Guest editors: Carlos A. Segura y Richard Gerald—Rondón
Institutions are inevitable conventions. They classify, create temporalities, remember and forget precedents, and authorize or censor narratives. They capture the shifting features of reality in order to serve their own aims and representations. Architectural institutions, in particular—academic, professional, and cultural—exist within multiple disciplinary crises, which are mediated by the persistence of a professionalizing educational regime, a highly extractive construction industry, and increasingly precarious labor conditions.Institutions do not merely mediate modes of labor within these disciplinary crises—which are simultaneously economic, environmental, and technological—but also the imagination of the crisis itself: knowledge production, legitimization and terms of mutual recognition, norms and curricula, contractual and affective relations, professional mythologies, states of exhaustion, revolt and its containment, historical debts, the speculation and management of risk, resignation and refusal,documentation and promotion, and space as such have all been configured by academic and professional institutions in ways that ensure their perpetuity. In this context, a set of practices, often referred to as “spatial practices”, have withdrawn to the margins of the discipline, even though they have shared training systems and interconnected agencies, thereby configuring other fronts of action.
Paradoxically, central institutions have identified and incorporated —at times as an object of genuine interest, at others as a mechanism of self-preservation—those alternative forms of organizing labor, knowledge, and skills that in some way challenge official formats, grouping them into a supposedly unified, stable corpus with clearly defined boundaries. The conceptual, operational, and political implications of this relation are often assimilated within the disciplinary aura as a form of reciprocal interest: firstly, central institutions selectively incorporate and coexist with these other forms, diminishing their capacity to articulate irreconcilable differences with institutional frameworks; secondly, these other practices choose to articulate their operations from within in order to ensure their survival amid crisis, not seeking abolition, but rather problematizing the institution itself and turning it into both a solution and a zone of contact.
Materia Arquitectura 31 is interested in exploring the tensions and latent complexities between
architectural institutions and these other forms of organizing labor, knowledge, and techniques—those referred to as “spatial practices” or “expanded architecture.” We seek contributions that examine the practical, conceptual, pedagogical, and political scope of individual and collective agents that both expand—and challenge—existing institutions, as well as their mutual destabilizations, tactics of survival and self-preservation, and acts of withdrawal. More broadly, we are interested in contributions that consider how the tensions between these agents allow us to test other ways of operating and reimagining the disciplinary crisis itself… ultimately, how they allow us to imagine other institutions.
We welcome submissions in the following categories:
• Peer-reviewed research articles
• Graphic essays
• Architecture and criticism
Submission deadline: August 3, 2026
Publication date: December 2026
For full submission guidelines please visit:
https://www.materiaarquitectura.com/index.php/MA/index
Short version:
Materia Arquitectura 31 is interested in exploring the tensions and latent complexities between
architectural institutions and these other forms of organizing labor, knowledge, and techniques—those referred to as “spatial practices” or “expanded architecture.” We seek contributions that examine the practical, conceptual, pedagogical, and political scope of individual and collective agents that both expand—and challenge—existing institutions, as well as their mutual destabilizations, tactics of survival and self-preservation, and acts of withdrawal. More broadly, we are interested in contributions that consider how the tensions between these agents allow us to test other ways of operating and reimagining the disciplinary
crisis itself… ultimately, how they allow us to imagine other institutions.
We welcome submissions in the following categories:
• Peer-reviewed research articles
• Graphic essays
• Architecture and criticism
Submission deadline: August 3, 2026
Publication date: December 2026
For full submission guidelines and call details, please visit:
https://www.materiaarquitectura.com/index.php/MA/index