THE MUSEUM AS OUROBOROS: A PATH THAT CONSUMES ITS OWN NARRATIVE
INTERLUDE 2
COSMIC HALLUCINATIONS
THE PERIPHERAL CONDITION
LA TRACE ROUMAINE
PENDULOOP
AROUND CERN: FIELDNOTES FROM THE PERIMETER
CURVATURE AS AN END CONDITION
INTERLUDE 3
CHANGING SHAPE
TETHERED
BIOGRAPHIES
a few contradictions
a circle has no sides. a circle is enclosed. a circle has no endpoint.
a circle has an infinite number of sides. a circle is radial. a circle bites its own tail.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Vedika Dawar, Daniel Owusu and
Sacha Trouiller
It appears incredibly convenient and ideal to ask an architectural community to respond to the tendencies and habits of a form. Yet the circle, latent with agreements and disagreements, is far from convenient. Our open call for contributions to this issue presented the circle through its dualities in short contradictory statements that invited a community to situate themselves in relation to it.
From the onset, we understood the circle as a ‘boundary object’, a concept defined by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer in 1989. Boundary objects are objects that are abstract enough to conform to multiple social worlds and robust enough to maintain a concrete identity across sites. This concrete fluidity is a contradiction that facilitates a dialogue that circles systems, bodies, cities and constellations. Venturing out into the form, this issue gathers contributions which reflect the ways in which death and time have ends that meet. While some authors have stayed at a particular edge, critiquing their own positions, others have patrolled the perimeters, mapping some of the processes that a circle can instigate.
MAKE A CIRCLE SO IT DOES NOT BECOME A CRISIS
Varvara Seregina
Body
I see a bruise form on my leg. A round stain, slow and deliberate, spreading outward from a point I do not remember. It spreads just far enough to create a small territory, leaving the deepest tone at the centre. The mark expands a little more overnight, then stops, as if a limit has been reached. Days pass and the colours shift through their sequence. Purple goes dull, green takes over, then a washed-out yellow settles around the edges. The mark fades, first at the perimeter, then at the core. By the time it disappears, the skin looks unremarkable again – ordinary, finished. The event that created it has already been processed, absorbed into a system that leaves a little trace. I run my hand along my leg and notice a new dark patch forming on the other side – smaller, sharper –waiting to deal with its own centre of impact.
City
I enter the roundabout with a row of cars already turning. They move in a measured rhythm, each one adjusting its speed to avoid interruption. More vehicles arrive from every direction, too many to pass through at once, so they wait, then slide into the pattern. The circle takes them in and stretches the build-up across time. Inside the loop, nobody arrives anywhere. Driving becomes maintenance. Cars stay in orbit until something frees up. The grass island in the middle is irrelevant, a centre that never receives what surrounds it. Movement is portioned out, released in small departures. Someone exits. Someone
fills the gap. I exit, and the road becomes direct again. In my mirror, more cars approach, too many for a straight path, slowing as they reach the entrance. They will join the rotation, circle, disperse and then more will arrive. Behind, someone else will slow, hesitate and enter again.
System
I walk into the lobby and catch my reflection in the black dome above me. A rounded surface that gathers everything beneath it, bending faces and bodies into a curved image. People arrive in short bursts, all at once, and the space slows them down, spreading movement into smaller gestures. The lens watches without hurry, converting a rush into a sequence it can handle. I see my own features distorted in the curved glass, stretched toward the centre, reduced at the edges. The shape edits, and I wonder what parts of me have been designed to survive capture. The present is broken down to whatever can be stored, passed forward in fragments, leaving the rest unacknowledged. I walk away and the reflection shifts, then disappears. Others step into the same view, changing shape in the same way, feeding the same quiet mechanism. I turn a corner and see another lens, catching my body entering its field. Whatever I was doing, I am doing it again, slowed, divided, for a future I will not be present in.
WHO OBSERVES
Jan Devaris Macbean
After parking the car outside El Paso’s municipal cemetery I followed the narrow path clockwise around its perimeter into Barranco de Tenisque, crossing a bridge over the aqueduct pipe towards the Petroglifos El Verde.
The rock carvings were made by the Benahoaritas, La Palma’s first peoples before the Spanish conquest in the 15th century. The symbols were connected to rain prayers associated with birth and fertility rites. There is archaeological evidence that links the spirals with a ritual practice of time calculation as they appear across the island and the wider archipelago in spatial configurations that align with the sun’s position at summer and winter solstices. For the Benahoaritas, the spiral embodies an ontology of relationality; an alimentary star knowledge and embedded cosmology in which a cyclical relationship between time, land and body was negotiated through congregational celestial observation.
After leaving Garafia, the archipelago’s poorest town, and passing two via cerrada (road closed) signs, I continued up the winding switchbacks until the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (ORM) came into view. Under a new moon the stars were strong enough to cast a faint shadow, allowing me to continue without a torch, unnoticed, towards the Cherenkov telescopes.
As I moved closer, I caught a haunting groan generated by the wind passing through the sensor’s mirror and across the tensile cables, moving in and out of harmony with the thrum of the sensor’s cooling system. These detectors are
designed to observe high-energy gamma rays colliding with the atmosphere, as they cause a nanosecond glow from the cascade of subatomic particles moving faster than the speed of light. They lie in wait for Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), and after receiving coordinates from a NASA satellite and the IceCube Neutrino Observatory are quickly repositioned to orientate towards the source. The last GRB captured was in 2018, lasting 50 seconds. The Benahoarita carvings and the Cherenkov telescopes operate as evidence of a cosmological speculation, demonstrating that the impulse to understand our existence in relation to the cosmos has endured across time, through the construction of specific spaces, instruments and practices.
Due to its geographical position, topography and climate, La Palma creates the ideal atmospheric conditions for astronomic observation. Light pollution is shielded by clouds that enshroud its coastal towns. The darkness, purity and stillness of the atmosphere is further managed by internationally agreed mandates such as the Ley del Cielo (Sky Law) which regulates zoning, airspace and La Palma’s lighting infrastructure. In effect, the protection of the night sky is written into local planning as a presiding legal structure to maintain the conditions necessary for the observatory to operate. Organisations, universities, institutions and private companies from around the world have built telescopes and detectors at ORM.
Even though the land sits within a national public park, 189 hectares are occupied by the Instituto Astrofisica
Canarias (IAC), jointly operated by the Spanish Government, Canary Authorities and University of La Laguna in Tenerife, who maintain the sole right to build.
La Palma is a site of cosmological tension. Once an island where star knowledge was performed as a popular cosmology exercised through ritual congregation, it is now a site of technoscientific instruments of speculation. Within this paradigm, the advancement of technologies and their techniques describe a process of human exclusion from the practice of cosmic observation. As telescopes at ORM are retrofitted to be operated remotely from around the world, observation shifts from architecture to instrumentation; its structures become nodes in the datasphere as opposed to incubators of type-specific working habits and patterns. Consequentially, cosmic registration within the scientific paradigm emerges as a relationship with an infrastructure rather than specific architectures or, to contrast with preEuropean observation, with land, the seasons and time itself.
El Apagón is a controlled blackout window coordinated around specific astronomical observations at ORM, during which restrictions on lighting intensify to protect data quality. The IAC has aligned Astrofest with this window, transforming a period of operational constraint into a public event where seminars, lectures and communal stargazing unfold within the same temporal and infrastructural suspension that enables scientific work.
Celestial observation in La Palma might then be read as a pattern of exclusion, where scientific operations enclose and inhibit what were congregational practices of common celestial worship and observation. However, in the context of globally deteriorating atmospheric quality, the prohibitions required for sensitive observation reorganise everyday life around a shared darkness, producing a common orientation under the night sky. Despite the machinery of contemporary star observation, the island does not revolve around a singular
technoscientific cosmology. La Palma hosts a plurality of practices that persist within, and because of, the conditions imposed by astronomical infrastructure.
Abstraction into an infrastructure does not therefore conclude with exclusion but establishes a spatial and regulatory condition through which new modes of congregation, spectacle and ritual are enabled. It is within this paradox that La Palma’s hybrid cosmology takes form as the successive nesting of worlds embedded within one another.
A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE RING ROAD
Lucie Morestel
The ring road is the city’s most profound architectural self-negation. It is a concrete paradox, a colossal infrastructure that exists so that you do not have to enter the place it defines. It is a circle that has devoured its own centre, replacing the myth of the agora with the reality of the bypass. To drive the orbital is to engage in a form of perceptual alchemy. The dense, historical, narrative-rich city – the supposed object of desire – is translated into an abstract blur, a smear of light and silhouette, a peripheral nuisance to be shunned. The ring road does not celebrate the city: it renders it optional.
Architecturally, the ring road is pure event-space, a linear edifice dedicated solely to the condition of being en route. It is a building without rooms, a corridor without a destination, a monument to potential energy. Its form is dictated not by aesthetics but by the mathematics of curvature and centrifugal force. Its exits are its only ornaments – concrete petals unfurling into the void, promising connection while enforcing separation. To study its engineering is to see the city reimagined as a physics problem: how to maintain a speed of 110kmph while skirting the gravitational pull of urban life. The viaducts and sound-barrier walls are not merely functional; they are phenomenological filters, editing out the city’s sound, smell and social texture, replacing them with the synthetic reality of asphalt, radio static and the hypnotic rhythm of expansion joints. This leads to a core theoretical provocation: the ring road inverts the fundamental logic of the city.
Historically, the city was defined by convergence. Roads led to the market, the palace, the cathedral. The centre was the locus of meaning, power and encounter. The ring road replaces this centripetal force with a centrifugal one. Its purpose is dispersal, not gathering. It is a spatial manifestation of what Jean Baudrillard might have called the precession of the simulacra: the bypass precedes the city. The experience of ‘London’ or ‘Beijing’ for millions is no longer the dense knot of streets, but a high-speed, sign-mediated glimpse from the M25 or the 5th Ring Road. The city becomes the signified that is never reached, a logo viewed from the motorway. Phenomenologically, driving the orbital induces a unique dissociative state of being. It is a kind of liminal trance. You are neither here nor there. You are in between, in a state of perpetual anticipation that never resolves. The body’s experience is reduced to a minimal set of inputs: the pressure of the steering wheel against the centrifugal pull, the orchestrated merge, the circadian rhythm of the sodium-vapour lamps at dusk. This is the architecture of the non-place, as defined by Marc Augé, but rendered at a metropolitan scale. It produces a form of panoramic perception, where the city is consumed as a distant, cinematic spectacle – the Gherkin, the Central Radio and TV Tower reduced to skyline souvenirs, stripped of their tactile social and historical contexts. The city-as-image triumphs over the city-as-experience.
Yet within this act of negation a strange inverted community is born. The
ring road creates its own social physics. It is the great democratiser of transit, where the delivery van, the taxi, the family sedan and the luxury SUV are momentarily equalised by the tyranny of the lane. Its culture is one of shared, anonymous protocol: the indicator flash of thanks, the collective groan at brake lights, the fleeting fellowship of those travelling the same arc for a few exits. This is a community of vector, not of place. Its monument is the traffic report, its epic poetry the digitised congestion map.
The ring road’s ultimate architectural power, however, lies in its creation of a negative monument. It carves out a ‘within’ and a ‘without’, but the valorised space is no longer the hallowed interior. Instead, the ring road sanctifies the exterior: the suburb, the exurb, the distribution hub, the airport. It makes the hinterland accessible and the centre avoidable. In doing so, it rewrites the urban hierarchy. The old central monuments become islands in a sea of access routes, while the new cathedrals – the logistics parks, the shopping megamalls, the data farms – cluster at the interchanges, feeding off the orbital’s lifeblood of flow.
Consider the world’s great orbitals: London’s M25, a magical circle that seems to conjure its own weather systems of drizzle and delay; Beijing’s concentric rings, stone ripples in the pond of imperial power, now channels for a titanic modernity; Berlin’s A10 – the Berliner Ring – a Cold War-era noose that once defined a walledin island-city, now stitching together a reunified territory. Each tells a story not of arrival, but of circumvention. They are the infrastructure of a networked, polycentric world where the very idea of a single, dominant centre is an antique curiosity.
Thus, the ring road is the definitive architectural form of late modernity. It is the physical realisation of our desire to be connected to everything, yet committed to nowhere. It offers freedom as frictionless transit and community as parallel isolation. It builds the circle not as an embrace, but as a dismissal. To enter its flow is to accept
its premise: that the greatest value lies not in the destination, but in the efficiency of avoiding all destinations equally. It is the asphalt ouroboros, forever chasing the promise of its own tail, ensuring the heart of the city remains a beautiful, bypassed and increasingly theoretical idea.
AALAWuN
with Razan Amer
INSCRIBED
Anna Font
Modelled as an iterative process between wax models and animation software, the Kansai National Diet Library by RUR is one of the first projects designed with digital technologies. The process of formation of an oblique surface into an interior architectural organisation triggers the featuring of a slope that articulates movement and use (circulation and programme) with no typological imprint.
This drawing is a revelation of the inscribed geometry of the fluid mass of the two sloped slabs of the building, that was never rationalised through controlled form. The manifestation of the circle is a provocation to revisit and make visible organisation-driven projects through their most implicit traces of characterisation, the minor geometries of their traits.
AUTOPHAGIC ORBIT Oscar Leung
The project is one circular urban block with an 800m diameter. Its sole programme is to remain a perfect circle while slowly devouring itself. Every decade, the outermost ring is pulverised on site, resulting in an aggregate that is conveyed inwards along radial conduits and re-printed as the new innermost ring. The plan migrates toward its centre at a constant speed of 1.7m per decade without ever deforming. No material crosses the original circumference in either direction.
After 720 years the block will occupy a single point of infinite density: the centre that was always also the destination.
The demolished periphery is printed with a generative fractal rule that guarantees self-similar porosity at every scale. From any distance the edge appears continuous; at every closer inspection it reveals another order of indentation.
The circle therefore possesses no sides and an infinite number simultaneously, depending only on the resolution of observation.
The block is absolutely bound –its footprint never exceeds the original circle – yet every vector of construction, demolition and habitation is strictly radial. There is no tangential movement, no exterior reference, no possibility of escape or addition. The centre is not a privileged void but the algorithmic seed that dictates every segment length, every demolition front, every reprinting head.
All agency emanates from a point that will, in the fullness of time, consume the entirety of its own emission.
Because the process is closed loop and perfectly reversible in principle, the block could – in theory – continue contracting forever, each cycle producing a marginally more refined version of itself from the debris of the last. Yet the geometry forbids it. At the limit the radius collapses to zero and the circle, having bitten its tail for the final time, disappears into the dimensionless point it always secretly was. The endpoint is therefore both impossible and inevitable.
Autophagic Orbit is not a building, not a masterplan, not a sustainable strategy. It is the built enactment of the brief’s six contradictions taken to their terminal conclusion: a circle that abolishes every distinction between form and anti-form, between permanence and obsolescence, between architecture and its own negation.
The circle remains perfect. Everything else is digested.
SOUND CIRCLES Matters.xyz
It is common knowledge that circular and curved shapes favour specific acoustic qualities. Along a curved surface, sound circulates smoothly. In a circular assembly, speech can be distributed equally. Neither closed nor broken, a circle distributes sound gently and consistently. Due to their oscillatory nature, sound waves embrace curves, allowing the possibility for sonic patterns to bounce depending on the tactile quality of the surface on which they resonate. Following frequency, radius, material, height and climatic conditions, among many other variables, sonic events emerge from this sensitive relationship. Yet these resonances are only perceived from the listener’s intimate perspective.
Circles are everywhere with sound. The shape of a vinyl record.
The membrane of a speaker. The section of a wind instrument. Circles appear as the most obvious sonic shape.
Following is a ritual from Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations (1971): ‘Sit in a circle with your eyes closed. Begin by observing your own breathing. Gradually form a mental image of one person who is sitting in the circle. Sing a long tone to that person. Then sing the pitch that person is singing. Change your mental image to another person and repeat until you have contacted every person in the circle one or more times.’
Athanasius Kircher, a renowned 17th century Jesuit scholar who was influential in geology, mathematics and physics among other disciplines, wrote two treatises on acoustics, Musurgia Universalis (1650) and Phonurgia Nova (1673). In these he described
several acoustic phenomena and principles, including the circular horn of Alexander the Great, a round tubular instrument which served as an early long-distance communication system.
An acoustic mirror is a passive device used to reflect and concentrate sonic waves. Depending on its diameter, such an apparatus can capture sound from a long distance, often employed as a surveillance system.
Completed in 1710, St Paul’s Cathedral in London houses the Whispering Gallery beneath its 34m-diameter dome. Along the walls of the circular space, whispers travel and become audible across the entire surface.
Acoustic Mirror, Hythe, United Kingdom, 1923. Credit: Mary Evans Picture Gallery. Whispering Gallery, Illustration of Sound Propagation and Reflection, Athanasius Kircher, 1673.
Coined by American inventor Frederick Hunt in the 1930s, SONAR (sonic navigation and ranging) is a system that uses sound wave propagation to measure distances. This technique allows for the detection of objects in space underwater, often displayed on circular screens.
Expo is a composition for three performers with shortwave radio receivers and a sound projectionist, written by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1970. The piece was conceived as a ‘process’ composition specifically for the auditorium at the Japan World Exposition in Osaka, a blue spherical structure designed by architect Fritz Bornemann which houses 50 loudspeakers.
A pioneer in sound art, Bernhard Leitner imagined several installations that gave a central role to sound in art spaces, shifting from the visual to the acoustic. Part of this series of ‘sound-space objects’, Cylinder Space (1974) is a system of 16 loudspeakers arranged as a vertical tube. Within this circular sonic space, the listener experiences variations in the distribution of sound.
The Surrey Sound Sphere from the University of Surrey was created in 2015 to host a reconfigurable array of 64 loudspeakers. The spherical mesh allows for a variety of immersive soundscapes as an adaptable audio booth for listening experiments.
SONAR image of the shipwreck of the Latvian Naval Forces ship Virsaitis, 2012 Credit: Muinsuskaitseamet.
Section of the Kugel-Theater project by Fritz Bornemann, drafted by Andor Weininger, 1926. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv.
Cylinder Space, Bernhard Leitner, 1974.
Surrey Sound Sphere, University of Surrey, United Kingdom, 2015. Credit: University of Surrey.
THE MUSEUM AS OUROBOROS: A PATH THAT CONSUMES ITS OWN NARRATIVE
Amira Al-Farsi
The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a museum that has perfected the ancient trick of the ouroboros: sustaining itself through self-consumption. The museum began as an improbable proposition with a nation state, roughly half a century old, leasing the authority of one of the oldest and most symbolically significant cultural institutions on Earth. In this transformation, something irreversible has occurred: the original Louvre ceased to be merely a museum and became the administrative headquarters of a global brand. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, in turn, has become a node in a planetary cultural supply chain. Each consumed the other’s identity, the serpent swallowing itself until you couldn’t tell its head and tail apart.
Paris supplied the heritage and Abu Dhabi supplied the terrain, in the supposed blankness of Saadiyat Island. Here the desert – often wrongly imagined as empty - becomes a tabula rasa convenient for both architecture and ideology, a flawless stage for a museum that wishes to reinvent world history. Jean Nouvel’s dome lands like a celestial saucer, flattening the desert beneath a shimmering artificial sky. The building is not just a container for art, but a climatic and symbolic correction to its environment, a technological fantasy that seeks to discipline heat, light and territory in a single gesture. Beneath its 90m canopy, visitors feel as though they are walking under a new cosmology – one that replaces the messy complexities of cultural exchange with the smooth ambient glow of manufactured universality.
The galleries stage this fiction with immaculate care. A Torah, Quran and Bible
sit in adjacency while a Chinese Bodhisattva sits beside a Greek kouros. The arrangement suggests a peaceful coexistence that history has not always afforded. The effect is seductive, theatrical and deeply misleading. In place of entanglement, it offers proximity; in place of conflict, harmony; in place of complex histories, the soothing promise that all civilisations were always already equal participants in a global conversation that Europe simply helped organise. This is the ouroboros in its most subtle capacity: the museum consumes the violence of history and converts it into a tableau of tolerance.
The ‘universal museum’ was always an Enlightenment fiction, born from colonial collecting, imperial conquest and European epistemologies masquerading as global ones. In Abu Dhabi, universality is reborn as a purchasable commodity, an export product of France and an aspirational branding tool of the Gulf. The museum claims to transcend national narratives, but its very existence is the result of two nations folding their political ambitions into a shared cultural enterprise. It claims to dissolve borders even as it strengthens diplomatic alliances. It claims to promote cultural equality while erasing the conditions that made its artifacts collectible in the first place.
Yet the serpent’s digestion is not confined to intellectual history. The most unsettling form of self-consumption occurs in the domain of labour. The museum’s public narrative of shared humanity, global citizenship and universal culture rests upon the labour of migrant workers operating under systems that human rights organisations have repeatedly condemned.
The Kafala system, with its restrictions on worker mobility and its frequent abuses, shadows every beam of the dome. The radiant tranquillity of the museum is built on the exhaustion and precarity of labourers whose presence is almost entirely absent from the institution’s narrative. A museum dedicated to humanity is built by men treated as if they were outside its realm. This ethical contradiction is not incidental; it is structural. The universal museum, whether in Paris, London or Abu Dhabi, has always relied on selective visibility. However, in Abu Dhabi, the contradiction becomes obscene. The museum’s moral rhetoric eats itself: humanistic ideals built through inhuman conditions, deployed once more to advertise humanism. The serpent swallows its own conscience.
If the Louvre Abu Dhabi consumes narratives of labour, it also consumes narratives of place. By positioning itself as the cultural nucleus of Saadiyat Island, it reorganises the territory around its own gravitational field. Abu Dhabi’s identity is renovated through the museum as the city becomes a cosmopolitan hub, a post-oil cultural capital and a centre for global civilisation. The museum legitimises the state’s ambitions and the state legitimises the museum’s authority. Each absorbs the other, resulting in a new territorial logic in which culture functions as a sovereign infrastructure, a political technology disguised as a public amenity.
France, for its part, is equally implicated in the ouroboric cycle by leasing the Louvre name, exporting curatorial expertise and participating in this grand architectural spectacle. France performs a late-imperial gesture repackaged as cultural diplomacy. The Enlightenment becomes a soft-power tool and universality becomes a commodity. The museum becomes an economic engine for both nations, producing surplus value in the form of prestige, tourism and diplomatic leverage. The serpent’s body stretches across continents.
Yet what the Louvre Abu Dhabi ultimately consumes is more than labour, architecture, politics or history. In the
Enlightenment model, the museum was an instrument for organising knowledge. In its 19th-century form, it became a patriarchal archive of empire. In the 20th century, it evolved into an educational space, then a cultural capital engine, then a tourist site. In Abu Dhabi, all these identities are shed. The museum becomes a self-justifying organism. It uses architecture as its argument, the brand as its legitimacy and finds its existence in the content enclosed within.
The visitors arrive to experience the museum as an idea that symbolises global unity, redefines the Arab world’s relationship to heritage, and positions Abu Dhabi as the future. Its true exhibit is itself, a building that displays its own power, mythology and geopolitical function. Under Nouvel’s dome, every artifact becomes a supporting actor in a much larger theatrical narrative: the triumph of the museum as sovereign.
After years of delays, the museum finally opened in 2017 and the world applauded it as a miracle of diplomacy and design. But the greatest miracle of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is its ability to consume all critique, all contradiction, all complexity, and metabolise them into pageantry. Labour controversies become footnotes, colonial histories become atmospheres and political entanglements become architectural abstractions. The museum survives by devouring the very foundations that should undermine it.
This is the ultimate ouroboric condition: a museum that contains nothing but its own necessity. The Louvre Abu Dhabi reveals the institution’s next evolutionary step, from a keeper of cultural memory to a factory of global myth; from a repository of art to a self-consuming political device; and from a space of reflection to a mechanism of transformation geared toward the reproduction of its own ethos.
In this museum, the ouroboros is no longer a symbol. It is the architecture, politics, iconography, epistemology and fiction of universality. The serpent gleams brilliantly under the desert sun, swallowing itself with perfect serenity, confident that the world will applaud the elegance of its hunger.
ACT ‘SIFIR’’0’’O’...’HIÇ’:
Sedef
Gökçe and William Jean Thomas Litré ACT ‘SIFIR’’0’’O’...’HIÇ’:
I can’t see in three dimensions.
{buttering an orbital pan; a sorrow thread forms itself on this roughened bumpy plane, verdâtre, repeatedly diffused light, surplus, seeps through the ribbon-window sky}
For years I’ve lived my life without knowing the existence of the third dimension. I have woken up in the mornings, rolled out of my bed see myself. There is no light here. Mirrors don’t work. subtractively dividing into interior} even be broken?
girl named nola sees a blue light coming out of the mirror, enters the mirror, breaks it and can’t get out. Everything turns blue.
There were mirrors and colours. {the point attempts again, jollily strolling across the honeythick surface
Things don’t work that way in the second dimension, of course. There is no light here. No colour. No depth. Without light, I am not even black, but without colour. the shadow’s outline} dream about volume. Sometimes I lie on my bed and imagine another dimension where spheres and prisms and dodecahedrons exist. jouissance du monde…sighing} Maybe I would become a washing machine. {the curtains of mondain performance skirt to the left and right} Let me get out of here and have a volume! I don’t want to roll out of my bed sometimes. {enter elcirc, silence pervades}
at my center.
Mine is right at my center.
of a blackened sun, an odor of weighted volume, ascetic profusion} describe this for you: Whatever dimension you are reading this which I hope you are not from the first dimension since you won’t be the instructions; watch a single point from anywhere you want. From let branches unfold in all 360 degrees until they become a whole {break} Now you see me. This is exactly how I wAS created. Without without time. There is no time here. I am a circle who only has circle without a ring, with no fixed radius. I expand and contract simultaneously, continuously {amplifying, worldly, cyclical to ellipsoidal}. Only
{in the light of a blackened sun, an odor of weighted volume, ascetic profusion}
Now let me describe this for you: Whatever dimension you are reading this from - which I hope you are not from the first dimension since you won’t be able to do the instructions; watch a single point from anywhere you want. From this point, let branches unfold in all 360 degrees until they become a whole circle. {break} Now you see me. This is exactly how I wAS created. Without depth, without time. There is no time here. I am a circle who only has a center. A circle without a ring, with no fixed radius. I expand and contract simultaneously, continuously {amplifying, worldly, cyclical to ellipsoidal}. Only a center.
π(R² - r²) = ☄⌾⌭⎄⌖◌◘↷⊂¤
slowly reading a traffic sign about accelerationism}
{elcirc slowly reading a traffic sign about accelerationism}
I call imagining the past. I know what to do now. Expand. Expanse. This is now the new center⊙⌖◑◛ of the Earth.
This is what I call imagining the past. I know what to do now. Expand. Expanse. of the Earth.
19°24’56’’ N
99°9’1” W 17°
55°22’40’’ N
3°26’9’’ W 46.7°
{ribbon-window sky rolls back on one’s own, .}
{the {ribbon-window sky rolls back on one’s own, .}
I sometimes am a 40066 kilometers long circle hugging the earth in the third dimension
55°22’40’’ N
3°26’9’’ W 46.7°
55°22’40’’ N
3°26’9” W 17°
I sometimes am a 40066 kilometers long circle hugging the earth in the third dimension 5
5
CIRCULAR DEATH
Yoonji Lee
I once heard that a funeral is not a ritual for the dead, but a ritual for those who remain. In Korea, most funerals last only three days, far too short a time to trace back the life of one person. It feels too fast for those who remain to accept the separation and grief through mourning. To where do the emotions that were not expressed or digested eventually flow? Aren’t we too easily returning to our daily life without realising what has been left unresolved?
From the 13th century up until its colonisation by Japan in 1910, Korea’s funerary rites had an entirely different rhythm to today’s practice. The life of an individual was inseparable from the afterlife of one’s ancestors and existence was understood through a clan-based kinship. Farming was not only a matter of subsistence, but a societal tenet of funeral and ancestral rites. The labour of the living overlapped directly with the practice of preparing for death.
Those who shared common ancestors would be buried on the same mountain. The mountain was therefore transformed into a map of lineage and formed a hierarchical terrain starting from the summit. From this convention emerged the Bongbun, a half-excavated tomb. Beyond the structural characteristics of the circle, the form represented a continuation of life into the earth.
After the death of a parent, the child would build a hut beside the Bongbun and live there for three years. During that time the mourner withdrew from society to dwell in grief and observe ascetic discipline and abstinence. This period was a rite of passage
that brought the living into the threshold between life and death.
Life was seen as servitude towards the dead, just as the dead looked out for the living. Upon burial the body became territorialised through the Bongbun, fixed into the memory of the living through their care and occupation of the landscape. The Bongbun typology was symbolic of a life-death cycle, where the honour of the deceased was immortalised through ritual and labour. The living remembered the dead through household rituals, where it was common to have a shrine for ancestral worship. Incense was lit in the morning as the family began their day together with the dead.
Today’s process of dying has been fractured into specialised institutions: hospital, funeral hall, crematorium and columbarium. The pre-colonial cycle which once structured daily life was dismantled in the interests of efficiency and productivity. In contemporary dying culture, life and death are binary states which are negotiated by abstract medical practices. Negating confrontation with death has made it taboo, and the wisdom of how to live with death has been lost. Perhaps what we have lost is not the time to mourn, but the will to reintroduce death into life.
Opposite: Royal Tombs of the Joseon Dynasty.
Credit: Cultural Heritage Administration of the Republic of Korea (CHA), royal.cha.go.kr.
Max Landau
With some kind of imaginary two-dimensional gravity, most shapes drawn on a piece of paper would fall from where the pen leaves them and come to rest on the bottom of the page, shuffling themselves in the process into a position of suitable balance. A circle might be unique in that it would fall and rest exactly as it is drawn, every time, because no one part of it lends itself more than any other to being in any given relative place. In this way, once the circle has fallen and rests, we assign what is to become its left and right, its top and its bottom, without the circle having expressed any such will, hinged only on the horizontality of the ground plane.
COSMIC HALLUCINATIONS
Renate Lurdesa Baumane
In the early 17th century, when Johannes Kepler discovered planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, he overturned more than a scientific assumption. A kind of philosophical tremor ran through western European thought, a sense that the heavens had acquired an asymmetry. With the sky long treated as the last refuge of geometrical self-assurance, it now carried a shape that leaned, stretched, pinched and deviated.
Something had slipped.
The universe becoming elliptical was, briefly, a metaphysical crisis. This crisis did not dissipate with Kepler’s equations; it persisted in almost every subsequent attempt to depict the sky.
The images of the cosmos we see today come from a variety of sources – inter-/national space agencies, groundbased observatories and private institutions – all trying to communicate intelligible events that lie far beyond the reach of unassisted perception. The sheer scale and complexity with which the universe operates mean that almost none of these images are straightforward captures. The raw data is translated into a visual synthesis of vaguely familiar combinations of colour and form that steer it back towards what a human viewer can plausibly make sense of, even if that translation introduces small slips and distortions along the way.
Earthrise is (probably) the clearest example. It was the first colour photograph of Earth taken from outer space, dubbed as one of the ‘most influential photographs ever taken’, gaining immeasurable traction at the time. Captured by astronaut William
Anders on 24 December 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, it was transmitted back to Earth shortly after to be edited by NASA technicians prior to its public release. The photograph was rotated 95° clockwise from its original orientation, so that Earth appeared to ascend like a moon over the lunar surface, a move that made the scene visually obedient to centuries of canonised landscape painting. In doing so, NASA stabilised the viewer’s position rather than the object’s, restoring a kind of aesthetic circularity by presenting Earth as a rising orb deemed to be legible for human apprehension.
Depiction is therefore a form of aesthetic mediation. It is assigned a language of inherited visual habits that bend perception towards expectations while leaving the universe itself untouched. So, if Thomas Fuller’s ‘seeing is believing’ is still at play, it now operates in a world governed not by direct vision, but rather by a cascade of ever-modified hallucinations, with each layer of mediation more complex than the last. Advances in imaging technology don’t bring us closer to the cosmos itself; they amplify the distance, producing images whose intelligibility depends on the conventions that render them legible.
Compartmentalising, fragmenting and recombining raw data becomes the mechanism by which knowledge-producers can manifest their imagined (presumably, imaged) perfect wholes.
EUMETSAT’s Dust RGBMTG0 degree turned 95 degrees clockwise: 10.40am Houston time on 24 December 2025, exactly 56 years and 1 minute after ‘Earthrise’ was taken
THE PERIPHERAL CONDITION
Richard Gerald-Rondón
Architectural discourse often returns to the same structural configuration: a recognised interior where the discipline asserts its coherence, and an exterior it continually draws upon yet struggles to assimilate. The movement between both regions is constant. It resembles an orbit, an ongoing circulation of pressures that redraws what counts as disciplinary ground.
In Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri exposes the impossibility of insulating this interior. His observation that ‘architecture is forced to absorb the contradictions of the production system’ makes the point unmistakable. Whatever the discipline identifies as its centre is already conditioned by forces it does not control. The boundary does not stabilise, it flexes under demands that exceed its conceptual frame. The instability of architectural identity accounts for its operational mode. The limit appears as a site of continuous activity – where a discipline stages its internal agreements while negotiating external obligations. Boundaries are not protective; they become procedural as they register the labour required to maintain the impression of a distinct field.
The profession ‘double coding’, as Jeremy Till calls it, intensifies this difficulty. Architecture must satisfy the logics of clients, markets and institutions, yet is expected to safeguard a disciplinary ethos that rarely aligns with those logics. The result is a field organised by alternating pulls. What appears central – canonical knowledge, inherited protocols, pedagogical grammar – depends on a surrounding zone where conditions such as extraction, climate volatility, infrastructural violence and technological shifts apply continuous
pressure. The circulation between these forces is unavoidable.
This was evident in the experience of teaching a histories and theories course framed under the emblem of Periphery – Centre – Periphery. Students mapped how issues on the agenda are dynamically positioned within boundaries while encountering the present as a dense field structured by fragments rather than continuous narratives. They worked with materials of fame and death, energy exhaustion, military geometries, agricultural metabolisms, cement ecologies, digital territories, coastal vulnerabilities, pedagogical apparatuses and collective insurgencies. Each topic altered the orientation of the discussion, showing how quickly the discipline’s supposed core is displaced by questions arising from its edges. The course treated this movement as architectural rather than supplementary. Instead of defending an origin point, we examined how attractors – media, technology and even crisis – reconfigure circularity into an orbital, alwaysconcentric relationship.
Immanuel Wallerstein’s gradients, Doreen Massey’s critique of vertical spatial narratives and Andreas Behnke’s writing on ambiguous peripheries helped situate architecture within a wider set of circulations, where centre and margins exchange roles with little warning. What is deemed peripheral often becomes structurally central once its implications unfold. This dynamic becomes sharper in regions shaped by subequatorial conditions – climatic volatility, extractive acceleration,
ecological fragility, contested land regimes and uneven infrastructural development. These forces do not wait for validation. Architectural thought emerging from such contexts does not sit comfortably within the inherited centre, yet neither does it occupy an external position. It operates in the circulation between both, where constraints and demands continually reorganise what architecture can claim as its own.
Tafuri anticipated this reorganisation when he argued that the ideological function of architecture falters in step with larger systemic crises. His point is not that the discipline loses relevance, but that its internal structure shifts under pressures it cannot redirect. The claim that architecture is ‘continuously remade at its edges’ aligns on how the field adapts by absorbing what arrives from outside its traditional remit, even though trajectories do not remain peripheral.
The discipline is shaped less by a closed perimeter than by the movement of forces that unsettle, re-enter, and reconfigure
its internal arrangements. The question is not where the boundary lies, but how it behaves under pressure: what it lets through, what it delays, what it recirculates.
Architecture does not stabilise easily; it persists in this continual adjustment. Its
boundaries remain active because they are continuously tested. The orbit – messy, irregular, never completed – marks the terrain where the discipline negotiates the forces that shape it, and where it recognises that its identity is always provisional, always contingent, always in motion.
The diagram below is organised as an orbital system. The themes revisited produce shifting centres and provisional peripheries. It traces an embodied route structured around several working principles: that architecture operates through a double code; grand narratives that resolve into an always-modern present must be avoided; the present is thick; the origins of the spatial history of life are multiple and resist linear expansion; history appears in fragments, with theory functioning as a form of occupation; temporal attractors of mobility demand attention; and centres and peripheries are
understood as dynamic, contingent positions. A first version of this diagram was produced during the History and Theory of Architecture course in the Architecture programme at the Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. The diagram was collectively developed by the students, who are fully credited for its conception and construction, with only minor adjustments and editorial guidance by the course tutor.
LA TRACE ROUMAINE
Tristan Blackmore
Of the artifacts recovered by divers last year from the sunken Cornish castle Rosmor, two have received keen attention. The first is the scandalous discovery of Caravaggio’s missing painting Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence, stolen by the Sicilian mafia from a Palermo chapel in 1969. Though in a ruined state, the mystery of its whereabouts was finally resolved. I argue that, given the painting’s destruction, the greater find has been the recovery of a second artifact: the lost folios of the Romanian poet Aurelia Zidaru. The waterlogged notebooks were so delicate that they were impossible to open, and instead were ‘digitally unwrapped’ by the University of Southampton’s μ-VIS X-ray Imaging Centre, revealing the poet’s missing last work: La trace roumaine.
Briefly, on Zidaru: born in Sibiu in 1919, she was recognised from an early age as a ferociously intelligent talent. At 16, supported by an unknown Hungarian benefactor, she left Romania for a scholarship in Paris. She would remain there for the rest of her life, writing exclusively in her adopted language, French. Her magnum opus, the anthology Les Hespérides (1959), is widely regarded as one of the greatest French poetic works of its generation. In the ensuing years, however, Zidaru grew increasingly reclusive, devoting herself entirely to a mysterious project she never published nor shared with anyone. After her death, her folios were invariably lost, her final project among them.
La trace roumaine is not a work of poetry. Though abstract, it is architectural, and deals with a kind of conceptual territory. Operating as a foil to the trace italienne,
it is a system of elaborate star-shaped fortress designs which emerged in Italy in the 15th–16th centuries as a response to the development of cannon technology. To Zidaru, these were hyper-optimised ‘anxious’ machinations that resulted from meticulous calculations of ballistic trajectories and ‘killing grounds’, producing ‘fractal crowns’ and ‘fearful, neurotic geometries’.
La trace roumaine, then, seems to be Zidaru’s manifesto for an anti-fortress: the star fort is the pursuit of the perfectly impenetrable while the trace roumaine is permeable. Zidaru uses terse and fuzzy language: en contrebas (below, or downhill); le brouillard (fog). With that, one descends. Perhaps it is unclear when one has entered, but at a certain point one understands they have been invited inside. These themes of obfuscating fog and invitation are similarly found in an earlier poem, ‘Avril 14’, from Les Hespérides.
From Rundell’s translation:
To give, Peace, Peace, Peace, what ache lies beyond the mist that we can soothe, our hands are smooth, please accept us–
Thundering sound of the cavalcade, hybrid beasts, lumbering white-bodied and red-eared retinue
Fearsome servants brought from dark to the blasted heath our hands are soft, we follow them into the dark
A passable translation, it preserves the dodecasyllabic verse lines which are emblematic of Zidaru’s interest in mathematics and numerology. Zidaru connects the number 12 with natural and mythic cycles, palindromes and wholeness; themes she plays with in this poetic conversation with TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922; she alludes to its final, incantatory line, ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ – ‘Peace, Peace, Peace’). Throughout Les Hespérides and La trace roumaine, care, trust and the tolerance for uncertainty are the key thematic impulses: to allow oneself to be pulled into adventure, or to accept a host’s hospitality, both of which Zidaru associates with spaces and thresholds. In her notes, she references the Ancient Egyptian cartouche, the hieroglyphic convention of encircling a ruler’s name as a ritual or technology of protection, which she uses in her development of the territory that protects as it invites. In addition to refuge, however, she states that the space must produce an essential enjouement, a cheerfulness which she specifically connects with a playfulness. And thus our definition of Zidaru’s anti-fortress is complete: a refuge that is permeable, ambiguous but inviting –and involving play.
‘Play – intrinsically rewarding, intensely absorbing, not serious, with no incentive for profit.’ Zidaru is referencing Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938); an imagining for its own sake, blurring fact and fiction, an expanded reality inviting one in. She evaluates artistry and writing spatially: to her, we are beings inhabiting the ‘house’ of the story (Zidaru often invokes Clairvaux’s histoire inventée experiments, describing his literary forgeries as ‘deep castles’). This is the wild, soft-hearted, refugial core of the trace roumaine, and what Zidaru sees as a potent social relationship: the trusting connection between people in play, and the serene housedness of inhabiting the interiority of a text.
Scholars will doubtlessly use the imagery of the misty anti-fortress to examine all manner of mysteries about the poet, the greatest or loneliest of all beings; why write for so many years about
such tender and social commons and then never share it? Why name the project after her homeland and never return? I suggest one possible understanding of Zidaru is via her first concept of the trace roumaine – our first instincts and images are often the most essential – Zidaru invokes the sea, specifically a presence lying dormant underwater. She recounts a dream she would wake from as a girl in which, standing alone on a beach, she would watch as an extraordinarily low tide pulled back to reveal a whole sunken forest, and her feet, as if having a mind of their own, would pull her down into the fossilised wood. Walking deeper along the dark escarpment, she would find herself in a grove of 12 stone-like trees:
I know I was dreaming of Lyonesse, that mythical kingdom in Cornwall that sank below the sea... The excitement of the deep, I tremble even now. I remember an ancient folktale of my grandmother’s, the story of Scholomance, a school for black magic built in a hall under a mountain – where in a circular, dark lake, there was stabled underwater, a dragon… Waiting!
p 31: Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia, 1617–18.
Personal Operating Systems (pOS) offer an alternative way to use, organise and navigate the complex systems imposed by institutions and technology companies. These systems, each with their own structures and sensitivities, scatter users’ attention across countless apps and environments, creating fragmented engagement in which it becomes difficult to maintain clarity or control, drawing users into sprawling and disjointed digital ecosystems.
A pOS addresses this entanglement by fostering intentional and organised engagement with digital tools. It encourages users to understand how their technologies connect, and to regain agency over how they structure, navigate and inhabit their digital environments. Rather than introducing new software into an already oversaturated digital landscape, a pOS focuses on designing relationships between existing tools and platforms. This is achieved through organisational diagrams and written protocols that establish rules, guidelines, and hierarchies, clarifying how different programs relate to one another.
PENDULOOP
PENDULOOP is a version of a pOS designed to bring structure to both individual and collaborative work within their practice. It operates through a carefully developed ‘P-P-P-P’ code applied consistently across digital platforms. While most operating systems remain confined to digital technologies, PENDULOOP extends
its logic into the physical environment, binding physical and digital spaces more closely together. By establishing the same structure across both, the system enables intuitive navigation, straightforward maintenance and easy synchronisation. Developing this code required understanding projects from within: examining the conditions that shape them, the rhythms and speeds at which they move, the resources they use or produce, and the questions and messages they bring into the world. These observations revealed where a system could offer structure and support without limiting a project’s character or creative direction. Composed of four interconnected parts, each addressing organisation at a different level, the ‘P-P-P-P’ code establishes an environment that is both strict and playful, enabling its users to interact and create with clarity.
PENDULOOP continuously oscillates between Program and Projects, with each feeding and strengthening the other. Throughout its lifecycle, the knowledge and resources generated by a Project flow back into the Program, enriching its database and refining its processes. Due to their shared structural imprint, this exchange remains clear and navigable. By embracing both structure and play, rigour and flexibility, PENDULOOP supports the creation of a practice that is grounded, coherent and open to transformation – demonstrating how internal organisational systems can become a form of creative inquiry.
AROUND CERN: FIELDNOTES FROM THE PERIMETER
Kartika Dewi Paramita
Subject: Week 1
Site Induction and The Existential Givens
Switzerland. Land of precision, neutrality and a pathological fear of ornament. The client, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that the most complex machine ever built – a subterranean godparticle cathedral 27km in circumference – needs a ‘Gateway Experience’. My role, ostensibly, is to assist in the schematic design for the new Visitor Centre annex. In reality, I am a glorified coffee fetcher with an MA in parametric design.
The first thing you notice is the sheer banality of the above-ground architecture. It’s all 1970s concrete boxes and 1990s glass-clad sheds, scattered across the border like Lego dropped in a field by a child. It’s as if the entire architecture budget was vacuumed into the hole in the ground, leaving only the administrative dregs to populate the surface.
This is my first design constraint: the sublime exists entirely underground. Our task is to create a signifier for a signified that is legally – and literally – inaccessible. We are designing the cover for a book no one is allowed to read. I proposed we call the project The Oculus Mundi, which got me a few blank stares in the meeting on Monday. Sandrine, the project lead from Geneva, said it ‘sounded like a contact lens’. Honestly.
Subject: Week 3
The Genius of the Car Park
Spent the morning doing a site analysis of Car Park B. This is where I had my first major insight: the collidor isn’t a circle. It’s a social condenser disguised as a physics experiment. And its primary architectural manifestation isn’t the tunnel, it’s the car park.
Observe: The scientists arrive from France, from Geneva, from the outer suburbs. They park their sensible cars in these vast, flat, asphalted plains. They walk, in their jeans and backpacks, across this non-space and towards their specific concrete box. There is no grand axial approach, no ceremonial stair, just the transition from the private vehicle to an institutional silo. This is the architecture of late-capitalist knowledge production: fragmented, nodal and anti-monumental. The car park is the true agora. The conversations happening by the bike racks are probably more valuable than anything in the peer-review pipeline.
My sketchbook now has three pages dedicated to the ‘Democracy of the Asphalt’. I don't think the Visitor Centre shouldn’t have a grand entrance. It should just have a really good car park. A multi-storey testament to the egalitarian journey of the mind. With exceptional drainage, of course.
Subject: Week 5 Wrestling the Metaphor
The team is stuck.
The client wants something ‘iconic but not flashy’, ‘inspiring but cost-effective’ and ‘fowardlooking while respecting the site’s history’. So, basically, a unicorn that does the accounts. They’re all obsessed with literal circles. Renderings full of curvilinear glazing and spiralling ramps. It’s pathetic, as a circle is what the thing is and our job is to articulate what it means.
I circulated a memo. My argument: the collidor doesn’t collide particles – that’s a vulgar misunderstanding. In fact, it orchestrates absence. It creates a 27km vacuum, a pristine nothingness,
so that the faintest signal of something can be heard. Therefore, the Visitor Centre shouldn’t be an object, it should be a void. A carved-out volume, a negative space in the landscape. You experience science by experiencing the architecture of its preconditions: silence, cold, darkness and anticipation. You enter a chamber that gets progressively quieter, cooler and darker, until you’re standing in a black room, staring at a single, real-time data point from the detector – a number ticking over, meaningless and profound.
I called it The Architectonics of Vacuum Sandrine said it sounded ‘uninsurable’ and ‘possibly depressive for children’.
Subject: Week 7
The Cafeteria as Critical Cross-Section
My salvation has come from an unexpected quarter: the CERN cafeteria, Building 501. It is, without doubt, the most important structure on the campus. It is a roaring, polyglot, culinary panopticon. Postdocs argue over curry, Nobel laureates queue for coffee, technicians and theorists rub shoulders at the salad bar. This is the machine. Not the metal one underground, but this social one. The flow of information here follows the flow of the lunch queue. The architecture is brutally simple. A high-volume, low-cost shed, which is why it works. It imposes no hierarchy, no narrative, just provides fuel and proximity.
My new proposal (I’ve stopped showing them to Sandrine, I’m just compiling a personal manifesto) is to scrap the dedicated Visitor Centre. Instead, we retrofit and extend the cafeteria, making it a portal. Visitors don’t get a curated exhibition, they get a lunch card. They sit at long tables next to engineers, and overhear conversations about muon detection over the din of cutlery. The ‘exhibition’ is a series of annotated tables, live data screens above the serving stations, and the simple, awe-inspiring sight of a thousand people trying to unlock the secrets of the universe, one panini at a time. Architecture’s failure here is its desire to explain. The cafeteria doesn’t explain, it immerses. It is the anti-spectacle, it is genius.
Subject: Week 9
The Tyranny of the Infrastructure
Had a tour of the service corridors. Endless ducts, pipes, cables, the vital organs of the beast. It’s more beautiful than any of the office blocks. It’s honest, with a kind of Gibsonian cyberspace aesthetic; all colour-coded and purposeful. It made me realise our entire profession is fixated on the envelope, the skin. But here, the skin is irrelevant, as it is the guts that matter. The architecture is all MEP. What if the Visitor Centre was the infrastructure? What if we designed a building that was literally a giant walk-through diagram of its own services? Would you follow the blue pipe for water, the yellow for cryogenic lines, the red for data, all the way to a viewpoint over the actual site? A building that confesses upfront that it’s just another life support machine for the real star of the show, buried below. I’ve started drawing sections that are just glorious tangles of tubes and conduits, with little viewing platforms inserted like treehouses. It’s either a groundbreaking deconstruction of architectural hierarchy or the blueprint for a very confusing power plant. Hard to tell at this stage.
Subject: Week 12
Conclusion (For Now)
They’ve chosen a design. It’s a timber-clad box with a ‘gentle, embracing curve’ and a green roof. It looks like a particularly thoughtful primary school. Sandrine is pleased. It’s ‘sensitive’ and ‘contextual’. I am, of course, despondent. They’ve built a waiting room for wonder. My year here has taught me one thing: the greatest architectural statement at CERN was made by the physicists and engineers when they decided to hide their masterpiece. They buried the Sistine Chapel and built a Portakabin above it. That’s a power move we architects don’t have the courage for. We have to sign everything, to leave our stylistic fingerprint on the awe. My unofficial, unsolicited proposal will remain the correct one: do almost nothing. Place a modest pavilion, a map or a window onto the cafeteria, along with a sign that says in multiple languages: ‘The important part is elsewhere. You are welcome to wait here.’ That would be a piece of architecture worthy of its subject. It would have the confidence to be a footnote. Instead, we’ll get a timber-clad footnote that thinks it’s a thesis statement.
Back to London soon, where the arrogance is at least on the surface for all to see.
CURVATURE AS AN END CONDITION
Walid Bhatt
Archaeologists often argue that the ancient Indus Valley cities are defined by their gridded urban planning systems; systems which produced surprisingly uniform infrastructural repetition across settlements dotted around the subcontinent, down to the ratios of the terracotta bricks that were used.
Yet Mohenjo-daro, a now-abandoned city in the province of Sindh, Pakistan, contains one of the oldest negotiations between rectilinear planning and circular construction in urban history.
Built around 2500 BCE, Mohenjodaro was contemporary with the urban experiments of Mesopotamia and building of pyramids in Giza in Ancient Egypt. Its plan is rigorously orthogonal yet circular forms appear at key infrastructural and topographic moments. The mound above the Great Bath, a raised mass with echoes of the later Buddhist stupa, illustrates this.
Stratigraphic studies show that the mound began as a series of rectilinear brick platforms. Over centuries, however, as platforms were rebuilt, the outer edges were ground down and slumped into a quasi-circular footprint. As a result, the mass drifted toward a cylindrical plan that naturally dissipated horizontal earth pressures and reduced shear along retaining walls. What appears today as a mound-like form is the accumulated effect of natural adjustments and general maintenance which has kept the structure standing over millennia. In this continuous dialogue between brick and time, curvature becomes the end condition.
The city’s wells represent the opposite form. Between 600–700 have been identified, mostly built from standardised
baked terracotta rings. These inverted volumes are an infrastructural unit which has been replicated, piercing the ground across the city and creating a network of circular voids. Their cylindrical shape distributes compressive forces evenly which prevents them from collapsing.
The Great Bath rises upwards through addition. The wells descend downwards for extraction. Both continue to exist as circular volumes. Both become stable as curved geometries. Circles in Mohenjo-daro emerge as a general architectural truth.
Photograph of the Great Bath area, Mohenjo-daro. Courtesy Harappa.com.
Paul Francis Feeney
The great Willie Thorne was a fabulous snooker player. His notable bulbous head inset with piercing circular eyes had the ability to master the destiny of those spherical balls atop the green cloth. Thorne was a great admirer of the work of Étienne-Louis Boullée with the design for the Cenotaph for Newton among Thorne’s favourite work. Willie Thorne, a total man of circles.
Credit: Alamy / Allstar Picture Library Ltd.
CHANGING SHAPE
Pooneh Erami
By the time the Vitruvian man spread his arms inside Leonardo’s dual halo of square and circle, the shape had transitioned from a proportional idea to a moral expectation. The circle became shorthand for unity, purity and wholeness – virtues that a diagram of architecture should aspire to, or at least borrow authority from. Plans, elevations and sections begin to behave as if circular harmony were contagious. The ideal hovers over the drawing board like a benevolent (if slightly overbearing) ghost.
Yet architecture rarely accommodates ideals for long. Buildings age, erode, collapse, are excavated, restored, misinterpreted and photographed at flattering angles. If the circle is the geometry of harmony, the ruin is the geometry of interruption. Ruin is what happens when time edits the diagram.
Across many ancient sites this tension is legible. A broken wall interrupts an otherwise confident axis; a reconstructed column stands beside its shattered twin; a once-symmetrical façade reads more like a diagram of absences than presences. Confronted with these fragments, the Vitruvian circle begins to appear less like a symbol of perfection and more like something fragile; a geometry that time can punch holes through.
Ruin perforates the diagram. It abrades, subtracts, displaces. The circle that once promised enclosure becomes a ring of partial arcs, a geometry that flickers in and out depending on what has survived. Renaissance diagrams teach us that bodies and buildings can be neatly tucked into ideal forms; ruins teach us that forms eventually spill out.
Looking closely at the remains of ancient architecture – at places where a circular base meets a later square repair – one sees two geometries negotiating the same ground. Not a clash, but an overlap. The circle continues, but unevenly. The diagram persists, but with voids. Time becomes a co-author.
Perhaps the interest is not in perfection, but in what perfection becomes after rupture. A circle that endures through absence. A geometry held together not by purity but by persistence. In this sense, the ruin does not negate Vitruvius; it extends him. If he proposed harmony through measure, ruins propose a different kind of measure: duration, erosion, displacement, repair. This shift suggests another vocabulary. Vitruvius offers firmitas-utilitasvenustas; time answers with fragilitasvacuitas-ruina. These are not oppositions so much as continuities – a reminder that architecture’s ideals survive less through preservation than through transformation. The narrative is simple: an ideal form, confronted with time, becomes something else. But it is also a story about architectural thinking. We inherit prescriptions –Vitruvian or otherwise – and then encounter conditions that refuse to comply. In that refusal, another possibility appears. The circle does not vanish; it becomes porous. It trades purity for depth, certainty for evidence, ideality for endurance. That is a more compelling geometry: not the form that resists rupture, but the one that survives it by changing shape.
TETHERED Issi Nanabeyin
A circle turns. A circle performs its own recursion. A circle has no endpoint, folding origin into aftermath. A circle can be a shield rotates, protective, orbital. a wheel advances – forward, outward. a home tracks across terrain, a vector disguised as shelter. Movement becomes the operating system of dwelling.
To speak of home here is to enter a feedback loop: the signal sent, the signal returned, distorted, doubled, delayed. Labelle Prussin reminds us: for the nomad, home is unthinkable without journey –space becomes legible only by moving through it.
The diaspora knows this intimately: home as migration-condition, as a threshold stretched thin between herethere simultaneity, as the poetics of the elsewhere. Over successive cycles the boundaries glitch: figures read as structures, structures behave like figures, each contaminating the other. James Baldwin murmurs: perhaps home is not a place but an irrevocable condition. A state of becoming. A state of circling.
I. LIMBO
A circle that turns, but here the turning is arrested a figure caught in the wooden grid of Western order, a body ossified inside cabinets that were never made for it.
A home that promises shelter, yet shrinks around the diaspora, misfitting, misreading, misnaming. This first drawing is an archive of stasis: a containment system disguised as care. A feedback loop where ‘home’ repeats but does not receive itself. This is limbo: a halted orbit, a circle that forgets how to move.
II. REBELLION
Then comes the second a surge of bodies in procession, a choreography where colonial collides with decolonial.
Memory and present tense fight for terrain, diasporic inheritance pushing against the architectures that tried to frame it. This is a march, a swarm, a rupture. The figure moves because it must, because the archive pursues it, because revolt becomes another way to redraw the line between here and elsewhere. Home becomes a threshold stretched thin –a moving perimeter between two geographies.
III. TWO FIGURES TETHERED
And then the third drawing: two figures, both the same self, tethered to wheels, a doubling, a split, a reunification. Here the circle turns again.
A wheel leaning forward into distance, a home that carries itself across whatever ground is available. This is architecture without architecture: form that refuses stillness, shelter that learns to travel.
A structure that behaves like a figure; a figure that behaves like a structure each contaminating the other until the difference dissolves.
A shifting ground, always circling back, always moving forward searching for a diasporic figuring, for a home that fits by refusing to stay still.
AMIRA AL-FARSI, former librarian (emerita) at Qatar National Library, now researches historical religious and cultural symbiosis across the Arabian Sea. She has an interest in open-source intelligence in conflict zones and baking viennoiserie. All taxonomies eventually collapse.
RENATE LURDESA BAUMANE is a recent graduate of the AA, where her work explored the political/ technological/spatial conditions through which narrative and memory are formed. She currently works at Earshot NGO.
WALID BHATT is a London-based architect and writer who leads the design studio bhatt.works. His work spans architecture, interiors and furniture, engaging the everyday through culture and narrative. He studied at Central Saint Martins, the Royal College of Art and Cambridge.
TRISTAN BLACKMORE is an Irish-American designer and writer based in London. His work has appeared in Litmus, Pidgin and Vienna Design Week.
POONEH ERAMI is an architect and PhD candidate at the AA. She has practiced in France and Morocco and currently lectures at the School of Architecture in Casablanca and UCLA’s Summer Sessions.
PAUL FRANCIS FEENEY is the co-founder of FAR, a practice which involves building, research, social and artistic pursuits. He has worked with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in the Netherlands and Hong Kong, and Herzog & de Meuron architects in Switzerland. He is currently preoccupied with all things earthbound and runs EarthLAAB (Intermediate 11).
ANNA FONT is an architect. She holds a PhD in Design from the AA and graduated from ETSALS Barcelona and Harvard University (GSD). She is currently Head of Learning at the AA, a studio tutor in the Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech) graduate programme and an Environmental Technical Studies course tutor. Prior to the AA she was a visiting professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Buenos Aires). Her work combines academic, editorial and design projects.
RICHARD GERALD-RONDÓN is a graduate of the MA History and Critical Thinking at the AA. His work lies at the contemporary margins of architecture and space, focusing on the sociology of architectural labour, institutions and the symbolic frameworks of professional authority.
SEDEF GÖKÇE and WILLIAM JEAN THOMAS LITRÉ are students at the AA, enjoy circles, and co-authored Annales (2025).
MAX LANDAU wants to understand architecture and to that end studies it at the AA.
LAWuN (Locally Available World unseen Networks), first iteration in 1969, AALAWuN first iteration in 2016; AALAWuN is only ever as useful as the students in the school make it; LAWuN is a site of the Invisible University.
YOONJI LEE is a student at the AA. Her current work explores death-related infrastructure, examining how medical architecture mediates care, grief and socioeconomic systems.
OSCAR LEUNG is an architectural designer and researcher based in Hong Kong, exploring computational geometry, automation and AI-driven design systems. He co-runs Electric Cloud Poetics and is a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and the University of Hong Kong.
JAN DEVARIS MACBEAN is a fifth year student at the AA. His project this year looks into the architectures, cultures and techniques of celestial observation.
MATTERS.xyz (Valentin Bansac and Alice Loumeau) is a tentacular collective endeavor that explores new territorial narratives through research, text, installation and exhibition. In 2025, they co-curated (with Mike Fritsch Sonic Investigations) the Luxembourg Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
LUCIE MORESTEL is an architect whose work operates between architectural production and spatial theory. Her writing engages with questions of mediation, territorial systems and the technical substrates that structure contemporary spatial experience.
ISSI NANABEYIN is trained in architecture, translating diasporic research into sculptural form. His researchbased design practice investigates the formal, visual and spatial matter that culminates with the entanglements and encounters of a diaspora. He is currently a studio tutor of Intermediate 2 at the AA.
KARTIKA DEWI PARAMITA in an Indonesian architect and planner now based in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She currently writes prose on the various forms of urban transformation in former Yugoslavia, and is working toward a novella. She is also an amateur luthier and an avid bikepacker, recently riding from Finland to Portugal.
PETAR PETRIČEVIĆ is a Brussels-based architect collaborating with diverse entities within the city’s established creative network. Since 2025 he has led his own practice, PENDULOOP, focusing on reorganisation, systems thinking, process-driven projects and an occasional play of contradictions.
VARVARA SEREGINA is an Intermediate student at the AA, working across exhibition, writing and material practices. Her recent research focuses on infrastructural systems and the temporary, exploring processes of circulation, accumulation and use.
