Guest Editor: Catherine Ingraham, Pratt Institute, New York City

This issue of Khōrein provides space for a discussion about the relevance of change for architecture. We equally encourage consideration of what architecture as a discipline can specifically contribute to the understanding of change as a concept. In the process of architectural creation, it seems crucial to address the underlying need for relativity to make the discourse of change possible. To conceive of change, we cannot but establish the relation of its absolute novelty with what precedes it. In this regard, the conception of change could be described as a kind of epistemic ordering of any change, real or imagined. We thus ask whether the reconstruction of precedents is key to understanding how change can be designed. Does the architect need “means for change” to change something? Supposing such an act is impossible without returning to architectural precedents and histories, how does the architect distance themselves from the iconicity of those hereditary structures, which yet seem to inhibit the flux of change?

To say what change is, as a concept, seems like a difficult task that often ends in logical paradoxes. This is so because thinking about change requires its definition, while change as such evades the definite: it is to be found beyond the idea of end. Could this be the reason, then, why we almost always speak of change in terms of the change of something, a thing for which we can still say what it is? Can we abstract change from things? Does this thingness as a “substratum of change” hinder our conceiving of its essence? Is it possible to grasp change while having in front of our eyes only its effects, that is, different states of a thing changing? These questions point to what Henri Bergson describes as the “phantom of change,” referring to the difficulty of thinking its inherent dynamics. However, even if we give up detaching change from phenomena, many questions about its nature still remain. For example, what remains unchanged of a thing after it changes? Can the vicissitudes of change make a thing cease being what it is and become “other” than itself? Regarding such alterations, should we consider change something more than pure dynamism?

Another set of questions refers to whether architecture needs change at all. Burdened with the ideas of stasis and sustaining life, does architecture fundamentally oppose change? Moreover, does change belong to architecture or rather to the architect? If the architect is expected to intervene in the world and change something, should we talk about the architect’s “outreach”?  Finally, would the absence of change make architecture unworldly?

Submissions should be emailed to khorein@ifdt.bg.ac.rs. 

Submission deadline: April 25, 2024