TOUCHING (ARCHITECTURAL) CORRESPONDENCES // LETTER TO A BUILDING

Dear R.H.,

We’ve lost touch. A few thousand miles between us, with months turning into years, things get in the way. “Let’s stay in touch,” we’ve said over and over again. And somehow we do, through screens, cables, hauntings, bush-hammered concrete walls, but not in the way we thought we would. Fingers reach, voices sink. Things excite you, they frighten me. By staying in touch, we’ve lost staying with it. 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.”

Yours,
Diana and Gustav

P.S. In the 1950s and 1960s Ray Johnson started exchanging small art pieces by mail with a group of colleagues, in rejection of the elite art scene and its venues—they called it the New York Correspondance [sic] School. In 2020 and 2021, the Queer Correspondence project sought to connect and nurture indeterminate spaces of possibility created by subcultural lives in East London and beyond. During the summer of 2025, we mailed former classmates and colleagues with whom we had been out of touch. ¹ Together, we’re exploring what the creative correspondence might bring to our lives, including the way we think of, practice and talk about architecture. By corresponding creatively, with the smudging of ink, to mail never being received, we practice staying with the touching, the fumbling, the nonsensical, and the getting lost together.

P.P.S. We’re attending to touch. Rehearsing touching (the) practicing (of) theorizing with touching-practicing-theorizing. Feminist physicist philosopher Karen Barad suggests that reality is towards phenomena rather than things—and proposes a boundary-making cutting-together-apart instead of binary-making Cartesian cuts. ² In their agential realist ontology, ³ space is not a container and time is not a backdrop, rather space and time is iteratively reconfigured with matter as space-time-mattering. ⁴ Touch is no longer an inter-action between distinct entities (Self and Other), but a radically intimate intra-active “self-touching”. ⁵ Staying with the reaching and longing of touch/ing is staying with alterities and aporia. ⁶ By attending to touch/ing with Barad, how might we explore ways of being with and knowing the world differently from an out-of-touch late modernity?

P.P.P.S. Touching with/as correspondence is also a doing-thinking of architecture differently. An embodied exploration of relationality beyond objects and representationalism, and a haptic encounter with plural worlds and ontological designing. ⁷ Søren speculates that Thoravej 29 in Copenhagen operationalizes an agential realist ontology. A careful curation of found materials with a brutalist finish is no doubt a cut that creates a specific phenomenon of adaptive building reuse. Bringing up Halberstam’s writings on Anarchitecture ⁸ feels pertinent, but is this it? In the architectural knolling of discrete elements, through “surgical” ⁹ discovery and repair, Thoravej 29 seems, epistemically, to disentangle the world in a Cartesian cutting that follows modernity’s Western logics. That is, we can read it as an agential cut, but one that makes matter ontologies of separation, fixity and control. Sitting there/here, between those concrete walls, who are enacting agencies and made to matter? What difference does it make if you were draw(in)n(g) by pencil on paper or nurbs in pixels? How can we take seriously and contribute to architectures of moving matter?