Faktur: Documents and Architecture is a journal that celebrates research as the source of architectural imagination. The journal responds to the concerns of an emerging generation of architects, and aims to bridge the distance between practice and academic scholarship. Faktur is interested in new and innovative methods for presenting and discussing architecture that understand research, both academic and otherwise, as a crucial precondition to developing critical, contemporary projects. It seeks to present topics, locations, and architectural concerns that function as micro­narratives illuminating larger issues of global culture. Faktur is interested in the construction of material arguments from local perspectives, linking them to longue durée historical threads within architecture on the one hand, and current political, economic, and cultural concerns on the other. Finally, the journal is interested in how these investigations affect, inform, or influence the design processes of contemporary architectural practices. Contributors to the fourth issue include: Eric Höweler; Magdalena Haggärde and Gisle Løkken; Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco and José Hevia; Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro; Emma Leigh Macdonald and Ben Goldner; André Tavares; Daphne Bakker; Florencia Álvarez; and Matthew Kennedy.

Pep Avilés is a historian, architect, and educator whose academic research explores the impact media had in modern architecture after World War II. His current book project is tentatively titled Gaudí’s Afterlives: Image, Historiography, and Postwar Architecture. In addition, he has concentrated on the environmental histories emerging at the Anthracite Region in Pennsylvania, and the impacts of the modern culture of extraction. Avilés is assistant professor at the Department of Architecture, Penn State. His work has been sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Getty Research Center. His essays have been published in journals such as the Getty Research Journal, Thresholds, and Footprint, and in edited volumes such as Dust and Data: Traces of the Bauhaus Across 100 Years (Ines Weizman ed., Spector Books, 2019), and Climates: Architecture and the Planet Imaginary (James Graham, et. alt., eds., Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016).

Matthew Kennedy is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Architecture, Penn State, and codirector of Cosa, a research and design practice based in Mexico City. He holds a master’s of architecture from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in media studies and mass communications from the University of South Carolina. He is the coauthor, together with Nile Greenberg, of The Advanced School of Collective Feeling (Park Books, 2021). He has participated in panels, juries, and discussions at SCI-Arc, the Center for Architecture (New York), Columbia Graduate School for Architecture Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), and LIGA in Mexico City. Prior to establishing an independent practice, he worked in the office of Frida Escobedo where he oversaw the development of such projects as the Serpentine Pavilion in London (2018), the exhibition No. 9 at Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery (2017), an intervention at the Neutra VDL Research House in Los Angeles (2017), and the office’s contribution to Exhibit Columbus (2019).

Founded in 2018, Faktur: Documents and Architecture is an independent journal that fosters research as the source of architectural imagination.