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This issue of Perspecta discusses whether fame empowers architecture by giving architects leverage to produce ambitious projects or undermines architecture by diluting the quality and neglecting the values it must serve.

The practice of architecture after the breakdown of consensus: designers, theoreticians, and scholars consider architecture's divergent ideological landscape in this issue of America's oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal.

A monster is in our midst, and its name is Architecture.

Architectural travel, from the Eternal City to the generic city.

Essays, interviews, and projects explore an expanded vocabulary of spatial practice.

A handbook of best practices, strategies, and speculation for architecture's future.

Essays and projects illuminate the nature of error and its creative possibilities for architecture.

An exploration of quotation, appropriation, and plagiarism, arguing that quotation and associated operations are ubiquitous, intentional, and vital in architecture.

Explorations of spatial, cultural, and social divides in the city.

Essays, interviews, and projects that consider the notion of medium and the possibilities for its productive use (and misuse) by architects.Since the arrival of radio and television in the twentieth century, understandings of space have become visibly intertwined with what is commonly referred to as the media. But what is a medium? Dictionaries define "medium” as something in the middle, or, a means of conveyance, and this elemental understanding of medium has nourished early conversations of networks and cybernetics, as well as recent media theory. Yet today, midcentury architectural fictions and fantasies are reality—nomadic devices connect people, rooms, buildings, and cities to vast networks of data, capital, and energy; media are palpably enmeshed in the concrete built environment surrounding us. This volume of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—takes a broad view of medium to take stock of and unpack unexpected relationships.The study of medium is transscalar and transhistorical. Therefore, media are part of a continuum, and architecture is inseparable from medium. For this reason, Perspecta 51 does not focus exclusively on the "new media” of today or predictions about the future; instead, it presents a conversation among varied theories on medium set against a series of architectural case studies. These include articles about about images and digital commons, heating systems and thermostats, sea level rise and flood-monitoring apps, search lights and public space, media walls and megastructures, social media capitals and suburban sprawl, surveillance and library architecture. A chapter on flexibility demonstrates its thesis by being printed (intentionally) upside down. These stories are grounded in the theories of medium design, mediascapes, and media politics. Perspecta 51 provides new histories and fresh responses to the notion of medium that might illuminate possibilities for its productive use (and misuse) by architects.ContributorsShamsher Ali, Nick Axel, åyr, Aleksandr Bierig, Francesco Casetti, Beatriz Colomina, DIS, Keller Easterling, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Moritz Gleich, Evangelos Kotsioris, Nashin Mahtani, Reinhold Martin, Shawn Maximo, Christine Shannon Mattern, Marshall McLuhan, Scott McQuire, Ginger Nolan, Shveta Sarda, Jeffrey Schnapp, Dubravka Sekulic, Prasad Shetty, Molly Steenson, Neyran Turan, Etienne Turpin, Christina Varvia, Richard Vijgen

Considering a redefinition of global space.As much as it is a neoclassical compositional principle, the ensemble today is shifting into a new critical focus: it is a central figure in nascent developments in probabilistic mathematics and a critical logic in the development of artificial intelligence algorithms. Statistical ensembles are a specific adaptation of Markov processes. They produce and are produced by a highly circumscribed definition of creativity—that of a predictive state inherently based on a chain of linked, given events, thus a computational intelligence predicated on the established patterns of the database. Are these mathematical ensembles different from those of neoclassical composition? How are the new ensembles characterized and materialized relative to their conceptual tradition?This fifty-second issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—is a projective art history of ensemble as form and politics. It uses theories of ensemble to propose both alternative extensive stagings of design objects, as well as other resistant assemblies of the corps of architects. Ensemble is posed a lens to theorize object-parts and states of motion at once, together: an architecture of the city.The volume includes a new photographic essay on the contemporary city of Bengali by American and Indian artists. A collection of essays by interdisciplinary contributors interweave this new creative work, pointing toward a compositional project for an architecture that is multiple, extensive, spontaneous, collective, durational, temporary.ContributorsCharlotte Algie, Hayden Bassett, Anya Bokov, Kim Bowes, Alex Bremner, Matteo Burioni, Swati Chattopadhyay, Jean-Louis Cohen, Mark Crinson, Arko Datto, Samia Henni, Heyward Hart, Mark Jarzombek, Vladimir Kulic, Jimenez Lai, Hannah Le Roux, John Loring, Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani, Emily Mann, Christina Maranci, Edward Mitchell, Brian Norwood, Itohan Oyasimwese, Cristina Osswald, Curtis Roth, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Hans Tursack, Yasmin Vobis, Aaron Forrest