ARCHIFUTURES: print and digital publication series

Archifutures is a new field guide to the future of architecture. Edited by &beyond and published by dpr-barcelona, the first three volumes – The Museum, The Studio, and The Site – map contemporary architectural practice and urban planning, presented through the words, ideas and images of some of its key players and change-makers. From institutions, activists, thinkers, curators and architects to urban bloggers, polemicists, critics and publishers, these are the people shaping tomorrow’s architecture and cities – and so helping to shape our societies of the future too.

Volume 1: The Museum, which launched at the Lisbon Triennale in November 2016, spotlights the work of the Future Architecture platform members themselves, whilst the second and third volumes,The Studio and The Site, present a thoughtful selection of theories and practice shaping the “future of architecture” today.

The first volume, The Museum – A field guide to communicating the future of architecture, includes contributions from institutions such as the MAXXI in Rome and the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel; festivals like Tirana Architecture Week and Prishtina Architecture Week, Kosovo; research and education platforms Design Biotop in Ljubljana and CANactions in Kiev and publishers dpr-barcelona. It maps their work communicating new and innovative thought and practice that is leading architecture today, highlighting the strategies they use and programmes they run to support this. Steering the dialogue are current practitioners and thinkers including Superstudio, Socks Studio, Nick Axel and Léa-Catherine Szacka. The volume also a specially commissioned “collage conversation”, a visual dialogue between generations, from Superstudio co-founder Cristiano Toraldo di Francia and Guillermo Lopez of MAIO.

In Volume 2: The Studio – A field guide to speculating upon the future of architecture, the focus is on the cutting-edge thinking and wider theoretical questions and themes underpinning the series, from reflections upon what our ideas of “future” really mean to the changing role of the architecture profession as a whole. This volume comprises speculative visions, essays and texts from contributors including: Ana Jeinić, Miloš Kosec, Clément Blanchet, Amateur Cities, Liam Young, Something Fantastic, Merve Bedir, Tomaž Pipan, Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Tiago Torres-Campos and Reinier de Graaf.

Leading on from the theoretical approaches contained in Volume 2, the third volume: The Site – A field guide to making the future of architecture, presents a further selection from the Future Architecture platform’s 2015 call for ideas. The focus here is on the nitty-gritty of practice: projects and strategies that are on-site or site-ready to shake up that future. These are the inspirational solutions and ideas, which could soon be transforming the landscape of architecture and our cities, reasserting the agency architecture in its widest sense.  Contributors include: Aleksandra Zarek; Plan Común; Guerilla Architects; Jack Self; Lavinia Scaletti; Léopold Lambert; Manon Mollard; Urbz and Natasha Reid.

The publication of all three volumes also marks the launch of the digital platform archifutures.org, designed to functions as the Archifutures digital bookshelf, a live repository of Future Architecture platform contributions and experiences. This allows both participants and readers to arrange and print on demand their own personal compilations. It also enables them to interact with the material and its dissemination, feeding back into current debate and mapping out new networks.

Archifutures is conceived, edited and designed by &beyond and published by dpr-barcelona. The series accompanies the Future Architecture platform, a European-wide network and EU-funded initiative created by the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana.