Architecture Writing Workshop

We are pleased to announce the launch of Architecture Writing Workshop (AWW), a platform for writers, practitioners, and academics—or anyone interested in writing—to explore and discuss issues affecting architecture discipline. Our aim is to collectively practice architecture through writing and explore the medium’s possibilities to engage the social, environmental, and political spheres surrounding architecture. For our inaugural issue, Who Gets to Write, we explore the accessibility of architectural discourse. Read our whole issue at

Architecture Writing Workshop in The Architect’s Newspaper! We are looking to build more live (virtual or in person) workshops with anyone interested. Please DM us, email us, tweet us! An excerpt from the AN article: “Why write? Specifically: Why write about architecture? Today, there are many reasons to write, little time to so, and many publishing efforts—books, journals, magazines, newspapers, blogs, Tumblrs, Substacks, newsletters, tweets, TikToks, posts, memes, et al.—that engage the built environment.”

“Norms surrounding family, love, work, and aging have shifted radically, while most of the spaces we inhabit still follow postwar scripts: the traditional nuclear family, linear work-life trajectories, and conventional notions of ownership,” says Igo Kommers Wender in “Living Apart, Together.” He continues: “And so apartments become evidence of a misalignment between how we live and where we live—but they’re also potential sites for resetting that relationship.” Image (2) credits: Three Generation House (2018) by BETA Office for Architecture and the City. Amsterdam, Netherlands. Courtesy of BETA Office for Architecture and the City. Photo by Ossip van Duivenbode. Read the full conversation at

Across Toronto’s postwar residential towers, parquet has endured as a marker of social and urban history. In “Postwar Parquet,” Sebastián López Cardozo and Stefan Novakovic trace its loss and legacy. Read full article at Image: 4 ¾” x 4 ¾“ oak “finger-block” parquet in Toronto rental apartment building, 1968. Photo by authors.

In “One Street,” Dan Seljak and Sebastián López Cardozo walk Toronto’s Bathurst Street—one of the city’s main north-south thoroughfares extending from the shore of Lake Ontario to Holland Marsh. From that walk came eleven photographs of apartment buildings, one from each decade between 1910 and 2020. Considered together, the photographs sketch a loose chronology of how Toronto has housed itself over more than a century—without a single master plan, but not without pattern. Read full article at Image: 2601 Bathurst Street, built 1953. Photo by Dan Seljak.

How do building technologies shape the way we live together? From early modern apartments like Stuyvesant (1870) and Dakota (1884), to the global spread of prefabricated concrete housing after World War II, construction methods have been intertwined with the evolution of collective living. Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) belongs to this same lineage. Jesús Vassallo and Pouya Khadem explore CLT’s history, challenges, and potential to reshape apartment construction for a more resilient, adaptable future. Read full article at Image: Modulus Matrix, 85 social housing in Cornellà, Spain (2020) by Peris + Toral Architecture. Spain. Courtesy of Peris + Toral. Photo by ​​José Hevia.

Apartments occupy a paradoxical position in the built environment. They are spaces of separation—defined by walls, codes, and legal boundaries—yet they depend on shared architecture, infrastructure, and circulation. Within this condition, questions of privacy and adjacency are not abstract concerns but everyday realities. In this roundtable, AWW editors Mai Okimoto and Sebastián López Cardozo convene Nicholas Gilliland, Igo Kommers Wender, and Karen Kubey to reflect on apartments across practice, policy, and lived experience. Moving between theory and example, the discussion considers how architecture might support—and balance—privacy and sharing at multiple scales. Read full article at Image: The Amalgamated Houses Building Number 1 (1927) by Springsteen and Goldhammer. Bronx, New York. Photograph taken 1929. Courtesy of Amalgamated Housing Corporation.

THE APARTMENT ISSUE Apartments shape how we exist alongside one another—how we negotiate space, proximity, and the idea of home. The Apartment Issue looks at apartments, and the buildings that contain them, at the intersection of private life and collective experience. At once familiar and strange, they reveal the gaps and overlaps between lived realities and the development patterns that produce them. The contributions gathered here consider apartments as a flexible and evolving framework through which architecture, material systems, social dynamics, and policy are closely intertwined. Taken together, they examine how apartments mediate between intimacy and exposure, efficiency and generosity, regulation and everyday life. In “Living Apart, Together,” Nicholas Gilliland, Igo Kommers Wender, and Karen Kubey discuss how apartments negotiate private life and shared space; in “CLT and Apartments,” Jesús Vassallo and Pouya Khadem examine the origins, challenges, and futures of cross-laminated timber in multi-unit housing; in “One Street, Eleven Decades of Apartment Building,” Dan Seljak and Sebastián López Cardozo document Toronto’s layered apartment landscapes; and in “Postwar Parquet,” Stefan Novakovic and Sebastián López Cardozo speak with residents about parquet floors as sites of memory and transformation. Read full issue at Image: The Bagneux Affordable Housing Project (2024) by Tolila+Gilliland. Bagneux, France. Courtesy of Tolila+Gilliland. Photo by Cyrille Weiner @cyrilleweiner .

One-foot Square Mirror, Mark Jarzombek, Submission for 1BY1 Design Challenge. Courtesy of O(U)R. Read “This Land Is Not My Land” by Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash at .

“The ADA generated a mobilization for disability that we had never seen in American culture, and it remains enormously impactful today. As a community, disabled people take a lot of pride in that work,” says Hannah Wong in conversation with Paul DeFazio in “Accessing Design / Designing Access.” She continues: “At the same time, the perception that there are minimum standards to meet—and then call it a day—can lead to a sense of complacency among designers. Standards and regulations also ignore the diversity of needs within the disability community; they imply that by instituting these very specific criteria we’re going to make things more beneficial for everyone.” Read the full conversation at .

“The facade struggles to be seen independently of the rest of the building, to be trusted on its own terms. We have relied on the facade to tell us stories about the politics and culture of societies; for instance, the extent of Baroque-era ornamentation signals the wealth and status of its patronage,” says Orçun Yazıcı in The Hidden Recesses and the Four Gates. He continues: “But a facade, concealing what lies behind, highlights a dual nature: It is both curtain and mirror, joining the city’s fabric while keeping secrets to itself. Traces of vital infrastructure are glimpsed behind the mask, as with a ventilation building’s fixed expression covering the enormous air shafts positioned above underground tunnels, exchanging polluted air for fresh air in a continuous, heaving breath.” Photos by Nick Somers. Read the full conversation at .

“Houston checks all the boxes of the American city: highways, strip malls, parking lots. But it takes driving—seeing its rawness firsthand—to begin to understand what draws people to a place that can seem, at first, so desolate. There’s a harshness to this landscape, its wet heat, endless asphalt, and, above all, its emptiness,” say Pouya Khadem and Mai Okimoto in “Parking Landscapes.” They continue: “But Houston is also this: the sun-baked signage lining the roadside; the low, stretched-out buildings they beckon toward, advertising a Washateria here, a bún suông place there, a nail salon, the check cashers. A simple turn off the road, a pause in the flow, reveals something more. Despite their shared vocabulary of unassuming forms, each cluster of buildings is a mikrokosmos of language, texture, and culture.” Read the full conversation at .