Year in review: 2022’s most read stories

This year, 1,144 pages were sent to press by the AR editorial team – well over a thousand pages of buildings, places and people that tell stories of our current reality. In a media landscape where stories are perpetually breaking and newsfeeds endlessly scrolled, we hope that readers find a slower form of journalism in the AR, when our magazine lands on subscribers’ doorsteps ten times a year. At the AR, we often say that buildings are constructed on site, but that architecture is built by discourse. Through our thematic magazines, we have built arguments and constructed campaigns for new ways of producing architecture. The Education issue looked at the oppressive structures of institutions and how they can be reimagined; the Animals issue argued that the worlds architects construct should be for more than just humans; and the Energy issue made visible the often obscured links between buildings and the energy sources they are built from, and around.

The 20 essays below are the ones published on our website in 2022 that were read the most, and they reveal the vital stories needed to at times propel the discourse forward, and at other times take us away from daunting realities. It is unsurprising that stories from the Stone issue were so successful, making up a quarter of the stories on the list – they reveal the urgency with which architects are finding new ways to build, and returning to old materials. The cultural landscape that we construct through architecture is also strong, with Marianela D’Aprile’s essay on storage units at the top of the list, focusing more on the objects than the walls around them. Buildings – old (Kariakoo market, Climat de France and Castelgrande), new (Cheré Botha School, Student housing in Paris-Saclay, Social housing in Mallorca, Dadfa market) and new again (Battersea Power Station) – were as popular as ever. Finally, number 20 – a letter from student members of UVW–SAW – ends the list with the matter of labour conditions in architectural work, and some urgent demands: ‘stop relying on our unpaid overtime, precarious contracts and bogus self-employment agreements.’ And so, we’ll see you in 2023, with our first issue of the year, the Labour issue.

For as long as we can, we will continue to tell these stories: campaigning for the future of architecture and our time on this planet. For this, we need you. Subscribing will help us to stay in print and maintain our editorial independence. Over the Christmas period, we have taken down the paywall on our website, making all stories free to read for registered users. If you enjoy what you read, please subscribe if you can. Students receive 50 per cent off until 31 December.

1. Storage wars: the structures that house forgotten objects, AR May 2022, Marianela D’Aprile
‘Many of us might not be so different from our objects, sitting in wait for the day we might finally be adequately housed’

2. Jerusalem stone: the history and identity of Palestinian stereotomy, AR April 2022, Nadi Abusaada
‘Palestinian expertise in stone quarrying, cutting, masonry and dressing remains the cornerstone of the country’s construction sector’

3. Revisit: Kariakoo market in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania by Beda Amuli, AR July/August 2022, Valerie Amani
‘The tragedy appears to be linked to how poorly the market was managed, with facilities not properly updated since it was first built’

4. Reputations: Dimitris Pikionis (1887–1968), AR April 2022, Freddie Phillipson
‘Each of Pikionis’s buildings is an experiment in what constitutes a place’ 

Aristea Charoniti's illustration of Dimitris Pikionis

5. Stone age: a new architecture from an old material, AR April 2022, Steve Webb
‘Making stone has about half the carbon footprint of concrete and stone is often more than 2½ times stronger’

6. Power and glory: Battersea Power Station in London by WilkinsonEyre, AR October 2022, Ellen Peirson
‘The nostalgia for industrial Britain that Battersea articulates so clearly reveals the murkier imperial link that some hold on to between coal and “great” Britain’

During the filming of Pink Floyd's music video in December 1976, an inflatable pig at flies between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station. The building reopened in October 2022, and was reviewed in the Energy issue

Credit: Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy

7. Cheré Botha School in Cape Town, South Africa by Wolff Architects, AR September 2022, Huda Tayob
‘The architects have created a recognisable feature in the landscape: a suggestion that public buildings such as schools should be prominent landmarks’

8. Student housing in Paris-Saclay by Bruther and Baukunst, AR June 2022, Justinien Tribillon
‘In between these buildings are empty roads, deserted sites, voids waiting for the next projects’

9. Ape town: living with baboons in Cape Town, AR February 2022, Tim Dee
‘The way we might live with our neighbouring wildlife can allow well-off communities to covertly fortify their homes against all unwanted visitors’

In Tim Dee's essay on apes in Cape Town, a chacma steals from a car

Credit: Yor Balini / Alamy

10. Social housing in Mallorca, Spain by IBAVI, AR April 2022, Rafael Gómez-Moriana
‘In the climate of conspicuous consumption of the 1980s, marés became the stuff of luxury holiday homes’

11. Revisit: Frankfurt Kitchen, AR December 2021/January 2022, Gwendolen Webster
‘Despite May’s drive for standardisation, there was in effect no such thing as the Frankfurt Kitchen’

12. Dadfa market in Bangkok, Thailand by M Space, AR July/August 2022, Pirasri Povatong
‘Dadfa blends into the jumbled surroundings of Bang Na with its unobtrusive form and hint of greenery inside’

13. The short straw: bio-based construction, AR June 2022, Dominique Gauzin-Müller
‘Although straw is readily available – and a carbon sink – the use of concrete, steel, polystyrene and mineral wool still predominates in France, due to the power of lobbies and well-established practices’

14. Revisit: Castelgrande, in Bellinzona, Switzerland by Aurelio Galfetti, online, Giovanni Corbellini
‘Galfetti acknowledged the paradoxical need of human memory to work as a sieve – remembering by discarding’

15. Pockets of promise: community interventions in Cape Town’s Gugulethu neighbourhood, AR July/August 2022, Kathryn Ewing
‘Ongoing clean-ups, co-design and climate change workshops have made visible the possibilities for small change’

16. Kitchen debate: where labour and leisure collide, AR December 2021/January 2022, Marianna Janowicz
‘The contemporary open-plan kitchen sets the stage for the shared, egalitarian running of the household, but the law – and reality – lag behind’

Marianna Janowicz’s keynote essay in the Kitchen issue looked at the forces of capital eddy around the kitchen island. Here, an Apple advertisement from 1977 imagines the kitchen table as a space of entrepreneurship, while still preserving and re-entrenching gendered placements of men as paid professional workers and women as unpaid reproductive labourers

17. Revisit: Climat de France, Algiers by Fernand Pouillon, AR April 2022, Brittany Utting and Daniel Jacobs
‘Pouillon saw his architecture as capable of bridging the gap between modernist agendas and the local needs of the Algerian people’

18. Architectural education in the climate emergency, AR September 2022, Essi Nisonen and Sofie Pelsmakers
‘A more democratic, low hierarchy, non-exclusionary way of teaching encourages us to decentralise ourselves as architects and centre those (including nature) who we design for’

19. Social contract: Parisian social housing, AR June 2022, Magda Maaoui
‘Even the Left cannot agree on how to manage or expand the country’s existing social housing stock’

20. Student members of UVW–SAW: letter from a young architect, AR November 2022, Student members of the United Voices of the World – Section of Architectural Workers
‘Architecture is not a ‘calling’ (thanks Marisa Cortright). It’s a job’