*30% off through March 31, 2026 (excludes shipping)
Guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic
What if the most urgent task for architecture today is to reclaim the work of imagining? In a present shaped by predictive models, climate dashboards, and platform logics that cast the future as already known—appearing to foreclose not only the possibility of transformation but the very meaningfulness of pursuing it—this issue of Architectural Design A–D, guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic, argues for the continued necessity of utopian thinking within and against the systems that constrain us. As we face the multiple urgencies of our capitalist present—and sense the darkening shadows of dystopic futures—the interventions staged in these pages propose not the neat solutions of blueprint utopianism, but strategies that reopen the field of the possible, burnishing our desire for alternatives without prescribing what the future might be. Crucially, this utopian imperative is recast in chimeric terms: as a hybrid, bricolaged, and provisional practice that acknowledges our complex entanglement within the planetary fabric. Running refusal and imagination together, the contributions featured here engage playable simulations, AI-mediated environments, feminist techno-futures, mobile infrastructures, and grassroots “practopias” whose insurgent energies reframe utopia as a shared improvisation in the present. Together, these contributions resist the dual temptations of nostalgic idealism and resigned realism, testing how architecture might negotiate, inhabit, and contest existing systems, bending them toward more enabling, equitable futures. They help us envision utopia not as a closed destination, but as a mode of speculative worldmaking: a living, ongoing process of chimeric invention.
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Cha, Adil Bokhari, Federico Campagna, Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Krish Dittmer, Graham Harman, Alina Nazmeeva, Neil Leach, Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti, Marco Santambrogio, Paulette Singley, Neil Spiller, Andrew Witt, Natasha Wanganeen, and Liam Young
FEATURED ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS
Sophia Al-Maria, Archigram, Architectural Association, Atelier Manferdini, AtkinsRéalis, Arthur Becker, Tega Brain, Paolo Canevari, Carlo Ratti Associati, Certain Measures, Nigel Coates, Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Peter Eisenman, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Graves, Grymsdyke Farm, Wes Jones, Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, Norman Foster Foundation, Andrea Pozzo, Giulio Romano, Federico Spoltore, Studio Lifeforms, Studio Meteora (ETH Zürich), John Maybury, Jack Oliva-Rendler, Superstudio, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Venice Architecture Biennale, and Rain Wu
*30% off through March 31, 2026 (excludes shipping)
Guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic
What if the most urgent task for architecture today is to reclaim the work of imagining? In a present shaped by predictive models, climate dashboards, and platform logics that cast the future as already known—appearing to foreclose not only the possibility of transformation but the very meaningfulness of pursuing it—this issue of Architectural Design A–D, guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic, argues for the continued necessity of utopian thinking within and against the systems that constrain us. As we face the multiple urgencies of our capitalist present—and sense the darkening shadows of dystopic futures—the interventions staged in these pages propose not the neat solutions of blueprint utopianism, but strategies that reopen the field of the possible, burnishing our desire for alternatives without prescribing what the future might be. Crucially, this utopian imperative is recast in chimeric terms: as a hybrid, bricolaged, and provisional practice that acknowledges our complex entanglement within the planetary fabric. Running refusal and imagination together, the contributions featured here engage playable simulations, AI-mediated environments, feminist techno-futures, mobile infrastructures, and grassroots “practopias” whose insurgent energies reframe utopia as a shared improvisation in the present. Together, these contributions resist the dual temptations of nostalgic idealism and resigned realism, testing how architecture might negotiate, inhabit, and contest existing systems, bending them toward more enabling, equitable futures. They help us envision utopia not as a closed destination, but as a mode of speculative worldmaking: a living, ongoing process of chimeric invention.
CONTRIBUTORS
Robert Cha, Adil Bokhari, Federico Campagna, Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Krish Dittmer, Graham Harman, Alina Nazmeeva, Neil Leach, Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti, Marco Santambrogio, Paulette Singley, Neil Spiller, Andrew Witt, Natasha Wanganeen, and Liam Young
FEATURED ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS
Sophia Al-Maria, Archigram, Architectural Association, Atelier Manferdini, AtkinsRéalis, Arthur Becker, Tega Brain, Paolo Canevari, Carlo Ratti Associati, Certain Measures, Nigel Coates, Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Peter Eisenman, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Graves, Grymsdyke Farm, Wes Jones, Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, Norman Foster Foundation, Andrea Pozzo, Giulio Romano, Federico Spoltore, Studio Lifeforms, Studio Meteora (ETH Zürich), John Maybury, Jack Oliva-Rendler, Superstudio, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Venice Architecture Biennale, and Rain Wu
