Journal Volume:
Scroope - Volume 34

Thumbnail Image

Volume

1

Issue Date

2026-03-11

Journal

Thumbnail Image
Journal
Scroope
0966-1026

Journal Issues

Thumbnail Image
Journal Issue
Scroope - Issue 1
1 - 1

Articles

Thumbnail Image
PublicationOpen Access
Making Contact- Drawing Ground
(Scroope, 2026-03-11) Fyfe, Jessie
How might we read architectural drawings not as formal exercises or isolated visions, but as embedded practices of contact, entanglement, and care? The article will reflect on a selection of site-based sketches and drawings from the Drawing Matter Archive through the lens of “contact: grounding”—a proposed critical method that reframes drawing as an active engagement with the material, ecological, political, and mnemonic dimensions of land. To ground is not simply to locate, but to encounter the histories, violences, lifeforms, and processes that constitute a site. Focusing on architects and landscape theorists whose on-site sketching practices move beyond stylistic expression—such as Lawrence Halprin, Alberto Ponis, Peter Zumthor, Gilles Clément, and others—the study explores how site sketch drawings can reflect multispecies entanglements, climatic awareness, and territorial memory. These drawings are treated not as static representations, but as temporal, processual, and phenomenological acts—maps of encounter rather than maps of control. Engaging thinkers such as John Berger, Anna Tsing and Jeremy Till, and drawing upon eco-critical and decolonial frameworks, this inquiry positions these sketches as sites of epistemic transformation. It considers how drawing can become a medium for ethical response—visualizing not only what is, but what could be, in architecture’s relationship to land and world-making.
Thumbnail Image
PublicationOpen Access
Staying with Touch
(Scroope, 2026-03-11) Smiljković, Diana; Nielsen, Gustav Jaer Van; Rendell, Jane; Frichot, Hélène
We’ve lost touch; a few thousand miles between us with months turning into years, things get in the way as reality strikes and hands slip. “Let’s stay in touch” we’ve said over and over again. And somehow we do; through screens, cables, worldly horrors, walls; but not in the way we thought we would. Fingers scroll, tap, click, pinch. Voices travel, sink, drown, reappear. Things excite you, they frighten me—by staying in touch, we’ve lost staying with it. I sift through the thick goop that is the history of us only to find that there is not much of me in there—a once-was, morphing into will-be. And as days fill the space in between, as worlds move and hostility prevails, through absence you say “we‘re at a loss when we stay”. PS. Re-centering the notion of touch suggests embodied and material ways of being with and knowing the world differently from an out-of-touch late modernity. Feminist physicist philosopher Karen Barad suggests that space is not merely a container in which we must “realise our situatedness” and in which activity takes place, but rather that we are in fact always already a part of the becoming of space as an iterative space-time-mattering of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 91). The dynamic (re-)mattering of space-time as the enactment of in/justice(s) is powered by an ethics of touch with/by/ as more-than-human bodies — a “posthumanist ethics, an ethics of worlding” (Barad, 2007, pp. 391-392). PPS. Touching on touch is also an inquiry on different ways of designing. An embodied exploration of “life-centered” and “relational” designing beyond objects and representationalism, and a haptic encounter with a radical extension of design “as an open-ended capacity and a mode of acting in the world” (Escobar et al., 2024, p. 152) — an ontological designing. Touch at once de-centers professional design practice and the expert architect, while re-situating them in a praxis of worldmaking. What might touch prompt for theorizing-practicing architecture beyond the phenomenological and representational? And how do we collaborate with touch in the extended entanglement of more-than-human agencies? PPPS. With folds, scribbles, artefacts and annotations we will engage in a practice of re-connecting and staying with/in touch with long lost friends through a mixed- register long form letter (3,000-5,000 words). Between lines of correspondence related histories of mail art, and feminist and decolonial theories of embodiment and difference un/re/fold in the context of authoritarian censorship and surveillance, violent bordering and policing of bodies.
Thumbnail Image
PublicationOpen Access
Touching Buildings
(Scroope, 2026-03-11) Waterman, Tim
This essay explores the affectionate, erotic, and aesthetic relations between people and buildings of all sorts (edifices, landscapes, sculptures, forests, etc) as 'touching' posthuman assemblages. It also seeks to read beyond anthropomorphizing approaches to affections between humans and objects, or paraphilias, to question whether these forms of contact might be mutually felt and reciprocated through forms of object agency. Dwelling briefly upon Indigenous lifeworlds and more-than-human interactions, but also on performance art where it engages with buildings, and cinematic depictions of human-object interactions, it seeks to bridge a wide range of associations to find common ground even across vast cultural differences.
Thumbnail Image
PublicationOpen Access
Editors, Authors and Commentators
(Scroope, 2026-03-11)
Thumbnail Image
PublicationOpen Access
Contact as Intrusion
(Scroope, 2026-03-11)

Description

Where things meet, tensions surface, edges fray, and new forms of relation take hold. Contact is never neutral—it can be frictional, transformative, violent, fleeting, or refused. Rather than treating contact as mere proximity, this issue of Scroope examines how encounters unfold across spatial, material, temporal, and digital dimensions, shaping the built and lived environment in ways that exceed the immediate moment of meeting. Rather than enforcing a single definition of contact, we developed themes that emphasize how contact operates relationally—as a force that mediates power, materiality, history, and technology. By bringing together voices from different disciplines and perspectives, this issue seeks to expand how we think about contact as an ongoing negotiation of space, memory, materiality, and refusal.