Vol. 10, Issue 2: Soil
Deadline: January 15, 2026
Submissions: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tadjournal
The upcoming TECHNOLOGY | ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN (TAD) issue invites original submissions that interrogate the roles of soil—earth, mud, dirt, clay, loam, sediment, strata—as both material and ecosystem within the architectural sciences and design technology practices. This issue invites inquiry into soil not as backdrop but as an active thread in shaping form, structure, living habitat, and community. Soil is neither inert nor empty. It is a charged and living substrate that, materially and figuratively, underpins architecture. It is where gravitation meets structure, extraction meets economy, and permanence meets decay. Soil is a medium of transformation: chemical, cultural, and political. Soil supports and resists–shaped by forces of compaction and combustion, microbial life, and industrial processes. Elizabeth Povinelli writes, “Industrial toxicity makes it more difficult for rivers, winds, soil, mineral, and rock formations to maintain their shape and substance.” How can architecture help understand and act upon these shape-shifting substrates in critical, ethical, and innovative ways?
We invite work that frames technology as a bridge across cognate disciplines: from material science and structural design to environmental performance, ethical positioning in technology, and other related areas in design and technology within building, landscape, and urban domains. We highlight architecture’s role in engaging soil as a geotechnical concern and a living ecology with socio-political resonance. In this, we ask to metaphorically follow Astrida Neimanis’ proposition of a “moist soil that holds and grows the seed,” recognizing soil’s generative and gestational capacities across species and systems. We invite contributors to reflect on disciplinary boundaries, methods, and material imaginaries. Contributors are encouraged to expand architectural design and technology by critically examining soil’s agency, temporality, and potential—installation, algorithm, fabrication methodology, policy, or prototype.
Topics may include, but are not limited to: architectural technology and its large-scale impact on soil ecologies; geotechnical, biological, and political entanglements of soil within architectural design; soil as a material of architecture: compressed, cast, cut, or printed; earth-fiber assemblies, carbon-storing, nontoxic, and minimally-processed material techniques; structural design of soil assemblies and their variance; climate resiliency, erosion, and the politics of land use; the role of soil in environmental design education and pedagogy; Intersections of architectural technology with geoscience, chemistry, or agronomy; demilitarizing soils and architectures of displacement and remediation; landscape, terrain, territory, and urban/rural/natural land use; standards, codes, and regulation for soil-based construction; philosophical and scientific frames for understanding soil in built environments. We welcome contributions that challenge paradigms of stewardship by proposing more entangled, situated, or collective approaches. The editors seek submissions representing diverse voices, practices, geographies, and perspectives. As such, we affirm the value of architecture’s capacity to act as both a site and method for dialogue across knowledge systems.
TAD invites original and innovative research from scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students. Contributions to the issue focus area are encouraged, but TAD will consider all papers that meet the TAD mission statement. The journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis, but for consideration in this issue, manuscripts are due before 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on January 15, 2026. All manuscripts are double-blind peer reviewed. Manuscripts must follow the standards detailed in the TAD Author Guide, available at TADjournal.org.
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(1) E.A. Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 52.
(2) A. Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 3.