Mindful of our mission to promote new territories of knowledge, in this issue of ARQ, we have focused on presenting architectural explorations of new grounds—whether through projects, essays, or research—publishing a range of readings and critical inquiries into a subject that, despite its age, is far from exhausted.
From discussions on the value of land (by Martin, Moore, and Schindler, as well as Montealegre) to conceptualizations of it (by Celedón and Torrent); from territorial disputes (in Weizman and Jaque) to design interventions on the territory (by González and Design Earth); from strategies to expand public land (by Carreño and Sartori) to the possibility of publicizing different grounds (by Herzog & de Meuron); from the subsoil as a territory of geopolitical disputes (in Bélanger) to the subsoil as a repository of ancestral wisdom (in Jorquera and Soto); from modified ground as a new program (by Mayoral and Murray) to modified ground as a new typology (by OMA). All these approaches open up a world of possibilities that expand the classical understanding of ground as the support for architecture, whether structural, existential, or symbolic.
