Despite our obsession with objects, dynamic and boundless non-things (pollution, climate change, radiation, data, algorithms) increasingly drive our worlds and shape our places within it. Timothy Morton, in The Ecological Thought, called these phenomena “the ultimate spiritual substances.” Even in things as nameable as the city and as architecture, the spiritual and physical coalesce. Colin Rowe understood architectural form as spiritual when he wrote of “a continuous dialectic between fact and implication.”
This issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture examines a range of spirits haunting architecture today, following a trajectory from augmented reality and data to memory and mood, from watermarks and ghost towns to inanimate objects and the uncanny, and from the dashed line and the X-ray to the appearance and disappearance of the e in whiskey. The common dimension of all these seemingly disparate realms, is the presence of the invisible, the missing, the unnameable, and the difficult to represent: a feeling, perhaps, that, like the curved line of a door swing in a plan, no matter how we try to deny it, is always present (yet absent). How, given the world’s contemporary spirits—environmental uncertainties, augmented reality experienced through the device, half-empty and migrating cities—must architecture acknowledge its own zeitgeist and genius loci today? How can we learn to talk differently about spirits as architecture vectorizes into the digital age? By acknowledging the worlds beyond the physical, this issue explores the countless angels, animations, atmospheres, data clouds, ghosts, indices, memories, moods, specters, and virtual realities that invisibly consume and produce our existence and our practice within it.
