Letters

For the July/August 2023 issue, the AR invited a practitioners, writers and curators to nominate a building that they wished had not been, or hoped would not be, demolished. Published in print and expanded further online, a collection of ‘demolition postcards’ were the result. Together, the postcards speak of different forms of demolition, from the wrecking ball to neglect, and from political erasure to natural disasters

In AR November 2022, we asked students of architecture and related fields to address their older selves. The resulting letters, of which we received more than two hundred, are written to the future. They are sent to someday architects and workers, pay cheques and bosses, ecological disasters and solar systems: a chorus of students projecting their voices into space

Collected in a special issue of the AR and further featured online, we have asked architects, critics, teachers, artists and enthusiasts to write a letter to the eternal figure of the ‘young architect’. Whether dispensing advice or recounting experience, offering optimism or words of forewarning, these ‘letters to a young architect’ look to the future as much as they draw on the past