Guest Editor: MOULD 

field is an internationally renowned, peer-reviewed, open access, indexed journal based at Sheffield School of Architecture.

field aims to support a wide range of research, pedagogy and writing on architecture and landscape, urban and interior space. We particularly invite interdisciplinary discourse that combines architecture and urbanism with other arts, humanities or social sciences disciplines.

field (11.1) follows the completion of the AHRC/DfG-funded research project Architecture is Climate, which proposes new ways for architecture to be understood, practiced, and taught through exploring its deep entanglement with climate breakdown. Instead of asking the normative question, ‘what can architecture do for climate breakdown?’, Architecture is Climate reverses it and asks instead, ‘what does climate breakdown do to architecture?’ Climate breakdown is not something to be fixed or mitigated by tweaks to architectural production through conventional notions of sustainability; it fundamentally pulls the rug from beneath architectural practice, exposing its foundations in colonial, patriarchal, and extractive ways of thinking and doing.

To say that Architecture is Climate is to challenge many of the orthodoxies, assumptions and protocols of architecture as it is professionally defined. To say that Architecture is Climate is to situate it within an unpredictable and volatile context, and this is daunting, scary even, for a profession that is founded on control. To say that Architecture is Climate is exposing, stripping away the layers of protection that any profession wraps itself within, leaving architecture in a raw state—but one which is both necessary and an opportunity. Away from the myopic version of architecture as mere static building, an expanded architecture shares many of the characteristics of climate. Both are relational, bringing together multiple human and beyond-human conditions. Both are temporal, formed in the past, affecting the present and projecting into the future. Both are profoundly shaped by the tenets and operations of modernity. Both are determined by the forces of capitalism. Both are experienced through multiple senses – visceral, haptic, emotional. Both are understood through a range from the measurable to the ineffable. Both are impactful on the human and beyond-human worlds. 

For this special issue of field we invite papers in three interlinked categories:

• papers which explore the historical entanglements of architecture and climate in terms of their shared foundations;
• papers which narrate and interpret alternative spatial practices which face and rearrange those entanglements;
• and papers which imagine alternative futures for architecture and spatial practice.

Paper proposals should expand on the way these three sections are described on the Architecture is Climate website. We seek examples across multiple regions, contexts, and disciplines that are addressing climate breakdown with implications for spatial practice, and which explore decolonial, anti-patriarchal, non-extractivist alternatives. Together, the special issue will draw grounds for a reimagined architecture that stretches beyond the self-defined boundaries of current architectural norms.

Process

Paper proposals, to consist of a 100-word author bio(s), 500-word abstract, key references, and details of any visual material due by 26 July 2024.

Proposals will be submitted to editorial selection review with comments.

Notification of selected paper proposals in August 2024.

Papers will then have an open collegiate review at a symposium and workshop event at Sheffield School of Architecture and Landscape on 22 November 2024 6 December 2024, and (for authors who require it) simultaneous double-blind peer review.

Final papers to be delivered by March 2025. 

Intended publication in Summer 2025.

Questions by email to a.powis@sheffield.ac.uk. Please upload your submission using the 'Start Submission' option above.