Launch of forA on the Urban Issue #0 and Forum #2

In one way or another, most of the demands on today’s world are intrinsically linked to the urban condition. forA on the Urban aims to detect, examine, analyze, and understand these situations in a way that goes beyond conventional frames of reference and tools in order to contribute to the necessary renovation of established vocabularies, formats, and methodologies—and the deconstruction of their very limits.

 

This conversation draws from contributions related to forA on the Urban Issue #0 and also builds upon questions from Forum #1, held during last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Forum #2 seeks to address pressing issues that center around notions of friction with regard to our present moment, however dire. What happens when multiple disciplines, practices, people, vocabularies, and actions meet spatially—and what collisions, frictions, and slippages occur? How might architecture play a role in portraying, creating, or alleviating certain concrete, real, and situated frictions relating to the urban? How, in turn, might this work alongside other practices help to recast the accepted role of urban practices as a whole, and allow for alternative future imaginaries?

forA on the Urban is a publication, website, and events platform that examines the open, unfinished, multi-scaled, interconnected, complex, and wild nature of urban manifestations, challenges, and situations through an expanded notion of architecture.

 

Bijoy Jain founded Studio Mumbai in 1995. The studio operates as an interdisciplinary collective of architects, engineers, master builders, artisans, technicians, and artists between India, Japan, and Europe. He currently teaches at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio.

 

Elke Krasny is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is the co-editor of books including Radicalizing Care: Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating. Her forthcoming book, Living with an Infected Planet: Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care, develops a feminist perspective on imaginaries of war and realities of care in pandemic times.

 

Sanford Kwinter is a writer and architectural theorist. He currently serves as Professor of Theory and Criticism at the Pratt Institute in New York. He is a co-founder of Zone Books.