How can I tell you, dear critic, that your very existence is vital to reinventing and queering the crit? How can I convince you that the crit - the central form of learning and valuing in architectural education - produces and reproduces unreflected values, practices, and privileges? You, dear critic, have a choice: to be complicit or to become the fierce queer critic you were meant to be! Go ahead, rethink the crit and the power you hold. It's time to queer the crit(ic).

As a continuation of the series Feminist Thinkers for Architects, architect/artist Afaina de Jong, in collaboration with CLAIMING*SPACES and master’s architecture students at TU Wien, has developed the second fanzine, Lorde for Architecture Students. Throwing shade at the homogenous selection of thinkers in the 18 current titles of Routledge’s Thinkers for Architects, this publication acts as a comment on- and complement to the original series.

Developed online (w/Covid restrictions) during spring 2021 and concluding with the second CLAIMING*SPACES Conference - Whose History? in spring 2022, the fanzine aims to connect key themes (silence, dismantling, difference, the erotic, anger) from five essays in Audre Lorde’s book Sister Outsider (1984) to everyday situations of the architecture student. It calls for architects and architectural educators to “do the work” to imagine spaces of freedom.

In a short position piece, Brady Burroughs devotes herself to the discipline of architecture in an Ahmedian therapy session, based on Sara Ahmed's critical theory. She suspects a father complex behind the homogeneously composed competition juries, lecture series, panel discussions, anthologies, book series, prize juries and award winners. In addition to a great insecurity and reluctance to let go of its architectural ancestors with questionable affiliations and values, and a long-standing obsession with older white men, the discipline also displays a fear of intimacy, in its educational institutions' tendency toward exclusion and upholding the status quo. It is no coincidence that Burroughs refers to the very diagnosis that is often used to discredit women, "Daddy Issues".

A presentation on the series of small DIY publications, initiated in a master's seminar course at KTH in 2019, that acts as a comment on- and complement to the original series Thinkers for Architects by academic publishers Routledge. 

An introduction to critical theory for design students and architectural practitioners, connecting ideas of feminist thinkers to the everyday situation of the architecture student and making them more accessible, this series continues through a collaboration with Dutch architect Afaina de Jong, Claiming*Spaces, and a master's seminar course at TU Wien.

Following the first number, Ahmed for Architecture Students (2019), the second in the series Lorde for Architecture Students (2022) is now "in progress".

The year is 2221, with the aftermath of climate crisis in Central Europe and the emergence of a new species, the Evriali- half fish/half human. Lois and Louise Mullet, an Evriali couple, have moved into Loos' Villa Müller, now sunken below sea-level. Lois Mullet, an aquatic architectural tutor, crafts a critical love letter to the most recent Deplazes descendant, with a critical reading of Constructing Architecture (2018). Inspired by Katherine Shonfield's feminist reading of construction handbooks in Britain between 1960-2000, Lois picks up where Shonfield left off and asks what phantoms might be lurking below the surface of this seminal (Swiss) work? And what else, if anything, could this handbook possibly do?

Calling all architectural feminist killjoys!

Academic publishers Routledge produce a series called ‘Thinkers for Architects’, introducing philosophical and theoretical ideas to an architectural audience. The fifteen current titles include the usual suspects, Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, with one female thinker, Irigaray. In this publication, we begin to suggest a new series and to outline a book they should have commissioned, ‘Ahmed for Architecture Students’, as a critical revision and architectural killjoy. Based on key texts spanning queer feminist Sara Ahmed’s career as a critical scholar, this master’s seminar course has collectively produced a fanzine to introduce Ahmed’s ideas and concepts, along with possible connections to the discipline and culture of architecture, making them accessible to architecture students and practitioners.

We have provided three digital files: 1) Digital Spreads - Fanzine, for reading directly on a digital device. 2) Print version - Fanzine Inlay, for printing your own hard copy of the inner pages. 3) Print version - Fanzine Cover, for printing your own hard copy of the outer cover. (On the back of the cover, you will find DIY Instructions to assemble your own fanzine.)

We think the fanzine is ‘amazingly awesome’ and encourage you to share the link to the DiVA database for download, so we have an idea of how many people find our publication. And why not organize a ‘DIY Fanzine workshop’, to make and share the fanzine with friends? Bake a lemon poppy seed cake for starters and be sure to use recycled paper!

Join Prince Perri’s quest to save the architectural kingdom from the plague of academic seriousness, giving serious attention to the unserious and asking what can architects, design students, and ultimately architecture ‹do› with humor?

First came the renovation of a terraced house, then the book about it, and now a conversation with a generaous dash of feminism and buckets of love for architects, puns, ghosts, animals, doughnuts and drama queens.

On the day and night of Full Moon, November 23th 2018, the contributors of this curated panel bring a HORIZONTAL ACT vis-à-vis the scaffold HOUSE 3 on the ground level of CIVA / KANAL - Centre Pompidou, Brussels. Through three distinct, but overlapping personas, this act architecturally and artfully brings POETICS OF VALUE into practice by means of enacting instructive-invites and performing play as the engaged-interaction between multiple bodies (the space CIVA / KANAL, audience, panel guests, the moon). As a collective design, scale 1:1 HORIZONTAL ACT creates a context of invention to articulate processes of value-creation, value-transformation, value-invention, and value-sharing as part of value-driven – and never value-free – practices in artistic/design contexts.

What are the spaces of your dreams that support creativity and learning? Do they involve generosity and “reparative acts,” informed by a “love ethic” (hooks 2000; Sedgwick 2003)? And how are these spaces gendered? In the background is a school of architecture, part of an educational institution of power, formulating a document that attempts to describe “The ABC’s of an Architectural Critique,” based on a culture of critique that maintains the lineage of an antiquated form of evaluation (Cuff 1991; Webster 2007).  This text focuses on the values instilled by this culture—values that not only begin with, but are reinforced and reproduced by, the education of young architects. In the foreground is a flirtatious performative seminar series, arranged and enacted collectively in an attempt to reexamine and reinvent the practice of critique and criticism through the art of staging critical positions in an architectural conversation formerly known as critique. This chapter documents and reflects on acts of pedagogical stewardship by recounting a fast-paced, performative text seminar course consisting of six sessions, each with its own theme. Following are my reflections as an architectural pedagogue, where a group of students make these seminar sessions come to life, with the help of theoretical guides and the work of passionate pedagogy, and where there is passion for learning with compassion.