for Collaboration, ARCADE has partnered with the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments Architecture Writing class, taught by Lauren Gallow, and will be publishing essays written by the students on a topic or design project of their choice. A large part of bringing this theme of “collaboration” to life is through the pairing of each essay with a professional or mentor currently working in the field who is adjacent to the student’s topic.

This issue explores the theme of monuments, memorials, and artifacts by conversing under the umbrella of urban regeneration, personal and civic relationship with public space, respite and reflection, and how urban generation/regeneration creates and destroys. Within, you will discover the experience of public parks and greenbelts, how the city implements public art as an act of memorialization after gentrification, and the too often nefarious nature of nostalgia – both the light and dark sides of memorialization and monuments. We have included works of composition as memorialization to the lived experience, and work from architectural critic Bruce Rips, the civic poet of Seattle Shin Yu Pai, cultural critic and philosopher Charles Mudede, architectural journalist Vernon Mays and many more.

This issue’s theme of “Exception” combines singularity and ambiguity in its layers of phonetic and conceptual interpretations. Exceptions to the rule; exceptional things off the beaten path; that which has been left to the side – or looking sideways to find something new.

Refraction examines how the events of 2020 and 2021 have forged new lenses and perspectives by which we understand our place in the world, and represents where ARCADE as an organization is impacting and inspiring positive change in our architecture, design, and arts communities.

We’ve embraced the changing of the guard, developed new outreach and engagement opportunities and increased the diversity of our dialogues. While retaining the thoughtful discussion that has been the hallmark of our organization for nearly forty years, we are looking forward to finding more ways to enrich the Dialogue on Design through digital, print and in-person connections. 37.2 was created in the spirit of experiencing between here and there.

What is death, really? Scientifically, it’s a shift, similar to how elements change from one state (solid, liquid, or gas) to another, an idea called phase transition. With this inspiration, we conceived our new title: PHASE SHIFT. From the start, our thinking has been framed by ideas of change, considering death as a threshold or catalyst for transformation, rather than an endpoint.

We’ve embraced the changing of the guard, developed new outreach and engagement opportunities and increased the diversity of our dialogues. While retaining the thoughtful discussion that has been the hallmark of our organization for nearly forty years, we are looking forward to finding more ways to enrich the Dialogue on Design through digital, print and in-person connections. 37.2 was created in the spirit of experiencing between here and there.

As a whole, does Seattle have a set of guiding moral beliefs—a collective ethos—that supports and enables equitable change? For this ARCADE feature, I asked members of two communities to address this issue on a personal level and share their thoughts in the following pages on what they’ve seen happen ing around them.

In the following pages, some longtime ARCADE writers and community members express their thoughts about the organization. They reflect on the ways thoughtful storytelling and nuanced dialogue enrich our lives, both nourishing and challenging us. They highlight the importance of community and connection, and they celebrate the role of print publications in an increasingly digital world. In some cases, we worked to quell their enthusiasm for ARCADE, but in the end we acquiesced. Please indulge us, just this once, as we celebrate 35 years of your ideas and work.

In this ARCADE feature, we explore what is lost in an era where efficiency has forcefully entangled itself in all aspects of our lives. We approach the topic broadly, having prompted our favorite thinkers and writers to consider where inefficiency exists (or existed) and what beauty arises from it. Knowing what we are to lose, we hope to discover some impulse to spend time among the thorns, extricating efficiency from the roots of our culture.

This is a love story — a story about a city and re gion remaking itseif with the goal of being a place that its citizens will love, a story about a dialog between a city and the people who live there. A powerful story to learn from, it describes a city committed to creating the most livable place in the world for all its residents.

Excerpt: "Since the 1980s, Burtynsky has been documenting human impacts on the natural landscape, with a particular interest in the transformations brought by industry; indirectly he has also been photographing some of the contributing culprits of climate change. “What makes climate change difficult is that it is not an instantaneous catastrophic event. It’s a slow-moving issue that, on a day-to-day basis, people don’t experience and don’t see."

This issue’s feature explores, documents, and critiques some of the spaces found throughout the migration process. It asks what it means to be displaced from home, to persevere en route, and to arrive elsewhere. Contributors describe displacements as three American cities cater to infl uxes of young, wealthy white people. They conceptualize architectures of those who can no longer build in places of their own. They survey precarious journeys through squats, camps, and detention centers. And they identify welcoming and unwelcoming spaces for migrants upon arrival in Europe and North America.

As we move into the future, what will we take with us—as we grow and change, what ideas and experiences will guide our choices? What influences from our pasts will help us understand and create our next chapters? In the following pages, contributors from a variety of design fields and more share thoughts on the cultural influences that have impacted their thinking, highlighting large ideas worth considering as we shape our world. The stories they tell and concepts they present are wide-ranging and Insightful.

Consistent, supportive hubs for creativity are essential. The Rainier Oven Building's 20-year history shows us why.

Authenticity is rooted in our disciplines, histories, and experiences. Understanding its meanings can help us grapple with change.

Data is infiltrating culture. Artists are using data as a subject for critique or as a new method of form generation, creating work that may help us come to terms with a changing society.

These days, the deepening global environmental crisis and recent research revealing the limits, and even dangers, of Western-style consumerism has turned the whole narrative of devel-opment completely upside down. One example of this is that more and more, politicians and economists in poor cities no longer see the car as a marker of progress and are instead considering allocating, or have already redirected, a sizable portion of their very limited urban resources to the lowly bicycle.

Aesthetics is one of the most difficult things to formalize and teach a computer.

Life in the city turns out to be greener than life in rural areas. Humans in the woods do more damage to the environment than humans in densely packed urban cores. The reason why hippies failed to see things this way is because it’s counterintuitive. But Buster Simpson did, and that’s why he sat on that jumble of concrete, and that’s also why that image in the timeworn newspaper is at the center of his retrospective.

Art and science are forms of inquiry. Artists and scien tists ask questions. Both engage research, and most often those who practice want to share the knowledge generated. However, this does not translate to art as being the same as science—they are distinct. And they are each equally important to our collective future. Societies that nourish diverse forms of inquiry gener ate new knowledge and shape how we act in the world.

We are trained at a young age to separate art from the core subjects of our studies. Students are unknowingly squeezed through a series of tightly fitted molds on their way from elementary school into adulthood, fully accepting an assumed fact that we spend less time teaching art because it is frivolous in the shadows of science and math. The truth of the matter is that these basic topics of art and science are more closely related than not, and the overlap is more relevant now than ever. The STEM subjects {Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are no longer adequate to describe the needs of our society. Our contemporary world craves empathy and understanding in the face of an intensified onset of techno logical advances and a decline in direct interpersonal communication. Art and design can offer just that. The equation is simple:

When the ARCADE Editorial Committee began discussing potential themes for the magazine’s 30th anniversary volume, we settled on the concept of less. Today, at a time when the global economy and climate change have defined a new world, what are the impli cations for the manner in which architects, designers and artists communicate, practice, educate and live? In the last issue we addressed communication. In this issue we present a handful of ideas about how better to practice—now and always.

In this issue of ARCADE, we explore a range of patterns, models and methodologies that exist in design education. The field of design is changing rapidly in fascinating ways. While in the past, design may have focused most on issues of form or aesthetics, increasingly the profession has grown to encompass social, cultural, technological and economic contexts, as well as new tools and technologies.

Less is the future. Less water. Less food. Less resources. Less consumption. Less of everything. Less equals a mandate for massive change now-the shift in values, in use, in stewardship and in the way we inhabit the world.

If we are going to design a sustainable way of living, we need to take “the good life” more seriously. We don’t need raw hedonism – waiter, more champagne! – or monkish asceticism, but instead, something in between.

This issue of ARCADE was originally conceived as the last in a series that loosely explores seemingly disparate forces that come together to make something unexpected. Our approach was to set up an opposition with piety, order, rules and, by implication, timidity on one side and rebellion, ambiguity, tension, uncertainty and bravery onthe other.

In interactive ecosystems, the more communicators share with the communities they’ve convened the more trust is created, leading to more sustainable interactions and possibly more powerful actions. The change of the Tunisian and Egyptian political regimes in the so-called “Arab Spring” in early 2011 is testimony to what self-organized communities can do when their members realize that they’re not alone in their thoughts and aspirations.Suddenly, they recognize that they can come together as a makeshift community and effect tremendous upheaval.

The projects included here were presented in Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts from the Landscape of Glorious Excess, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver during the summer of 2010. They are judged by their usefulness but instead by aesthetic, political, cultural and historical potential. They are less involved in the ethics of how energy should be used than in imagining the many ways in which it could be used.

As a design-build firm in the Northwest, a typical day for us involves everything from conceptual design sketches to fabricating a connection between steel and wood. Because the path of design and construction covers such a wide spectrum of thinking and doing, there are many potential stopping points along the route to considering a designed object “finished.” When and how we choose to declare a design complete is often just as important as the designed object itself.

For this feature I approached 67 people from a variety of professions and walks of life with a call for submissions—I asked them for new and creative views on fire. I solicited artists, writers, culinary types, architects, industrial designers, graphic designers, pilates instructors, musicians, dancers, librarians, curators, academics and government officials.

It is the first and last of the elements we encounter. It is almost nothing, yet no living thing would be without it.

“Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing: it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.” - Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot, 1945

Grounded is the first of four issues comprising ARCADE volume 28, a series urging change in the way humans inhabit the planet. Building on the questions regarding waste raised in volume 27, these issues use the four elements of alchemy — earth, water, air and fire — as an investigatory lens.

Massive changes to the atmosphere are nothing new. The pace of this human-caused change is what makes it unique. To the best scientific knowledge, the changes to the atmosphere caused by human industrialization are occurring at the fastest pace ever.

Our country’s waste management system is flawed. the essence of these flaws lies in the fact that as a country we’ve been trained to buy stuff, use it and throw it away, only to buy new stuff again.

Jordan’s photo portraits of the Pacific Northwest’s industrial sites and waste management facilities treat accumulated waste as landscapes: towering mountains and crumbling cliffs, vast plains planted with discarded products and industrial debris. These dense, sensual images express a Romantic appreciation for the aesthetics of ruin and share scope, physical size and subject matter with Edward Burtynsky’s sweeping photographs of polluted mine sites and Andreas Gursky’s portraits of architectural spaces that are chockablock with people or products.

Excerpt: Instead, we (ARCADE’s Editor Kelly Walker and Pliny Fisk III) decided to bring together examples that directly and immediately affect planning and design. These projects describe a possible stitching together of life cycles for how resources could be “urban mined” and manufactured sensibly based on Design for Manufacturing (DfM) and Design for Disassembly (DfD) protocols.

A Conversation with Bill Fritts: Bill Fritts is the founder and director of intelligent design—creators of collaborative design solutions across the architecture, interiors, furniture and lighting industries—and founder of SOLIDCORE— providing sustainable solutions in furnishings and interiors.

Technology vowed to take the exacting labor out of such tasks as sewing a dress. It facilitated more efficient weaving, new fibers, increased volume and fast fashion, but also heralded the rise of sweatshops and landfills teeming with synthetic fabric.

Excerpt: and then I built a table. and kept manifesting them. I am little uncertain as to why. but it is now a nervous tick — and invades my dreams (and I pace, fidget, even squint “tables”).

The desired goal of the human endeavor is to optimize conditions for human development over time. This is largely what our founder, Ove Arup, meant when he said that we must pursue our work with a humanitarian attitude.

This issue of ARCADE brings together a collection of architectural illustrations as imagined by the gamers of the art world: comic book artists.

We want to think about architecture and its relationship with cinema in two distinct ways.

For the special anniversary edition, this feature celebrates the visual and offers a gift of contempIation: the possibilities of architecture as idea, geology and attitude that photography-itself a medium literally born in silver-capably describes.

Excerpt: So, why do the six firms gathered here deserve public work? They would all like to get it and some have even achieved small commissions. But their current attitudes toward public work vary greatly, from desire to frustration, ambivalence to disinter- est. They all have the skill, talent and seriousness to accomplish public work.

Excerpt: The voyeur in me is eager to see the shifts in design and urban content. That's why l fashion myself as flaneur: a person who wanders the city in search of something, anything, that could be interesting. I want to see the new buildings and the discarded ones, the tip of sidewalks and the orange cranes of the shipyards.

A catalog of interiors that are not for sale including: Stairwells, Elevators, Radiators, Lamps, Armchairs, Ceilings, a Basement, a Hardware Store, and Much More!

The Pacific Northwest Corridor has three main train stations - Pacific Central Station, King Street Station, Union Station - that were built during the peak of the Railway Age, fell into neglect after World War ll, and since the '90s have made a steady return to public life. Presently, the stations have the potential to transform the cities of the corridor into one urban realm. The following essays examine the fixed histories and open futures of the train stations.

Landscape is the place for the complex interplay between nature and culture, supporting all human activity. Landscapes are our story because they reveal who we are. They embody our values and history, and provide the framework for our future.

Somewhere around mile 17,574 of their national tour, Seattle's own action: better city drove through the looking glass and stumbled across the not-so-ordinary town of Gentryville, Missouri. Hear one man's cautionary tale of a small town that dared to dream big.

As an artist who makes 'public’ work, I am by desire and necessity out on the street pushing the exchange of ideas. Invited to be a guest editor of ARCADE, I thought it would be interesting to investigate ways that ideas surface in the city.

Photography's history is bound to architecture in myriad ways. Photography, like architecture, is based on perspective, rooted in planarities and volumes; it operates on their transformation. Each work of architecture, like that of photography, is an instance of order imposed.

The pieces in this section display a tension between the concepts we entertain as "dreamers" and the identities, sometimes far richer, surprising and constructive, that we enact as "doers," when engaged in collaborative, discipline and interest crossing practice.