Call for papers - JOELHO - Journal of Architectural Culture #14 - Digital Culture. What’s Next?
Editors: Armando Rabaça, Bruno Gil, Isabel Clara Neves
Digital Culture. What’s Next?
We live in an era characterized by profound changes in the way we perceive and interact with the world, guided by the driving force of digital technologies, a phenomenon many authors have no hesitation in calling a Fourth Industrial Revolution. As diverse as these changes may be in the realm of architecture, they are inevitably embedded in a long-standing negotiation of formal codes, as suggested in Antoine Picon’s Digital Culture in Architecture (2010) and Mario Carpo’s The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011), ultimately leading Reinhold Martin to ask: “Is digital culture secular?”
Despite the inevitable links with past codes, soft architecture technologies based on speculative intelligence are leaving behind what Nicholas Negroponte named “Soft Architecture Machines,” in which hardware still ruled, and opening a new era which is definitely distinct from the First or Second Machine Ages, as identified by Reyner Banham. Indeed, these digital changes are part of a deeper historical change. We are experiencing a growing political instability on a global scale, in which social inequality is increasing, while the worldwide urban population has surpassed the entire rural population. These phenomena have given rise to problems in urban policies, such as a lack of quality housing, social segregation, and the informal growth of cities. The evolving and nearly unavoidable phenomenon of climate change has been accompanied by a growing awareness of the effects of human activity on the planet and of the urgent need to achieve a measure of environmental sustainability. These changes all have direct consequences for the practice of architecture.
After reflecting in issue 13 on how memory can act as a catalyst for architectural thinking within the singular mind of the creative individual, the particular interest of Joelho – Journal of Architectural Culture #14 is in how shared and collaborative processes, driven by the architect operating within this digital culture, are motivating experimental architectural and urban practices that are attempting to confront the associated political, environmental, and social concerns. Apart from the digital turn advanced by a rhetoric founded on aesthetic novelty or on innovative, conceptual ways of making, the undeniable strength of digital tools resides in how, and by what means, they might contribute to a more environmentally, politically and socially responsible architectural practice.
The essays in this issue might address a variety of questions. What methods, tools and processes could contribute to this practice? How can these methods and tools foster intelligent practices directed towards a sustainable and socially responsible future in architecture and urban design? How might they act at the analytical and productive levels? Can artistic thinking and digital automatization find a subversive middle term? How might we ensure there will be a critical appropriation of those technologies?
Submissions
Authors need to register prior to submitting (https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/joelho). If already registered, simply log in and begin the five-step process.
First stage: potential contributors should submit the full article in English (4,000 to 6,000 words, plus footnotes and captions), an abstract (with no more than 1000 characters, including spaces) and illustrations until February 28, 2022. These will be subject to a blind peer-review process.
Blind peer-reviews will be reported to the authors by April 30, 2022.
Second stage: Articles found suitable for publication must take into account the reviewers’ comments. A revised article must be then submitted until May 30, 2022.
The issue will be published in February 2023.
