This issue, on architecture and things geologic, was suggested by the work of Smudge Studio and Friends of the Pleistocene, a very active group of people who are examining our cities, our urban practices and our daily lifes, identifying just where they intersect the earth's deep processes.

FOP has an active website, which outlines all sorts of exhibitions, projects, publications and symposia such as The Geologic Turn: Architecture's New Alliance curated by Etienne Turpin of Scapegoat.  I came across them at a Musagetes Foundation café in Sudbury in September 2011, where they handed out their guidebook to the geology of New York, Geologic City: a Field Guide to the Geo-Architecture of New York.    

There is something going on here, some sort of turning away from the middle ground and the future to deep history which controls our every act. There are also more recent connections to the land art projects of the 1970s and 80s, which continue of course, but that is when Smithson, Heiser, Turrell et al began to be published.  Land Arts of the American West, under Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert, is a program that investigates 'the intersection of geomorphology and human construction'.  Now, Chris Taylor has been working on this since the 1990s, so there is a body of work, mostly in the USA, that interrogates the very surface of the earth and our tiny incisions into it.

We could call this DIRT 2, Dirt 1 (issue 26, fall 2011) being mostly about surface, DIRT 2 mostly about what is beneath the surface.  Metaphors can abound. 

However, we haven't written a formal call for articles for this yet, this is just a notice to get you thinking about it. 

We would like to do a parallel exhibition of work – architecture, urbanism, performance, construction, infrastructural projects – that bump up directly and indisputably against geologic processes and events: volcanoes, oil sands, shifting plates, eroding mountains, earthquakes, tsunamis — surely it can't all be about disasters.  I, for one, want to do something at Frank Slide.  Something that tells us what the consequences are when you don't listen to indigenous oral history about quaking mountains.  and so on.