Editorial

Throughout history, the eye has claimed authority over the other senses, the entirety of the natural world recognizable and catalogued through their perceived discernible differences. 18th-century invented taxonomies provided unquestionable truths that have persisted in society under the guise of logic. CARTHA has spent the last year researching the ways that these pre-organized systems continue to shape the environment by looking at architecture. A discipline heavily reliant on visual order, architecture insists on form and material, yet at the same time, equally as significant are the unseen layers. The contributions are an exercise in the nuances of visibility.

This was an elaborate task, the evident breadth of the topic provoking us to tackle the very nature of our systematised way of thinking. Marking out the imperceptible forces in architecture reinforces the idea that this exercise is not linear, but rather reciprocal. The study perpetually turns back on itself revealing in ever greater depth the dance between architecture and culture as they simultaneously create one another.

The Open Call for Submissions invited contributors to respond to prompts put forward by an economist, biologist, artist, architect and historian in the Invisible Structures: Prologue. The themes that emerged from their research were meant as a starting point to explore systemic influence in the built environment. Some of the contributors for this issue chose to respond directly to the Prologue essays and others sprawled out, questioning agendas of governance and labour, dismantling gender in architecture, or describing love in spatial terms. 

Through storytelling, academic research, film and visuals, the contributions navigate and attempt to manifest how invisible structures are realized in space. This issue tackles how historic systems of classification persevere, but also introduces the ways in which softer structures of intimacy and affect play equally as important of a role in architecture and society. They begin to map out aspects of contemporary life that are produced by things we cannot see or touch. 

Lena Appel’s loosely connected short essays question memory as structure. Masa Tomsic unearths the sublime dialectic between ground and heart, while Viola Ago traces the invisible forces of western oppression that have defined the fate of the Albanian built environment in the last decade. Galo Canizares wonders what compassionate software would look like in practice. Reflecting on digitally-mediated buildings, Gillian Shaffer describes ways that machine vision has permeated the urban fabric already from half a century ago. More speculative in nature, Alina Nazmeeva looks at how our current methods of viewing digital representations affect our understanding of reality. Edoardo Cresci analyzes the origins and impact of the network of Cisterian abbeys in Europe. Shou Jie Eng explores the construction of both physical and metaphorical feminist comunities across centuries and continents, and Brett Zehner & Kylie King found the foundations of corporate psychology lying among the ruins of Cold War defensive architecture in the US. In the form of a video essay, JDA Winslow reprocesses the ways that the West depicts and appropriates Russian language in its cinema industry since the fall of the Berlin wall. Exploring the concept of the digital twin, the collective State Of The Heart researches its deployment as a medical device to monitor the health of the planet. Marianna Charitonidou draws from the saturated history of László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto to research the influences of biosemiotics in architecture. Marco Zelli dissects key moments in the unfolding of Modernism to suggest its hidden project: the disappearance of the author. Mariana Meneguetti speculates on representations within the patriarchal practice of modern Brazilian architecture. Hamish Lonergan travels to venice on off-grid queer pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden, and Alexandra Pereira-Edwards questions contemporary infrastructures of intimacy.

The cycle’s contributions are widespread in their approaches, all negotiating the fine line of new types of spaces becoming visible, even if they were designed to be obscured, or safely tucked away in the monotony of the everyday. A peculiarity that emerged from these contributions is the instability of this exchange, between visible and invisible. At what point do more abstract things like acceptance, desire, memory, scent and labour enter the visual arena, and how much space do they take up, even if for a brief moment?