Telesis

The Essence calls for a return to fundamentals in a moment shaped by rapid tech shifts and the pull of the virtual. The volume asks contributors to rediscover the core values, forms, and nuances that give architecture meaning, treating environments as living, vital entities rather than inert objects. It explores identity, presence, and materiality, questioning how design can remain grounded when attention is fragmented and experience is increasingly mediated. The issue also probes emerging “hybrid” essences that bridge physical and digital boundaries, ultimately inviting readers to pause, look away from screens, and reconnect with the spaces that shape daily life. 

Adaptive Practice focuses on rejecting “business as usual” by examining fluidity, change, and evolving methods in and beyond the built environment. It argues that contemporary design must respond to shifting socioeconomic and political conditions, as well as urbanization, climate change, and technological transformation. The volume frames “adaptive” as an ongoing recalibration of values and tools, an approach to practice that stays responsive to new realities while remaining accountable to communities and consequences. Through interdisciplinary work, the issue positions adaptation not as passive flexibility, but as active restructuring of how and why design operates.

Habitation expands the belonging question outward: how do we ensure that all things, living and non-living, may continue to inhabit our planet? The volume gathers proposals and reflections that rethink the everyday systems that sustain life, from housing and food to education and consumption. Urbanism, migration, and border spaces appear as key sites where habitation becomes unevenly distributed and politically charged. The issue emphasizes strategies for living within environmental uncertainty and designing with interdependence in mind, treating habitation as an ethical and ecological project, not only a technical one.

Isolation centers a guiding question: how can design influence one’s sense of belonging? The issue frames isolation as systemic, produced through infrastructures, institutions, and social inequities, and invites design responses that confront those conditions rather than aestheticizing them. Topics include incarceration, discrimination, and displacement after disaster, showing how spatial decisions can intensify harm or open pathways toward dignity and connection. Across essays, artworks, and investigations, the volume argues that belonging is not sentimental. it is designed, contested, and political.

Metamedia asks what happens when architecture is understood not only as buildings, but as a medium that intersects with other media, including image, text, networks, performance, and digital culture. The volume highlights hybrid practices that use cross-media strategies to produce meaning, shape publics, and drive cultural conversations. Rather than treating “media” as secondary representation, this issue explores how media environments condition design itself: how architects communicate, organize, collaborate, and construct narratives. The contributions collectively test architecture’s capacity to operate across formats and platforms, proposing that design today is inseparable from the media ecologies that circulate it.

Design Against marks the revival of Telesis as a forum for pushing, pulling, and redefining boundaries in architectural thinking. The volume frames “against” not as refusal for its own sake, but as a method: questioning what we inherit, resisting easy answers, and re-seeing the assumptions embedded in design culture. It encourages contributors to treat constraints, such as time, conventions, professional norms, and received narratives, as opportunities to generate alternative positions and new forms of agency. In doing so, the issue positions architecture as critical practice: a way to interrogate systems and imagine different futures through drawings, writing, and experimentation.