To divine is a vehicle whereby the field of architecture can manifest diverse places of difference and reconstruct narratives of the past, present, and future. From the most religious to the most secular, from the mystical to the ordinary, from the individual to the collective, the intertextual links in this volume orchestrate a journey that unfolds in three acts: divinings, divinations, and divinizations.

In the first act, the diviners dissect the meaning of the word “divine” itself. Their meditations on ethereal concepts reveal parallelisms with the practice of architecture. These ruminations eventually wrestle with the realization of ghastly profanities—even the divine cannot escape commodification. Against this disconcert arises a collective desire for the reclamation of meaning. The search for resolve in our material and tectonic cultures vis-à-vis this capitalistic milieu immerses us into a journey within.

In the second chapter, diviners excavate meanings and processes for architectural futures and worldbuilding from various sources: faith, pop culture, traditions, and shit. Building into this interface to divinize the profane and to profane the divine, they yield fertile ground for cultural critiques on the deceptive desires we have come to uphold as sacralities.

The third act explores the calcification of humanity’s derailed priorities into the absolutist religion of global capital, and the subversive determinations to recover virtues worth celebrating. They show that the delight of meaning may coexist in spite of, within, and around mounds of commodification. Throughout these acts, encounters with spaces, words, and bodies reveal new parts of an infinite waiting to be divined

Co-Editors: Maximilien Chong Lee Shin & Tasiana Paolisso

Team: Alice Bian, Luke Blair, Elina Chen, Andy Entis, Sarai Huamán, Andrew Jiao, Kexuan Shang, Elliot Yamamoto, Juchen “Ignis” Zhang

With contributions from:

Igor Marjanović—Timeless and Timely

Maximilien Chong Lee Shin & Tasiana Paolisso—diviners divining divine

Jake Deluca—Echoes of Divine Nemesis

Stephanie Choi—Worlds Within : A visit to the Menil’s Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision

Amir Halabi + Christopher Sanders—Which Afterlife? Transmigration and a Pause from Binaries

Evan Pavka—“The Girls” and Their “Church”

Vivien Sansour—Seed as Vessel

Civil Architecture—Sunpath, Rajab to Shawwal 1444

Brendon Carlin & Maria Paez Gonzalez—Architecture without Categories : On Divine Economy and Sympathetic Magic

Carlos Jiménez—In Search of the Divine

Besler & Sons—Screen Fatigue

Sabrina Chou—Divining the Sewer

Kordae Jatafa Henry—Monster

Lesley McIntyre—Artifacting Geomythology in Rútshellir

Léo Figuet & Telmo Escapil-Inchauspé—Katechon : A State (of Exception) of European Architecture

Tsuyoshi Tane—Old as New : Archaeology of the Future

Khoa Vu—Grayscale : Architecture of Fog

Sumayya Vally—Gathering Home

Ece Duran & Oğul Can Öztunç—Reimagining Everydays of Divine Space with Taksim Mosque

Kyle Dugdale—Divine Office

Alex Yueyan Li & Will Fu—Outlet Fervor

Timothy Wong—Making Sacred : Underground Suburban Homes in Postwar America

WAI Architecture—Think Tank Monument to the Victims of Capitalism

Jeffrey Zhenhua Liu & Haylie Chan—Woven Veil 團結

Rachel Chapman—Sk8 Liborius

Anoushka Mariwala—Larger than Life : Ritual Performance in Mumbai’s Ganesh Chaturthi

242 pages, published Spring 2024.

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