Camillo Boano’s work is an attempt to shorten the gap between architecture, radical philosophy, critical theory and urban design, understood as a space to find a potential emancipatory project for pedagogy and design practices. Boano’s active research in the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia promotes transformative thinking in the search for forms of just city and, with the creative use of theory, offers a look at urban and spatial practices as political acts and ethical. In this book, we publish two of his research projects. The first, Whatever Architecture, proposes an architecture whose value is not on the object or beauty but rather in how can we open possibilities for emancipation through design. The second, An Urbanism of Exception, helps us to read – through the case of Jerusalem – the way in which our cities are becoming more and more a constellation of enclaves where the exception is rather the rule.

Since her amazing project for Ordos 100 in 2008 – in which she proposed a reenactment of Adolf Loos's House for Josephine Baker, 75 years after the death of its author in 1933 – Ines Weizman has permanently challenged the hegemonic discourse and the cultural assumptions of architecture. In this book, she presents two essays. Documentary Architecture portrays her research on the reconstruction of architectural histories through documentary tools and new technologies to detect invisible material traces of history. Dissidence through architecture follows the paths of a series of dissident architects within the eastern bloc who, instead of becoming political activists, started to develop dissident designs, showing that architecture can also be a tool for dissidence.

This book, by the architect, urbanist and writer Keller Easterling, perfectly merges the various goals of the ARQDOCS series: heavy ideas that move architecture beyond what we know, backed by serious research and written in a prose attractive to read. This ARQDOCS has two texts. One is “World City Doubles”, an essay in which she invites us to analyze the famous case of Dubai but in terms of its double, Abu Dhabi, to show us the way both cities operate in tandem. The other text, “Histories of things that do not happen and that should not always work”, leads us to see these phenomena that slowly occur: they are not events and, therefore, they are not things that happen but that are constantly happening; that is why we do not realize of them and why they are often social defeats; that’s why Easterling tells us that they should not always work.