Clara and guest editors Jolein Bergers, Nadia Casabella, Seth Denizen, and Ananda Kohlbrenner are launching a call for papers for the thematic section “Architecture has a soil problem” of issue 13, to be published in 2027.
Architecture has a soil problem. Not only epistemologically—through the discipline’s limited frameworks to understand, analyze, or work with soil—but also ontologically, in the very way it conceives of soil in the first place. From the digging of foundations to the sealing of surfaces, architectural practice typically treats soil as ‘dirt’, an interchangeable substance devoid of specificity, meaning, or vitality. Soils are too often reduced to a passive background for human activity, an empty canvas to build upon rather than a living milieu to design with, within or through. This ignorance indirectly contributes to their depletion and demise. What would it mean to resist this thanatological path and instead reconceptualize both soil and architecture through their entanglements, in relation to the pedogenetic processes they co-produce?
Architecture has a soil problem or rather, several interrelated problems or predicaments that must be addressed. In this call for contributions, we invite submissions that may (A) deepen our understanding of these problems through scholarly or visual interventions, or (B) present case studies of built projects that suggest ways of confronting or transforming them.
Contributions may take the form of academic papers or visual essays and can be written in English or French. Abstracts should be submitted by 30/01/2026 to clara.archi [at] ulb.be. Full CFP and exact modalities can be found on our website : https://clararevue.ulb.be
Clara is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal in architecture dedicated to topics, research methods and tools specific to the field. Each issue comprises a main thematic section with its own call for papers, and two additional sections with Archives and Position(s) articles.