COVID-QUID TUM
ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW SPECIAL ISSUE (24:2, 2020)
The first months of this year have witnessed a disturbance to the way we conduct intellectual work. In some respects, this disturbance has signalled a return to writing as a primary mode of communicating ideas. Or, at least, of speaking online in the mode of writing. It has done so, however, under the shadow of a crisis that invites thinking— both reflective and projective—framed by the various realms most overtly touched by the advent of Covid-19 (health, economy, environment, society). Lectures, concerts, exhibitions and conferences have also proceeded through an insistence on life as usual, but only through the intercession of online platforms that also, for many, ring hollow. Initial expectations that the nature of our work would remain unchanged—merely conducted under different technological conditions—have been replaced by the realisation that the ability to work (at all) has become a rarefied possibility.
The series of short articles that follow respond to an invitation to consider the state of our world (the world of our thinking, the world in which we think and act) and the ways in which it suggests we might proceed. What values are clarified in this moment? What possibilities open up? Or shut down? We proposed a number of questions, and invited authors to work with the freedom to take some up and leave others aside. How has this experience, in all its variety, shaped intellectual work in particular? Does it affect what we deal with? If so, how? Is the world of our scholarship expanded by the events of this year? Or contracted? What are their effects?
We posed these questions in the midst of this moment. But we are also asking for them at a precise stage within it: as discussion around the prospect of “opening up” begins to seek a balance between public health and economic stability, and when the terms on which we return to “normal” are open to debate—as is the meaning of normality itself. Are the imperatives that shape the work you are doing now, or that you plan to start next, the same as those that drove you last year? How, we asked, do you figure what you do against the changes we have seen? What ideas about culture, architecture and thought seem most changed by the future we can imagine from this point in time?
Or at least we thought it was a precise stage. Events of the last two weeks (at the time of writing—a necessary clarification) have scuttled any sense that anybody could have predicted the course this year would take. The truism of Lenin—that in some weeks, decades happen—has been justifiably recalled by various commentators in recent days. The refugee crisis, the climate crisis, Black/Blak Lives Matter, global recession, pandemic: nobody would be so bold, here in June, after what we have seen, to treat that as a complete list for the year. It has become a year of reckoning with ourselves, our habits, and the Covid-19 pandemic has merely been the most functional of these crises in stopping us in our tracks.
The unfolding experience of this pandemic invites us to check ourselves, to pause and reflect, to rearrange our values and priorities, and to act where we need to act. Still lacking is clarity as to what such action could look like within our field: the motives, modes and outcomes of scholarly work, and the distance (or connection) it maintains to the world around it. The role of this journal, we believe, is to document what we can of the intellectual work that takes place in and around architecture. The former experience places the latter project into fresh terms. What is the role of that work now? What could it, should it be? The essays we received took up the questions we posed in a variety of ways: in some instances playing them against existing lines of enquiry, in others proposing new sets of coordinates for critical inquiry into architecture. At once these short, thoughtful reflections and provocations attest to the extent of the reverberations of the previous months, as well as the porosity of our field in being moved by them.
Notes on Contributors
Andrew Leach teaches architectural history at the University of Sydney. He is editor-in-chief of this journal.
Jasper Ludewig is a lecturer in architectural history, theory, and design at the University of Newcastle. He is an associate editor of ATR.