It is not without irony that in an age characterised by the dissolution of certainty – a consequence of digital dematerialisation and the catastrophic destabilisation of our social institutions and natural world – architecture, for so long the repository for our myths and the vessel for our intangible narratives and rituals, has been stripped bare. Increasingly preoccupied with the physical, material and measurable, architecture has forfeited its original purpose as a mediating link between the tacit and the tangible. Drawing on the current resurgence and our enduring cultural fascination with the ethereal and uncanny, this AD frames the spectral as a deconstructive gesture that undermines the fixedness and certainties of binary logics, a means to develop new practices and positions from which to address our contemporary uncertainties. Gathering a body of work that explores and speculates on architecture’s long romance with the incorporeal, the issue is intended as a catalyst through which latency, contingency and indeterminacy, inherent characteristics of the architectural condition, can once more be valued, cultivated and nurtured.

Contributors: Kirsty Badenoch; Michael Chapman;Nat Chard;Oliver G Goche and Peter P Goché; Perry Kulper; Ifigeneia Liangi and Daniel Dream; Eva Menuhin; Mark Morris; Mike Phillips; Ian Ritchie; Chris Speed, and Cameron Stebbing

Featured architects and designers: Captivate: Spatial Modelling Research Group, Daniel Libeskind, Night Kitchen Studio, Michael Sandle, and Ritchie Studio

It is not without irony that in an age characterised by the dissolution of certainty – a consequence of digital dematerialisation and the catastrophic destabilisation of our social institutions and natural world – architecture, for so long the repository for our myths and the vessel for our intangible narratives and rituals, has been stripped bare. Increasingly preoccupied with the physical, material and measurable, architecture has forfeited its original purpose as a mediating link between the tacit and the tangible. Drawing on the current resurgence and our enduring cultural fascination with the ethereal and uncanny, this AD frames the spectral as a deconstructive gesture that undermines the fixedness and certainties of binary logics, a means to develop new practices and positions from which to address our contemporary uncertainties. Gathering a body of work that explores and speculates on architecture’s long romance with the incorporeal, the issue is intended as a catalyst through which latency, contingency and indeterminacy, inherent characteristics of the architectural condition, can once more be valued, cultivated and nurtured.

Contributors: Kirsty Badenoch; Michael Chapman;Nat Chard;Oliver G Goche and Peter P Goché; Perry Kulper; Ifigeneia Liangi and Daniel Dream; Eva Menuhin; Mark Morris; Mike Phillips; Ian Ritchie; Chris Speed, and Cameron Stebbing

Featured architects and designers: Captivate: Spatial Modelling Research Group, Daniel Libeskind, Night Kitchen Studio, Michael Sandle, and Ritchie Studio