TOUCHING (ARCHITECTURAL) CORRESPONDENCES // LETTER TO A BUILDING

Dear R.H.,

We’ve lost touch; a few thousand miles between us with months turning into years, things get in the way as reality strikes and hands and time slip. “Let’s stay in touch” we’ve said over and over again. And somehow we do; through screens, cables, hauntings, bush-hammered concrete walls; but not in the way we thought we would. Fingers reach, voices sink, things excite you, they frighten me—by staying in touch, we’ve lost staying with it. And as days fill the space in between, as worlds move and hostility prevails, through absence you say “we‘re at a loss when we stay”.

Yours,
Diana and Gustav

P.S. In the 1950s and 1960s Ray Johnson started exchanging small art pieces by mail with a group of colleagues in rejection of the elite art scene and its venues—they called it the New York Correspondance [sic] School. In 2020 and 2021 the Queer Correspondence project sought to connect and nurture indeterminate spaces of possibility created by subcultural lives in East London and beyond. During the summer of 2025 we mailed former classmates and colleagues with whom we had been out of touch ¹ . Together we’re exploring what the creative correspondence might bring to our lives, including the way we think of, practice and talk about architecture. By corresponding creatively—with the smudging of ink and mail never received—we practice staying with the touching, the fumbling, the nonsensical, and the getting lost together. Who/how/when/where are we becoming when we’re “intra-actively writing each other”² ?

P.P.S. We’re attending to touch. Rehearsing touching (the) practicing (of) theorizing with touching-practicing-theorizing. Feminist physicist philosopher Karen Barad suggests that reality is towards phenomena rather than things and proposes a boundary-making cutting together-apart—the agential cut—instead of binary-making Cartesian cuts³ . In their agential realist ontology⁴
, space is not a container and time is not a backdrop, rather space and time is iteratively reconfigured with matter as space-time-mattering⁵ . Touch is no longer an inter-action between distinct entities (like Self and Other), but a radically intimate intra-active “selftouching”, and staying with the reaching and longing of touch/ing is staying with alterities and aporia⁶ . By attending to touch/ing with Barad, how might we explore ways of being with and knowing the world differently from an out-of-touch late modernity?

P.P.P.S. Touching with/as correspondence is also a doing-thinking of architecture differently. An embodied exploration of relationality beyond objects and representationalism, and a haptic encounter with plural worlds and ontological designing⁷ . Søren speculates that an emerging fascination with surgical vocabularies ⁸ over the past decade (Brandlhuber’s incisions, Lacaton & Vassal’s excisions, de Vylder Vinck Taillieu’s sutures, Carles Oliver’s resections, Schemata’s implants, or Pihlmann’s biopsies) bears family resemblances to agential realist ways of thinking about events and relations, and might enter into fruitful dialogue with Barad’s conceptual framework. Bringing up Halberstam’s writings on Anarchitecture⁹ feels pertinent too. Sitting there/here, entangled with those concrete walls and Minerva, who is made to matter or excluded from enacting agency? What difference does it make if you are draw(in)n(g) by pencil on paper or nurbs in pixels? And how can taking seriously the temporality of boundaries let us reconfigure different possible worlds with architectures as/of moving matters?