For this issue, we asked: if there is architecture without architects, what could architecture without buildings look like? - one of the discipline’s urgent, but often suppressed questions. The breadth and conviction of more than 75 responses we received from 22 countries, spanning from Peru to Australia, attest to the necessity of this inquiry and confirm that it is not speculative. It names a condition already underway.

Now more than ever, it is evident that architecture is increasingly practiced under conditions in which building is neither its primary activity nor its most consequential outcome. Beyond the externalities that pressure our profession, we see that it is the broadening of architecture that allows us to coerce this system in the most productive ways. This shift comes from the conviction that every object, building, and environment is a result of design decisions. To operate architecturally is therefore to reject design as passive objects to be consumed and intervene in those decisions, whether or not they culminate in a building.

The contributions gathered here insist on this expanded field. As Justin McElderly reimagines the architect as a civic servant, Marina Schiesari documents the tree debris as architecture of affection. Bryan Wong and Namhi Kwun shed light on the anti-architecture of a rising tech dystopia, while Joar Nordvall rebels against the retreat of public space with a simple chair. Issi Nanabeyin translates poetry, Rosita Palladino questions what it means to celebrate at urban scale while Lexi Tsien suggests that we can put it all on wheels, Simona Ferrari reminds us to look for gardens in the city gaps, Alaina Griffin - to decenter buildings in discourse, and Caleb Lightfoot turns it all to dust to prepare the ground for what is to come. Across these projects, architectural practice operates horizontally, embedded within social, ecological, political, and technological systems rather than perched above them.

Here, architecture without buildings is a promise, not a threat. The question is no longer whether architecture can survive without buildings. It is whether we are willing to recognize how much architectural work already occurs beyond them. Seeing an edifice now as one of the many knots in this system will allow us to serve our intent of doing it right; if not a building, perhaps a chair is doing enough for now.

Olga Kedya & Tony Salem Musleh