Featured on the cover of the April issue, Mimei Thompson’s fantastical cave painting reveals the strata sedimented into our planet’s rocky crust, striped through with minerals and other richnesses and beckoning us further inside. Far from being a blank or inconsequential space, the underground is a critical and contested site, full of foundations, infrastructures, and junk; hidden architectures tucked neatly underneath the surface. Excavated, extracted from, dug up and bored through, the underground is made messy so that things on the surface can be kept clean. This issue, we peel back the skin of the earth to look at what goes on under.
Keynote: core beliefs, Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita
Building: Metro station in Santiago, Chile by Beals Lyon Arquitectos, Pedro Ignacio Alonso
Future archaeology, Manon Mollard
Case study: Deltawerk 1:1 in Waterloopbos, the Netherlands by RAAAF
Case study: Subterranean public space in Groningen, the Netherlands by RAAAF
Case study: Ca’n Terra in Menorca, Spain by Ensamble Studio
Undermined planet, Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of Design Earth
Building: Arzo quarry park in Mendrisio, Switzerland by Enrico Sassi Architetto, Davide Tommaso Ferrando
Stepwells of Ahmedabad, Tanvi Jain
Revisit: Talponia housing in Ivrea, Italy by Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola, Nina Bassoli
Outrage: the flawed premise of the luxury bunker, Kate Wagner
Tunnel vision, Lili Zarzycki
Under Jerusalem, Nadi Abusaada
In practice: Cave Bureau, Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi
Shaking the foundations, Eleanor Beaumont
Reputations: César Manrique, Alejandro Scarpa
Building: Soulton Long Barrow in Shropshire, United Kingdom by Sacred Stones and Greenstone Design, Phineas Harper
Soulton poems with an extract from Modern Air, Merlin Fulcher
Editorial contributors
Nadi Abusaada
Tomà Berlanda
Khensani de Klerk
Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita