Journal
The studio's written record of Quiet Metabolism fieldwork, award-cycle reflection, and the slow questions a hundred winters of scrutiny tend to ask of a building. Published quarterly since 2009. Edited in Tokyo, set in Montréal.
Current Issue — Issue 14, Autumn 2024
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01
14 October 2024 · Field Note
On the Threshold of a Hundred Winters
A reading of the Kitakanto Civic Library five years after occupation — what the building has learned from the citizens who use it, and what it has refused to learn from us.
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02
02 October 2024 · Essay
Quiet Metabolism, Ten Years On
Tracing the methodology from a single adaptive-reuse brief in 2014 to its quiet adoption across forty municipalities — and the three principles we would rewrite if we were starting again.
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03
19 September 2024 · Award Cycle
Notes from the UIA Shortlist Room
A studio log of the 2024 UIA Gold Medal deliberations, written not to flatter the jury but to record what our work sounds like when it is described by people who did not commission it.
From the Archive — Selected Past Issues
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04
12 July 2024 · Long Essay
Against the Render: Why We Publish Photographs, Not Visions
A studio position on the difference between architectural marketing and architectural evidence — and why every project on this site is shown only as it exists on the day of the photograph.
A note on what belongs in this Journal, and what does not.
The Journal is not the studio's press office. It does not carry project announcements, market intelligence, or the kind of architectural small talk that ages badly within a season. It is set in the cadence of a quarterly monograph insert because the writing earns its place slowly — by being revised three times, by surviving the editors' table, and by holding still on the page long after the news cycle has moved on.
What appears here is fieldwork. The studio's long-form observations from project sites and award cycles, the questions raised in the materials atelier at 312 fabricators, the methodological refinements that only become visible when a building has been lived in for a decade. We commission essays from collaborators we have worked with for years, and from members of the studio whose tenure exceeds seven. We do not publish sponsored content. We do not publish work that depends on a single photograph for its argument.
The Journal is read by the architectural press, by award juries, and — increasingly — by the commissioners we have not yet met. We write to them in that order. If an essay holds for the third reader, it holds for the first.
If the writing has held for you,
consider what the building will hold.
We accept 3.7% of submitted commissions. Conversations begin in confidence, last about seventy minutes, and are conducted in person in Tokyo or Montréal, or by encrypted video elsewhere.