volume 8/ FUTURES FOR SITES UNKNOWN.

The seventh volume of Lunch took a large step in engaging the design field outside the walls of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. It included a series of conversations with practitioners who visited the school, including Eduardo Arroyo, Levi Bryant, Teresa Gali, Rafael Moneo, and Camilo Restrepo. The effort to foster an evolving dialogue with the profession at large has been expanded in Lunch 8: Futures for Sites Unknown by breaking from tradition: no longer does Lunch only include articles submitted from the UVA community. A call for submissions was made, and the answer came from across the world.

Lunch 8: Futures for Sites Unknown tackles the uncharted waters and unsteady ground facing designers. Boundaries are being redrawn due to rising sea levels. The large modern infrastructural projects of the mid-twentieth century are now our antiquity and new technologies respond to craft, climate, and waste. Ever expanding and decentralizing patterns of urbanization are providing vacancies and urban wilds ripe for investment. Site is not only geographic, but a concatenation of the social, cultural, economic, ecological, and metaphysical. It is at once bounded and boundless. It is territory, which is implicitly contested — it is a claimed sphere of influence and therefore defines a sphere of action.

This is an incredibly exciting time to be a designer. In this moment of uncertainty, we must ask ourselves: How do we address the problems on the horizon when we are only starting to have a glimpse of what they will be? The projects within these pages explore the emerging conditions of our time and beyond, presenting Futures for Sites Unknown.

Editors
Danielle Alexander
Nicholas Knodt
Clayton Williams

Image by Ronan Bouroullec.