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issue 1: place and placelessness

What compels us to imbue a place with meaning and power? While the notion of place is crucial to our existence and evolution, it remains a subject to its complex, ever-changing context and inhabitants. We can understand places through multiple, intersecting forces — such as physical form, geographical location, human experience, personal and collective memory, evolution over time, functionality, accessibility, uniqueness, cultural and political contexts, and environmental impact. Yet, the effects of globalization, climate change, and shifting socio-technological paradigms alter and possibly threaten these complex but critical facets of place. To understand place — and placelessness — we are obligated to consider its evolving plurality, recognizing that no single lens can fully capture the layered realities that constitute them.

Since its emergence in the mid-20th century, prominent discourse has emphasized that the richness of place as a concept lies, in part, in its ambiguity, multiplicity, and deeply personal nature. If these contingencies remain true at present, then what are the current formative criteria of place and placelessness, and the significance between new landscapes, memory, and their culmination at individual and collective scales? Does physical space remain the context for all action, and regardless, what type of space is receptive to the depth of place?

Contemporary infrastructure and the Technosphere collapse Cartesian distance, making unlikely connections between disparate spaces, cultures, and environments. Is this merely an evolution of place into that which is fluid, transient, virtual, and cooperative, or does it suggest its thinning-out and eventual cessation? How do historical conceptions of place withstand in a world increasingly mediated by devices and artificial intelligence, blurring the boundaries between physical and virtual, as well as body and location?

In Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph states that the “essence of place lies in the unselfconscious intentionality that defines them as centers of human existence,” (43). Can place be conceived with intention if its processes of formation are largely understood as organic, ever-changing, and contingent on personal interaction and memory? Is this formation, and its continuity, the responsibility of the designer or inhabitant? If aspiration and possibility of meaningful, significant places do exist, how then do we balance forces of the contemporary market economy and pressures of commerce which prioritize efficiency, profit, and insensitive development?

For Issue 01, Sandbox aims to compile a diverse set of explorations on the historical and contemporary state of place, placelessness, and the architect’s role in and in-between. We ask all who are interested to view our submission guidelines and contact us at sandboxatgt@gmail.com.