As a part of this year’s call for submissions to the journal, we invite contributions that reflect on the role of Architecture Images Studies (AIS) on the current “Liminal” times. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Were and how Architecture Images Studies relate with a polarized world?
Which/whose are the limits of Architecture Images Studies concepts and how this discussion contribute to the present global challenges?
What methodological experiments are you undertaking and what methods are being developed?
Which novel theoretical insights can we draw upon to bring the Architecture Images Studies (AIS) forward?

 In addition to this specific themed call for submissions we also welcome contributions that deal in a more general way with issues pertaining to AIS. We remind that AIS Journal is focused on the image production realms that are connected with Architecture and Design, among others architectural and design photography, 2D and 3D drawing technologies (CAD) project and inspirational illustration.

As a part of this year’s call for submissions to the journal, we invite contributions that reflect on the role of Architecture Images Studies (AIS) on the current “Liminal” times. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Were and how Architecture Images Studies relate with a polarized world?
Which/whose are the limits of Architecture Images Studies concepts and how this discussion contribute to the present global challenges?
What methodological experiments are you undertaking and what methods are being developed?
Which novel theoretical insights can we draw upon to bring the Architecture Images Studies (AIS) forward?

 In addition to this specific themed call for submissions we also welcome contributions that deal in a more general way with issues pertaining to AIS. We remind that AIS Journal is focused on the image production realms that are connected with Architecture and Design, among others architectural and design photography, 2D and 3D drawing technologies (CAD) project and inspirational illustration.

The proposed issue of AIS address how some architects are embracing forms of SF to represent the intersections of these technological developments and forms of otherness and most importantly articulate those ideas through the creation of progressive architectural design position and the representation of architectural ideas.

One of the objectives for a progressive speculative architecture would be to provide the visual and spatial forms that animate these narratives, giving them an immediacy and tangible presence that text alone is unable to communicate. We are living in age of great social and technological transformation: our spaces, societies, interactions and even our bodies are being transformed and the spatial consequences of our networked societies need to be fully explored as integral part of newly framed utopian architecture of the future.

The uncertainties surrounding the future have tended to result in popular narratives that are nihilistic and reductive, if only for dramatic value, and It is clear that alternatives are necessary if we are to make positive sense of the increasingly complex technological opportunities that shape the world around us and the range of possible outcomes that we face.

Architectural design and Science Fiction (SF) share an important characteristic, in that they both, conceptually, take place in an imagined future, and potentially ask ‘what-if’ questions about the way we inhabit those futures.

In architecture the conclusions that are drawn are often seem prosaic though the effects can have far-reaching implications for millions. Many contemporary SF texts deal with more radical forms of futurity through imagining extreme forms of technology and otherness involving different expressions of identity, agency and new forms of collective action, and while they may seem quite fanciful such conceptions also have a direct significance to the type of built environment the future may hold.

The second issue of Architecture Image Studies focuses on a series of projects created, by an international group of architects and academics, as thought experiments and developed through the production of speculative architectural drawings and critical texts. Together they represent a provocative and polemical approach to contemporary architectural and spatial practice.

The central theme of ‘Narrative Architecture’ engages with possibilities of spatial representation in architecture through the themes of cognition, perception, experience, whilst employing wide-variety forms, media and techniques.

The contributors employ speculative narrative methods to create architectural projects and texts that combine 21st-century approaches to digital technology with analogue processes and methodologies to experiment with hybridised forms of representation creating new architectural typologies and expanding disciplinary territories.

Much of the work published here was initially exhibited in a series of exhibitions, most recently as part of the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season 2019 in the exhibition ‘Sensorium’. Through the production of these drawings and texts, the contributors seek to align themselves with a tradition of visionary narratives and use the multiple platforms of dissemination to communicate those ideas to a wider set of audiences beyond architectural academia.

At a time where the autonomy of architects is under threat from the pressures of commercialisation and commodification, it is our ambition to continue a debate about what makes architecture ‘architecture’ beyond the limits of the corporate world of architectural practice, focused around representations, where the ‘drawings’ are not generated for something else. They stand and exist in themselves as architecture.

Online Journal, AIS is focused on the image production realms that are connected with Architecture and Design, among others architectural and design photography, 2D and 3D drawing technologies (CAD) project and inspirational illustration.