EDITORIAL INTENT

Alternative Futures emerges from a set of unresolved tensions in my own practice. For several years, teaching at the Architectural Association sat alongside the demands of running a studio engaged in fast moving, large scale work. Teaching created space to engage with cultural questions as they were forming, to see what students were responding to, what they were pushing against, and what felt newly urgent in the wider world. Practice, meanwhile, required clarity, speed, and delivery. Both were productive, but they rarely spoke to one another in a sustained way.

Over time, a considerable body of thinking accumulated within teaching. Ideas were tested through briefs, discussions, and student work, but without a clear afterlife beyond the academy. At the same time, the pace of practice left little room to reflect on how those ideas were already shaping the broader work. I did not want this thinking to remain confined to an academic endeavour, and I was equally resistant to becoming purely an academic. Alternative Futures is an attempt to construct a third space, one that allows ideas to move between teaching, research, and practice without being subsumed by any single mode, and to make visible lines of enquiry that would otherwise remain unarticulated or dispersed.

At its core, Alternative Futures is concerned with bringing different voices into conversation around shared questions. Architecture is shaped by many forms of intelligence, and no single perspective is sufficient to address the complexity of the futures it helps produce. Some of the most productive ideas emerge not from agreement, but from adjacency, from voices placed next to one another in unexpected ways, and from conversations that would not otherwise happen. This project is an attempt to create the conditions for those encounters to take place, with a sense of care, curiosity, and openness about where they might lead.

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CULTURAL DEPTH

The kinds of questions Alternative Futures is concerned with do not sit comfortably within the timelines or structures of architectural production. They are often cultural before they are formal, systemic before they are spatial, and long term before they become legible within a brief. While they may inform projects indirectly, they are rarely given the space to be examined on their own terms.

In practice, such questions are frequently compressed. The need to resolve, coordinate, and deliver leaves little room for sustained reflection, particularly when working at scale or speed. The profession’s imperative to reduce and manage risk often excludes these questions altogether. Cultural considerations may be acknowledged, but they tend to remain secondary, shaping decisions quietly rather than being articulated explicitly. Over time, this produces work that is informed by context without ever fully engaging with it.

Teaching and research allow these questions to surface more clearly. Within academia, it is possible to test ideas without the immediate pressure of delivery, and to observe how broader cultural conditions are reflected in the work students choose to pursue or resist. These environments often function as early indicators of societal change. Yet the depth generated there is fragile. Once removed from its context, it risks being diluted, parked, or lost.

Alternative Futures is concerned with fostering and deepening this intelligence. Depth, in this sense, is not about completeness or authority. It is about sustained attention, the willingness to stay with a question long enough for its implications to unfold, without knowing where it might land. It requires resisting the impulse to resolve ideas too quickly, or to frame them solely in terms of productivity.

By creating a space where ideas can be revisited, challenged, and reframed over time, Alternative Futures seeks to cultivate cultural depth as an active condition, one that allows architectural thinking to operate beyond immediacy, and to engage with longer social, environmental, and institutional trajectories.

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COLLECTIVE CONTINUITY

Alternative Futures is structured to unfold over time rather than to arrive as a finished position. It is conceived as an ongoing editorial framework, one that allows ideas to accumulate, recur, and evolve as conditions change. Many of the questions the project engages cannot be resolved within a single moment, and attempting to do so would diminish their complexity.

The work operates through a simple but deliberate structure. At intervals, I articulate topics as a way of focusing attention on questions that feel culturally relevant or architecturally pressing. These are not briefs or agendas, but points of departure. Contributors from adjacent disciplines and practices respond independently, bringing different forms of knowledge and experience into conversation. The role of editing is to frame these exchanges, not to reconcile them, allowing difference, disagreement, and partial alignment to coexist.

Continuity, here, is not linear. Some ideas will deepen over time, others may recede, and new questions will emerge as circumstances shift. What matters is not coherence in the conventional sense, but the ability to return to thinking without starting again. In this way, Alternative Futures functions as a collective enquiry, both a how to and a why not.

Here, Alternative Futures takes shape through a series of focused topics and responses. Essays, reflections, and conversations that sit somewhere between practice, research, and culture.

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