The impetus for this issue is a “positive obsession” (word to Octavia E. Butler) I share with Linda Goode Bryant: bemoaning the ubiquity of right angles in the built environment. As she articulated in recently released footage from her Art21 interview (2023): “You know, folks get annoyed with me ’cause I rant about this, but my first trip to the High Line, I’m standing, and I’m looking out, and all of a sudden it hit me. Everything I was looking at was a rectangle… So I started stopping people… [and asking them] ‘What is the dominant shape you’re looking at?’ [and they’d say]  ‘Oh wow, it’s a rectangle…’” She then goes on to ask: “How does that rectangle shape how we relate to one another?” If the morphological mood of the rectangle is one of foreclosure, alienation, and separation, then this issue adamantly advocates for more curves.

In step with Goode Bryant’s longing for “more diversity in the shapes that I’m living in,” we also crave more curves in how we discursively apprehend the built environment. Thus, each contribution bends the question of architecture by integrating references and methodologies that span the worlds of poetry, painting, film, collage, and more to speak about the built environment through an interdisciplinary gaze. By entering through the built environment’s back door, this issue invites a consideration of the modes of thought, imagination, and relation that might spur from dismembering the supremacy of the hard edge.

Simon Ghebreyesus frames The Architect (1959) by Jacob Lawrence as a prophecy that foretold the completion of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s new home. Grounded in Gwendolyn Brooks’s critique of modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, an interview with the artist Roland Knowlden Jr. articulates how a chance encounter urged him to reconsider the stakes and scope of an architect’s responsibility. Nailah Reine Barnes offers a retelling of her journey across two highways—U.S. Route 30 and Interstate 75—to spend time with Calida Rawles’s exhibition, Away with the Tides. Denny Mwaura brings readers along as he visits the Limbo Museum in Accra to elaborate upon how the burgeoning institution’s conceptual framework is attuned to the historical, environmental, and political urgencies of the now. Sika Bonsu lingers with the shortcomings of MoMA’s recently opened exhibition Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa. Oluwatobiloba Ajayi sketches a triangle of relation between Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings, and Josephine Baker to propose a vision for an architectural theory propelled by her unrelenting regard for Black women’s subjectivity.

Alexandria Smith revisits June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller’s architectural plan Skyrise for Harlem (1965) by way of a research-based, speculative drawing; panoramic in scale, it will be on view in the window at Long Gallery, Harlem from September 13 through November 15, 2026. Elodie Dérond and Tania Doumbe Fines of ibiyanε venture into the thicket of a Martinican forest to retrace the footsteps of a familial legend about an ancestral home. The resulting short film, bokodji (2026), is accompanied by a series of testimonies from their global network of friends and collaborators about the manifold experiences of architectural inheritance across the Black diaspora. Finally, enamored by the wallpaper Sucking Salt (Zenobia Lee and Shani Strand) made for Modeling Ecologies: Take Care—curated by Sienna Fekete at Entrance Gallery, NY from November 14 through December 21, 2024—we invited them to create a cover for this issue, which takes shape as a shifting composite of images that relate to the array of sites featured in the aforementioned contributions. Together, Alexandria, Elodie and Tania, and Sucking Salt’s participation mark the beginnings of a new practice for Jupiter: commissioning not only written contributions but also visual artworks to carry forth our experiment in peeling cultural criticism off the page.

“Social constructs are meant for us to be distracted… we get so constructed that we can’t even see what’s in front of our faces, and then we don’t question it,” Goode Bryant goes on to say. Alas, this issue intends to inspire a lucid criticality around the architectural forms that surround us and to lend language that can support that scrutiny.