Call for papers: Future Anterior Journal

“Recovery” is a special issue of Future Anterior that seeks to explore how the concept of recovery can reshape our understanding of preservation practices and the built environment. Submissions for contributions are now being accepted through April 20, 2025, for publication in 2026. Future Anterior approaches historic preservation from a position of critical inquiry, rigorous scholarship, and theoretical analysis. It is an important international forum for the critical examination of historic preservation, spurring challenges of its assumptions, goals, methods, and results. Future Anterior is a journal of Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Preservation that is published twice a year by the University of Minnesota Press. 

The pathbreaking architectural salvager and preservationist Larry Giles (1947–2021) amassed the largest collection of built environment artifacts in the US, around which he built a new institution. Instead of considering his endeavors “salvage” or “preservation,” Giles preferred to call his removal of everything from single parts to the entire facades of buildings a process of “recovery.” While Giles’ use of this term alone could support a call for sorting out the implications, there is a need for a wider consideration. “Recovery” opens itself to multiple denotations and connotations, implicating both practices around the built environment already undertaken and those yet to emerge. Fundamentally, it opens a space for practices neither condoned nor legible to authorized powers—portals into a prefigurative world in which at least people can be made whole and sane by contesting authoritarian disruption of the built environment.

“Recovery” is a fantastically metaphoric description of a historic preservation practice, because it immediately invites a search for a social subject. Whose recovery, and is it achieved by the simple safeguarding of physical artifacts or by intangible processes around them? The parallel usage of the term also expands Giles’ term beyond a literal description of manual labor to encompass a breadth of potential expert and non-expert relationships to the built environment. Recovery can be medical (the healing of the body from trauma or injury), mental (regulation or suspension of illness, abandonment of addiction), political (reclamation of colonized lands or stolen places and artifacts), economic (the return of lost value) and architectural (the restoration of erased, damaged or lost materials). The properties of the term “recovery” invite an inquiry that explores a set of human relationships to the built environment that may exist more evidently in affect than in the solid forms of artifacts.

This journal issue aims to explore potential theorizations of “recovery” as a method of making meaning with the built environment. The historic use of the term by Giles and others in architectural salvage, itself a contested and sometimes-orphaned historic preservation practice, deserves more full articulation in an age in which, per Keller Easterling, demolition is more often the product of the architect than design of new forms. Yet the other possible associations of “recovery” in the current age also could create a wider sense of the power of the term to define relationships of producing new versions of the built environment against the destructive forces of warfare, climate change, colonization, dispossession, genocide, economic deprivation, population decline and financialized capital. Some of the acts that contributors could consider are official, while others may be scholarly. Some are desperate acts under pressure, and others are deeply intentional projects with deep support. The volume aims especially to capture a sense of unauthorized processes, discourses and acts around the built environment, in the spirit of the outsider stance of Larry Giles. Theoretical essays, case studies and critical biographies of key figures are all welcome.

Future Anterior is a peer-reviewed journal that approaches the field of historic preservation from a position of critical inquiry. Situated in the distinctly multidisciplinary field of architecture (architectural history and theory, preservation, landscape architecture, urbanism, technology, and artistic practices), we look forward to contributors with experience in these fields as well as anthropology, art history, literature, philosophy and the digital humanities.

Future Anterior Journal
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Founder and Editor / James Oberting & Aaron Luo, Managing Editors / Michael Allen, Guest Editor.

Formatting requirements
Manuscript: Articles should be no more than 4,000 words (excluding footnotes) with up to seven illustrations. References to the identity of the author must be removed from the manuscript before submission. It is the responsibility of the author to secure permissions for image use and pay any reproduction fees. A brief abstract (200 words) and author biography (around 100 words) must accompany the submission, but in a separate file to preserve the double-blind peer review process. Acceptance or rejection of submissions is at the discretion of the Editorial Staff. Please do not send original materials, as submissions will not be returned.

All text files should be saved as Microsoft Word or RTF format. Text and citations must be formatted in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition. All articles must be submitted in English, and spelling should follow American convention. 

Illustrations: Images should be sent as TIFF files with a resolution of at least 300 dpi at 8” by 9” print size. Figures should be numbered clearly in the text, after the paragraph in which they are referenced. Image captions and credits must be included with submissions.

Examples of manuscript and illustration formatting can be found in past issues of Future Anterior: here and here or via EBSCO.

Submission checklist
–Abstract (200 words)
–Manuscript (4000 words, excluding footnotes)
–Illustrations (maximum of seven)
–Captions for Illustrations
–Illustration Copyright information
–Author biography (100 words)

Manuscripts must be submitted electronically, via email to future.anterior.journal [​at​] gmail.com. Please direct questions to michael [​at​] michael-allen.org (cc future.anterior.journal [​at​] gmail.com).