Issue 40 completes the fifth year of the Avery Review, an online journal dedicated to critical essays on architecture published by Columbia GSAPP’s Publications Office.

In this last issue before a summer break, Caitlin Blanchfield and Nina Valerie Kolowratnik explore cartographies and counter-cartographies of surveillance in the Tohono O’odham Nation; Yuki Higashino retraces the transnational/transhistorical sprawl of the Bauhaus on display at HKW; Reinhold Martin entangles “Bjarke” and “Murdoch” in a Lower Manhattan lifeboat under construction; Daryl Meador embodies oil at Houston’s Weiss Energy Hall; Bart-Jan Polman dissects the historicist histrionics of the Netherlands’ Forum for Democracy; Pollyanna Rhee journeys between a special economic zone in Ireland and a retrospective of Kennedy Browne’s work at the Krannert Art Museum; Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco voices the (neo)colonial impact of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Tren Maya; and Filipe de Sousa speculates on the individual, the collective, and the collection at NURTUREart’s Aesthetic Behavior; Developmental Sequences.

The Avery Review is an online journal dedicated to thinking about books, buildings, and other architectural media. We see the genres of the review and the critical essay as vital but still underutilized ways of exploring the ideas and problems that animate the field of architecture, and we hope to push these genres beyond their most familiar forms, whether journalistic or academic. Our aim is to explore the broader implications of a given object of discourse (whether text, film, exhibition, building, project, or urban environment), to expand the terrain of what we imagine architectural discourse to be, and to broaden the diversity of voices that our field typically hears from. We are interested in reviews that test and expand the reviewer’s own intellectual commitments—theoretical, architectural, and political—through the work of others. The Avery Review publishes new essays monthly during the academic year.

The Avery Review’s 5-year anniversary will be marked with events in the fall of 2019. The editors thank all authors for their contributions throughout the years, and encourages everyone to keep an eye out for buildings, books, landscapes, histories, and ideas that demand critical and rigorous consideration in coming editions. Queries, comments, and general submissions are always welcomed at editors@averyreview.com.

The full archive can be accessed online.