Between the first sketch and the finished building, or between the first draft and the final text, architecture rests on a dense meshwork of complicities, an intimate scaffolding that histories have often disregarded.
While recent criticism has widely read complicity as architecture's service to power and markets, and as its share in systemic crises, less attention has been paid to the word's original meanings, before negative, legal, and moral connotations obscured them. The Latin root complicare (to fold together) carried its original productive, positive, even friendly meaning, pointing to what may persist as shared understanding, fertile entanglements or tacit agreements. Both meanings of complicity are interlaced in the subtexts of built or written achievements.
Historians encounter these relations through their traces. Reconstructing them means reading what was agreed and what was assumed, what was refused and what was never asked. Historians and critics are not immune to this fabric of complicities: monographs are often written with the cooperation of their subjects, archives open through the goodwill of heirs, and histories are rewritten after each change of regime.
The current issue of studies in History and Theory of Architecture (sITA) invites critical contributions on the subtexts of architecture, in buildings and projects as much as in the production of architectural discourse. We are interested in the working relations through which these subtexts come into being; how these relations have been recorded, concealed, or judged; and what the notion of complicity reveals or obscures about them. We welcome papers that deal with:
Paratexts of architecture in print, in drawings, and in building: prefaces, footnotes, colophons, title blocks, acknowledgments, inscriptions, and lists of collaborators; what they reveal and what they omit about how the work was done;
Historiography and criticism: the complicity of historians and critics with their subjects, archives, and institutions; the writing of professional histories after a political change; the retrospective attribution of responsibility;
Archives and traces: correspondence, minutes, rejected variants, drafts, and proofs; reconstructing relations from the archives;
Working complicities: architect and client, architect and builder, craftsperson, engineer, artist, or user; author and editor, author and critic; co-authorship, attribution, and claims of authorship; trust and tacit knowledge;
Architects and political regimes: practice under authoritarian rule; design institutes, commissions, professional organizations, and publishing houses as sites of negotiated consent, dissent, and accommodation;
Unconscious biases: mechanisms of reassurance in the way the discipline operates; preexisting assumptions and preestablished positions, taken for granted and no longer questioned; complacency; hidden prejudices in the positions upon which architects, theorists, historians and critics stand, without even knowing that they are already conditioned, already complicit.
