Author(s): Gustav Nielsen (Editor); Rachael Tsai (Editor); Diana Smiljkovic (Editor); Jack Rusk (Editor); Nick Masserelli; Luiza Dale

ARCHITECTURAL THEORY | ACTAR

I, Like Many Things mobilizes diverse narratives in a meditation on the nooks and crannies of pandemic life starting at home.  Contributions by people from across many geographies and fields make inquiries about alternative domesticities, virtualities, ecologies and collectivities that unfold from everyday practices and suggest spatial agencies and actors within their complexities.  Can we take any lessons from these past few years and how should we approach learning anything anyways?

The pandemic has taught us to unlearn a lot of things and to throw many of the things we thought we knew back up in the air.  Within the blur of lockdowns, quarantines and remoteness we have become accustomed to navigating uncanny, strange and ambiguous worlds.  In the face of hardship we have explored alternatives, some nascent, some forgotten and others novel.  While "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" metaphorically refers to an ineffective action in a time of crisis, rearranging the furniture in one's home has been both symptom and cause of a newfound social and spatial agency that spilled over into street demonstrations, office districts, and fragile remnant ecologies. Antipodal to the global emergency, individual and collective actions composed new scripts for relating to each other and to the places we live--acts that constitute alterities to existing global orders while subsumed within them.

At this point in time, roughly three years into the Covid-19 pandemic, we have had some time to think through what just happened.  And what is still happening.  Rather than proclaiming new normals or predicting futures we believe that it is time to use our recent collective memory of a shared adversary to listen, form alliances, organize commons, build solidarity, trust, mutual understanding, care in order to take collective action.

This edition is experimental in its format and brings together voices from architecture, planning, design, art, philosophy, anthropology, microbiology, history and more in an attempt to contribute to a multidisciplinary and public discourse.  Meditating changes of domestic landscapes, and revisiting abstract spatiotemporal pockets within which to perform the everyday, I, Like Many Things excavates and narrates forms of spatial practice prodded by encounters within dense time.

With Contributions of (contributors of commissioned texts and visual pieces) Markus Miessen, Oxana Timofeeva, Joshua Tan, Kathryn-kay Johnson, Michelle Millar Fischer, Deirdre Barrett, Lee Scrivner, Zach Michielli, Ellen Blumenstein, Luisa Sol, Kyriacos Christofides, Meera Badran, Stefano Masserini, Francesco Casetti, Simone C Niquelle, Adonis Archontides, Pinar Yoldas, Cruz Garcia, Nathalie Frankowski, Simon Str yer, Athar Mufreh, Patricia Dominguez, Rachael Marie Scicluna, Monica Narula, Jennifer Christine Nash (contributors of drawings and photos for open calls of which some are featured in the book)Rukshan Vathupola, William Beck, Renata Cesar, Abhishek Ambekar, Olivia Epstein, Nick Massarelli, Megan Panzano, Robbin Juris, Andrea Sanchez Moctezuma, Viet Nguyen, Montgomery Balding, Abby Sandler, Abhishek Ambekar, Anishwar Tirupathur, Anthony Iovino, Konstantinos Ballis, Benjamin Tan, Katharine Blackman, David Bruce, Michelle Bunch, Chase Ireland, Katie Colford, Olivia Epstein, Ethan Lethander, Dhruv, Giada Puccinelli, Nathan Garcia, Christina Zhang, Christina Anastase, Elias Carrion Verra, Sofia Alfaro, Drew Doyle, Tarranum Akhter, Alondra Correa, Miguel Astete, Yanara Formandoy, Rachel Ghindea, Aaron Payne, Sofia Guzman, Edgar Papazian, Athiba Balasubramanian, Deirdre Plaus, Helen Farley, Kaitlin Baker, Hoby Horak, Itaparica, Jessica Zhou, Tyler Krebs, Andrew Miller, Katie Lau, Leidy Karina Gomez Montoya, A. Lopez, Matthew Liu, Michelle Nguyen, Mari Kroin, Morgan Anna Kerber, Pete Pham, Martina Potlach, Rachel Skof, Sangji Han, Shahla Alharthi, Jonathan Bolch