Un-

Architecture is a discipline of consequences. Buildings organise forms of life, consume resources, shape territories, and materialise political, economic, and cultural decisions. By projecting itself into the future, architecture also projects consequences into the future. The question of what architecture builds can therefore never be separated from the question of what architecture enables, excludes, preserves, or destroys.

As Robin Evans observed, architects work from an anterior position, articulating ideas of buildings before they are built. Architecture operates through anticipation, it makes space for possibilities, expectations, desires, and fears. Yet every anticipation is also an act of selection. To imagine one future means to abandon or neglect others. Projections establish priorities, planning privileges certain forms of life over others. 

Anticipation presupposes a degree of confidence in the future. It assumes a future to be imagined, planned, shaped, and improved. Such confidence has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Ecological crises, resource depletion, social inequalities, technological transformations, political instability, and the persistence of colonial structures challenge not only the futures architecture projects but also the concepts, methods, institutions, and forms of knowledge through which those futures are imagined. Concepts, methods, institutions, and forms of knowledge through which architecture projects futures have themselves become objects of scrutiny. 

In response, architectural discourse increasingly turns toward a family of operations gathered around a simple prefix: un-.

Unlearning. Undoing. Unbuilding. Unsettling. Unauthoring. Unmaking.