exhibition catalogue for BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping, the Dutch entry at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, by Malkit Shoshan. BLUE focuses on the most prominent footprint of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations: the compound.

The political left has had a rough few decades; everything just seems to be going in the other direction. Instead of romanticizing what it would be like ‘only if’, we’d better get to work on figuring out how to turn the engine of progress around. Volume spoke with Adrian Lahoud about the stakes of architectural research within the academy today and how it might contribute to moving towards the horizons of the left.

Buildings get built, inhabited, and begin to come undone. Political regimes rise, have their fun, and fall. The knowledge that goes into and comes out of such processes lives a different kind of life, though. Ideas are birthed, yet their death is an impermanent state of forget. Buildings can impress and politics can mobilize, but knowledge is wild; there’s no telling just what it will do. With immateriality comes a certain type of power, which industrialism has taught us can be wielded to virtuous effect of both benefit and harm. All it takes is setting our mind to it.

During the Venice Biennale 2016, Volume organizes 'Whose Side Are You On?': a breakfast discussion on the possible role of architecture in UN Peacekeeping Missions. In addition, Volume #48: The Research Turn will be officially launched.

An opinion-piece by ArchDaily's Jesse Connuck in response to Nick Axel's essay 'Cloud Urbanism: Towards a Redistribution of Spatial Value' as featured in Volume #47: The System*.

Dredging is the mechanical process that keeps water, water. Yet due to natural fluid dynamics, silting is an ongoing process. So we have to continuously take subaquedous sediment from one place and move it to another, releasing a host of disruptive ecological processes along the way. The Open Workshop has developed a strategy for Toledo, Ohio to use dredged material for both extending the city's civic space and cleaning up Lake Eerie.

The welfare state was pretty great while it lasted, wasn't it? Yeah, those were the days, golden, even. But now, sad to say yet no point to lament times have changed; things are different. Planning used to be the way society would stay on track and moving forward. Today, for better or worse, we have the market. There are reasons why the market came to take the place of the state, but the real question is, now that we have it, how can we make the market work for us?

The central hub of the United Parcel Service (UPS) processes, on average, 1.6 million packages per day. That's almost twenty per second. Such an intense flow forces operations to be internally consistent, but also demands an enormous amount of flexibility due to unpredictable externalities. What if a road is closed, or a machine breaks? Ghazal Jafari investigates the UPS's contingency management system and looks at this logistical behemoth venturing into new territories.

Latin America is a place, but it's also a project. Its history as a colonial project gave birth to a radical one of decolonization. With revoutionaries like Simón Bolívar and José de San Martin, the idea of Latin America as a collective whole emerged and has persisted up to this day. Godofredo Pereira looks at the failed proposal of a pipeline running between three countries to question whether such a mechanism can't be used to realize such a project, that of Latin America itself.