Toolkit for Today proposes a week of seminars, workshops, and public events that invites scholars to open their toolboxes and share their methods with the participants of our Doctoral Students Program.

This fall, the group will engage with the complex, relational constitution of environments that contemporary architecture makes and inhabits and that are often overlooked and taken for granted.

While anthropologists have maintained and questioned their relationships with situated sites of investigation, scholars of the built environment are increasingly turning to the material politics of contemporary cities, remote geographies, and the wide spectrum of lived spaces in between to consider our present planetary conjuncture as a mobile reality that demands certain practices of documentation and analysis. The concept of the field maintains a contentious status across a number of disciplines, particularly given its levelling and abstracting of local knowledge and those who possess it as projected objects of study. Architecture’s three dimensionality has often privileged and confined the field to the scales of the building, neighbourhood, or city. These sites exceed easy categorization, particularly when they are situated either in distant geographies, often in the Global South, or, even, under the conditions generated by the global pandemic, when they are defined by proximity and stasis.

From 2 to 6 November, we invite the public to join us for conversations with researchers that address where the field is, what work can be done within and across it, and that generate reflections on how it is constituted as a means of addressing the important sites within it as part of a planetary architectural culture defined by environmental and social urgency.