Architecture and Conflict

Editorial

With more than fifty active armed conflicts worldwide and an increasingly widespread presence of social, environmental, and geopolitical tensions, the relationship between architecture and conflict now emerges as a field of inquiry that is both urgent and complex. Conflict can no longer be understood solely as an exceptional event or as a destructive interruption of history, but rather as a structural condition that cuts across territories, cities, and their heritage, leaving traces that settle over time, both materially and symbolically.

As recalled in the Call for Papers for this issue of ADH Journal, architecture is called not only to confront the most visible outcomes of violence, destruction, loss, and trauma, but also to engage with less evident and more everyday forms of conflict, including inequalities, exclusions, and cultural and environmental fractures. The Call itself was informed by the themes explored during the twelfth edition of the Mantovarchitettura festival, which provided an initial framework for reflection and discussion. Within this context, architecture and architectural research take on the role of critical practices, capable of reading the present, conveying its complexity, and, in some cases, opening up new possibilities for coexistence and memory. Several of the editorial contributions and invited essays included in this issue are directly connected to the festival, extending its debates into the pages of the journal.

The Essay by Images opens the issue by entrusting the visual dimension with the task of conveying the density of conflict as a historical and collective experience. The contribution devoted to Chilean architecture and the work of Cristian Undurraga creates a layered narrative in which identity, landscape, and political memory are inextricably intertwined. The images do not simply illustrate conflict; rather, they place it in tension with the very idea of design, showing how architecture can become a space of confrontation and, at times, of reconciliation, without ever neutralising the trauma from which it originates. Conflict thus emerges as the matrix of a design practice that is conscious of its ethical and civic role.

This perspective is complemented by the Essay from the Archive, dedicated to Andrea Bruno’s work in Afghanistan and conceived as a moment of tribute and reflection following the architect’s recent passing. Drawings and photographs function not only as tools of knowledge but also as testimonies to a long-term commitment in contexts marked by war, political instability, and the destruction of heritage. The archive is not presented as a neutral repository, but as a space traversed by tensions, where cultural responsibilities, collective rights, and the very possibility of the survival of monuments are at stake. In this sense, the essay frames conflict as an intrinsic dimension of conservation practice, transforming it into an ethical and political act capable of holding together loss, design, and future, while reaffirming Bruno’s intellectual legacy within the contemporary debate.

The Lecture introduces a further level of reflection, offering an explicitly theoretical reading of the relationship between architecture, memory, and conflict. The idea that architecture is grounded not in soil but in memory opens up a perspective in which design becomes a critical tool, capable of making fractures and absences visible without claiming to resolve them. In this view, conflict is not something to be pacified, but a condition to be consciously traversed, so that the built environment may continue to question the present and engage with the fragility of democratic systems.

It is within this theoretical and critical framework that the papers selected through the call for papers are situated. Together, they articulate the theme Architecture and Conflict across different geographical contexts, scales, and disciplinary approaches, showing how conflict can take heterogeneous forms that are often not immediately recognisable. Heather Clydesdale’s contribution reflects on the role of public libraries in Taiwan as civic infrastructures capable of strengthening democratic resilience in a context shaped by geopolitical pressures and forms of non-conventional conflict. Through the case of the Beitou Library and its subsequent developments, architecture is read as a space of social and cognitive mediation, able to foster practices of knowledge sharing and to build trust, thereby redefining the very meaning of the public building.

A different perspective is offered by Mirna Mikhail, who shifts attention from the material construction of space to its representations. By analysing cinema as a form of counter-archive in the Palestinian territories, the author shows how absence, ruin, and fragmentation become operative conditions for a critical reading of space. In these contexts, architecture continues to exist even when it is materially denied, as image, trace, and symbolic construction, capable of keeping open the relationship between memory, identity, and the possibility of imagining a future.

Santiago Araque Collazos approaches conflict as a long-term urban process, reading the transformations of the city of Cali through the relationship between material and immaterial dimensions. The essay highlights how violence, inequalities, and social tensions have shaped urban form and everyday practices of inhabitation over time, leaving persistent marks. Within this framework, architecture and heritage appear as living archives of conflict, but also as potential resources for activating processes of regeneration and social recomposition.

Closing the section of selected contributions, Qendresa Ajeti’s work reflects on the role of architectural heritage in post-conflict contexts, focusing on conservation devices as tools of mediation between memory, territory, and reconstruction practices. Through the case of historic monasteries in Kosovo, the essay invites readers to consider heritage as a dynamic space, crossed by layers of meaning, in which architecture participates in the redefinition of the cultural landscape after conflict.

Alongside the papers selected through the call for papers, the invited contributions further expand the field of observation, introducing theoretical and operative perspectives on other critical contexts. In his essay, Alessio Battistella addresses post-war reconstruction in Mosul, interpreting architectural design as a practice capable of restoring continuity, identity, and room for action to local communities. Through the case of the Ekhlas School, reconstruction emerges as a cultural process as much as a technical one, grounded in constant dialogue with the context and with the people who inhabit it.

Luka Skansi’s contribution shifts the focus to the issue of conservation in the Balkans, highlighting the uncertainty of the past as a structural condition of preservation practice. Through examples of destruction, rewriting, and manipulation of twentieth-century architecture, the essay shows how conservation often stands at the centre of political and cultural tensions, compelled to confront conflicting memories and the traumatic legacies of recent conflicts.

The section concludes with Ekaterina Golovatyuk’s essay, which addresses conflict on the level of contemporary representation. By interrogating the museum and the display as unstable spaces in which the present is staged and continuously renegotiated, the text offers a critical reading of exhibition practices, restoring to architecture the role of a tool capable of making visible the tensions between memory and design.

Taken together, the contributions gathered in this issue show that conflict is not external to architecture, but a condition that deeply permeates its practices, theories, and responsibilities. Without claiming to offer definitive answers, the issue instead seeks to open a space for critical reflection, reaffirming the role of architecture as a tool for questioning the present and for giving form, memory, and meaning to the fractures of our time.