We are excited to invite you to contribute to our next issue: trans 48 Pseudo.
The prefix pseudo shifts words from their commonly accepted meaning towards the false, advancing claims or postures that mimic the genuine. Yet, pseudo is more than a façade or a pretence; it is both an illusion and a promise. Pseudonyms are a sheltering protective mask – one that can provoke and open up space to experiment, enabling dissent, and allowing one to choose their identity.
Architecture has long been familiar with the pseudo: from honesty of structure and hidden joints, to picturesque ruins, Disneyland’s simulated streets, and the Venetian’s canals – an immense accumulation of spectacles. What counts as authentic? Fake materials and fake spaces can’t be seen as exceptions but rather as instrumental. Privately Owned Public Spaces perform openness while choreographing division. Participation becomes a protocol for consent. Glass ceilings deny passage despite promises of visibility, a transparent architecture of exclusion. Greenwashing, at the scale of a building and a country, polishes statistics to launder continuities of extraction.
In an era of deepfakes, synthetic data and identity thefts, reality itself seems caught in a pseudo-state: neither fully present nor entirely absent. Scam villages along the border of Myanmar – built to script trust and extract value – formalize this theatre. Throughout issue 48 we aim to explore what constitutes reality, what earns belief, and where the pseudo begins to blur into the real.
Bring us scams that educate and illusions that confess; Manuals for structural honesty; taxonomies of architectural imposture; field notes on pseudo-archeology; histories of alias as a tactic; accounts where safety is staged rather than achieved; records of pseudo-publics and pseudo-participation; spaces of promise defined by those whose names can’t be shared.
If you were to write, what would your pseudonym be?
Send us up to 400 words, between truths and fictions, in German or English to trans@arch.ethz.ch by November 2!
We are looking forward to hearing from you,
Burak, Charlotte, Chéryne, Giacomo
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