The Avery Review stands with all those fighting, organizing, teaching, and writing for abolition—and, in architecture, with all those working against the white supremacy, settler colonialism, ableism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy upheld in and by our field.
The essays in Issue 57 test the limits of the review as a genre: looking at and through places, methods, and books to envision and approach other ideas differently. Bella Carmelita Carriker complicates the “public” memory of 9/11, recording the long-term violences enacted against low-income communities of color; Supriya Ambwani exposes histories of spatial violence and colonial extraction entangled in the Great Hedge of India; Gealese Peebles traces the historiographic silhouette of Norma Merrick Sklarek to scrutinize architecture’s diversity narratives; and Peter Paul Walhout unsubscribes from the internet-as-utility rhetoric in NYC that has come to stand in for questions of inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not What I Meant But Anyway
by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen
In Not What I Meant But Anyway, the work of Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen form points of departure from which to contemplate issues of friction, entanglement, porousness, reflection, and self-implication. Together with conversations between the artists, the book hints at the intimacies and estrangements inherent to their practice.
Deserts Are Not Empty
Edited by Samia Henni
Deserts Are Not Empty draws on a framework of decoloniality to challenge popular assumptions about desert regions as “empty” spaces, devoid of life. It explores how these assumptions have been leveraged to justify colonial interventions in desert territories around the world. In questioning the roots and ramifications of this “regime of emptiness,” the book proposes different ways to see, think, and imagine Earth’s deserts otherwise.
Art after Liberalism
by Nicholas Gamso
Preservation, Sustainability, and Equity
edited by Erica Avrami
Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound
edited by Natasha Ginwala, Gal Kirn, and Niloufar Tajeri
Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality
edited by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt
Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction
by Larry D. Busbea
Superpowers of Scale
by Andrés Jaque
Preservation and Social Inclusion
edited by Erica Avrami
Ways of Knowing Cities
edited by Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley
Projects currently underway include:
Aeropolis
by Nerea Calvillo
Abolish Architecture: Disobedient Design, Wayward Scripts, and Other Ways of Building
by V. Mitch McEwen