NEW CALL FOR PAPERS!
Clara and guest editors Seth Denizen, Jolein Bergers, Nadia Casabella, and Ananda Kohlbrenner are launching a call for papers for the thematic section “Architecture has a soil problem” of issue 13, to be published in 2027.
Architecture has a soil problem. Not only epistemologically—through the discipline’s limited frameworks to understand, analyze, or work with soil—but also ontologically, in the very way it conceives of soil in the first place. From the digging of foundations to the sealing of surfaces, architectural practice typically treats soil as ‘dirt’, an interchangeable substance devoid of specificity, meaning, or vitality. Soils are too often reduced to a passive background for human activity, an empty canvas to build upon rather than a living milieu to design with, within or through. This ignorance indirectly contributes to their depletion and demise. What would it mean to resist this thanatological path and instead reconceptualize both soil and architecture through their entanglements, in relation to the pedogenetic processes they co-produce?
Architecture has a soil problem or rather, several interrelated problems or predicaments that must be addressed. In this call for contributions, we invite submissions that may (A) deepen our understanding of these problems through scholarly or visual interventions, or (B) present case studies of built projects that suggest ways of confronting or transforming them.
Contributions may take the form of academic papers or visual essays, and can be written in English or French. Abstracts should be submitted by 30/01/2026 to clara.archi [at] ulb.be. Full CFP and exact modalities can be found on our website : https://clararevue.ulb.be
❤️💕Very happy that Three Landscape Essays was one of the selected projects among more than 800 submissions to the I Casa de la Arquitectura Awards, which recognize outstanding architectural production in Spain.❤️💕
Congratulations to finalists and winners, and heartful thanks to the jury!
📸: Revuelta al patio, Conde Duque, 2023
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#architecture #archilovers #landscapearchitecture #archidaily #bestnewarchitects
Last month we gathered online during #NYCClimateWeek to engage with Thinking Through Soil - a conversation about what it means to learn from and work with the ground beneath our feet.
Researcher Seth Denizen shared insights from his book “Thinking Through Soil” (Harvard University Press, 2025), co-authored with Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, reflecting on how soil holds both ecological and social relations, while artist Brooke Singer responded with stories from her soil-based “Carbon Sponge” collaborations in the Hudson Valley, exploring the tensions between regenerative agriculture, local economies, and global systems of extraction.
Together, they invited us to consider soil not just as a material substrate, but as a living record of a planet in transition, and a site where questions of care, equity, politics, economics, and environmental justice take root. 🌱
Watch this 1-minute excerpt, and see the full talk at the link in bio.
#ClimateWeekNYC #ThinkingThroughSoil #SoilJustice #RegenerativeAg #EnvironmentalArt #CollaborativeResearch
Join us during New York City Climate Week for a 60-minute lunchtime webinar on ZOOM exploring the challenges and possibilities of interdisciplinary environmental work through the lens of soil.
Registration at wright-ingraham.org/public-events
Mapping soil is a difficult task. Unlike topography, the most important features of a soil are not visible from its surface. To know anything at all, you have to see it in section, as a profile cut down into the thickness of the soil body. This is not the view that maps present us with, and to solve this problem, soil scientists divide the soil up into "pedons," which are hexagonal chunks of ground between 1 and 10 square meters at the surface, and extending down to the bottom of the soil. Soil maps show us where these hexagonal chunks are the same and where they are different. This soil pedon represents a soil formed in the wastewater of the Mezquital Valley, where microplastics, pharmaceuticals, and heavy metals mix with the nutrient rich sewage of 22 million people. For more info on this project check out the book at T̾h̾i̾n̾k̾i̾n̾g̾ ̾T̾h̾r̾o̾u̾g̾h̾ ̾S̾o̾i̾l̾:̾ ̾w̾a̾s̾t̾e̾w̾a̾t̾e̾r̾ ̾a̾g̾r̾i̾c̾u̾l̾t̾u̾r̾e̾ ̾i̾n̾ ̾t̾h̾e̾ ̾M̾e̾z̾q̾u̾i̾t̾a̾l̾ ̾V̾a̾l̾l̾e̾y̾, from Harvard Press. 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐢𝐨 @tbr0603
#thinkingthroughsoil
#soilscience
#mezquitalvalley #wastewater
@harvardgsd@harvardpress
•´¯`•. 𝙇𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙠 https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/book-release-thinking-through-soil/
Thursday, April 24, at 12:30PM ET Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Gary Hilderbrand and I will be at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design @harvardgsd@gsd_mla for the book launch!
Thanks to Harvard Design Press for organizing! Thanks also to the SOM Foundation Research Prize for supporting the project. @somfoundation
Limited copies of the book will be available for sale at the event. You can also pre-order it through Harvard University Press ahead of the book’s official release on June 10.
Book Description:
In cities, soil comprises a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. By considering the specific material and political conditions of the world’s largest wastewater agriculture system, Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley offers a design methodology derived through a sustained engagement with Mexico’s most controversial soil, and imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. This case study demonstrates a way to “think through soil” in urban areas -to privilege soil as the basis for decision-making in city planning and design- and asserts an approach to soil knowledge with global utility, particularly for places where environmental problems are complex, long-term, and have no purely technical solution.
🆃🅷🅸🅽🅺🅸🅽🅶 🆃🅷🆁🅾🆄🅶🅷 🆂🅾🅸🅻 has been 6 years in the making and we couldn’t be happier about how it turned out. Thank you for everyone who helped us get this in print! Link in bio.
For those of you who are new to the project, 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘚𝘰𝘪𝘭: 𝘞𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘈𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘦𝘻𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 is a rich case study looking at the perils and promises of reusing urban water in arid environments. We offer a new method for thinking through the surprising biopolitics of wastewater reuse, and rather than imagining wastewater agriculture as simply a technological problem, we see it as a political project to build the social and empirical relationships that would allow us to rethink the city through the lens of the soils it produces. To do this, we pay very close attention to history, and engage deeply with the work of Mexican soil scientists and farmers, tracing the sharp boundary you see here in this video... between the grey arid soil of a high altitude valley dominated by spiny CAM plants and the green oasis of lush agricultural crops irrigated by urban wastewater from Mexico City. #wastewatertreatment #wastewater-urbanism #wastewatermanagement #waterreuse #arid #mexico #cdmx #valledemezquital #hidalgo #sustainability #sdg6 #sdg6cleanwaterandsanitation #wastewateragriculture #environmentaljustice #climatechange
The book is out! 🆃🅷🅸🅽🅺🅸🅽🅶 🆃🅷🆁🅾🆄🅶🅷 🆂🅾🅸🅻 has been 6 years in the making and we couldn’t be happier about how it turned out. Thank you for everyone who helped us get this in print! Link in bio.
For those of you who are new to the project, 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘚𝘰𝘪𝘭: 𝘞𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘈𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘦𝘻𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 is a rich case study looking at the perils and promises of reusing urban water in arid environments. We offer a new method for thinking through the surprising biopolitics of wastewater reuse, and rather than imagining wastewater agriculture as simply a technological problem, we see it as a political project to build the social and empirical relationships that would allow us to rethink the city through the lens of the soils it produces. To do this, we pay very close attention to history, and engage deeply with the work of Mexican soil scientists and farmers, tracing the sharp boundary you see here in this video... between the grey arid soil of a high altitude valley dominated by spiny CAM plants and the green oasis of lush agricultural crops irrigated by urban wastewater from Mexico City.
𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐔𝐬 on zoom
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐮̈𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬: 𝐖𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐄𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐌𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐜𝐨
4 March 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
DocTalks x MoMA
ｈｔｔｐｓ：／／ｄｏｃｔａｌｋｓ．ｎｅｔ
REBECCA YUSTE
Columbia University
Respondent: Seth Denizen, Washington University
in St. Louis
Mexicans see the shame of today’s events at WashU clearer than US media right now. The headline reads “The repression of US university students continues”
I asked chat gpt to show me soil as a body with organs and this is what it gave me. Sound off in the comments.
Or, better yet, join us on ᴀᴘʀɪʟ 25 at the ᴀᴀʀʜᴜꜱ ꜱᴄʜᴏᴏʟ ᴏꜰ ᴀʀᴄʜɪᴛᴇᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ for Ｓｕｂｔｅｒｒａｒｉｕｍ where I’ll be thinking through the 19th century transformation of soil from dead rock to a body with organs, whose uncertain animacy still troubles us today.
#soil #deleuze #aarhusschoolofarchitecture #subterrarium #soilbody #dokuchaev
![NEW CALL FOR PAPERS!Clara and guest editors Seth Denizen, Jolein Bergers, Nadia Casabella, and Ananda Kohlbrenner are launching a call for papers for the thematic section “Architecture has a soil problem” of issue 13, to be published in 2027.Architecture has a soil problem. Not only epistemologically—through the discipline’s limited frameworks to understand, analyze, or work with soil—but also ontologically, in the very way it conceives of soil in the first place. From the digging of foundations to the sealing of surfaces, architectural practice typically treats soil as ‘dirt’, an interchangeable substance devoid of specificity, meaning, or vitality. Soils are too often reduced to a passive background for human activity, an empty canvas to build upon rather than a living milieu to design with, within or through. This ignorance indirectly contributes to their depletion and demise. What would it mean to resist this thanatological path and instead reconceptualize both soil and architecture through their entanglements, in relation to the pedogenetic processes they co-produce?Architecture has a soil problem or rather, several interrelated problems or predicaments that must be addressed. In this call for contributions, we invite submissions that may (A) deepen our understanding of these problems through scholarly or visual interventions, or (B) present case studies of built projects that suggest ways of confronting or transforming them.Contributions may take the form of academic papers or visual essays, and can be written in English or French. Abstracts should be submitted by 30/01/2026 to clara.archi [at] ulb.be. Full CFP and exact modalities can be found on our website : https://clararevue.ulb.be](https://sp1.picnob.com/p/pt_6758145117717267691830_0_f0fede19718d5bc0d9fe693a21607697.jpg?o=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&h=ce6383d0ca0558a2ae19f5697ced1c45)
