CURRENT ISSUE

Editorial: Departure

I hope you’ll forgive me a brief reflection and goodbye.

Through this vehicle–Crit–I have tried to highlight a discourse on some of the less tired themes in architecture and urbanism. Credit for any success in that endeavor goes to our authors. I am sure you will agree that their voices–from among our student, emerging professional, and educator populations–have been refreshing and enlightening.

In each of the four issues I edited, we sought to employ the (Crit)ical voice that has distinguished this student journal for 33 years. Together as editor, authors, designers, readers, publishers, we took stock of the many proposed forces within the practice of architecture, and we questioned the dogma of certain architectural “movements” (Crit 64). Together, and with guest editor John Cary, we discovered the parallels between the tumult of 1968 and 2008, exploring the potent work of activist architects and activist architectures (Crit 65). Together–and perhaps a few months before its time–we critiqued the fabric and infrastructures of our cities, the systems and volumes that stitch urbana together (Crit 66).

In Crit 67, we reach into the arena of human conflict. War is the psychological, social, cultural, and physical manifestation of Hell on Earth. It is an ever-present reality in parts of our world, and there is no ethical way to disconnect ourselves from all conflict. As architects, we should consider the ways in which conflict rapes landscape. Architectures and urban landscapes–whether or not intended–behave as the playing field for violence. This issue of Crit includes investigations of Architecture as Target; Architecture as Battlefield; Architecture as Fortress; Architecture as Barrier; and what we might call “Scar-chitecture.”

We are blessed to have an amazing team of contributors, including Archis’ Kai Vockler
Robert A.M. Stern, Subtopia’s Bryan Finoki, The Architecture of Fear’s George Agnew, Casius Pealer, Ava Abramowitz, AIAS Past President Andrew Caruso, Adler Prioly, Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine’s Abe Hayeem, and an amazing group of gifted student writers. With them we journey from Kabul, Afghanistan to Prishtina, Kosovo; Ramallah to Jerusalem; Iraq to Southern Sudan; and from painfully militarized borders to sinister laboratories of war.

Between Crit 64 and 68, some issues were hopeful, some cynical. However this issue will be characterized, I hope you find in it what I have: the boundless collective of gifts residing in designers and design students. If I haven’t said it before, I am continually floored by the spectacular and unending creativity and cleverness of my fellow designers, who are, as it turns out, as gifted in their manipulation of the written word as they are the drafted line.

I’ll miss this terribly.

Jacob Day
2007-2009 Editor-in-Chief