calls for articles

on site review 48: building materials

the stuff buildings are made out of:

traditional, innovative

new, old

local, global

industrial, artisanal

flexible, recalcitrant

singular, hybrid

Don't think of this list as either/or binaries: take each term as the end points of a range, from traditional to innovative, from new to old. There are historical shifts along such trajectories that relate to technology, conflict, exploration, identity, manufacturing and refinement capacities. Skill sets, scarcity of raw materials, or surplus materials — buildings start here, with the materials they are designed to use.

We would like to survey what is interesting about materials themselves: their potential in use, in impact, in longevity, in the architecture that you are interested in.

This an open call to you all, whether you wish to discuss any of your own particular projects, or something you have seen and noted, or ideas for materials not yet developed. Details, technical specs welcome. Tell us why you want to write about a particular building material or building system.

Proposals might outline something you've already built, or written about or studied. Or they may outline something you wish to research for a short article: the first step of perhaps a larger project or study. What we are looking for is a concise outline of an article, essay, photo-essay or video that we can fairly consider, so not too abstract or vague in the writing, and not off-topic.

Final submissions are due 6 weeks later, January 15, 2026, so make sure you have time for this.

This issue will be about the materials with which architecture is made in all their gnarly details, their glories and their problems.

Send your proposal to us here: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us

Please forward this link – https://onsitereview.ca/callforarts to anyone you feel might be interested in contributing to this or any of our discussions.

on site review 49: watery edges

Blue humanities: the human relationship with oceans, rivers, lakes and seas, now recognised as one of the important foundations of civilisation.

One of the aspects of the ancient infrastructure of the shoreline is as a site of war and trade. Does the human relationship to oceans, rivers, lakes and seas still embody that interstitial condition, commanded by weather, by hinterlands, by tides and maritime vessels? The dock, the pier, the container port, the sandy beach: these are all constructions that mediate between water and land, war and trade. Migratory routes transcend borders, only registering at frontiers: a border crossing is a metaphorical landing site. It can be open or policed, marked by reefs, by walls, by surveillance as humans cross from one state to another, from land to sea; sea to land. These borders are marked by mangrove swamps, seaweed and kelps, reefs of coral and shipwrecks, by crumbling cliffs, by beach encampments. Spaces that do not always cohere; under many kinds of threat, they are as fragmentary and elusive as the camps of Achilles.

For On Site review 49, we would like to look at the architectures of those watery frontiers This is clearly a wide, global condition with extremely local built infrastructure. Can, for example, one write about a container port in terms of its landscape, its form, its ultimate relationship to the size of its hinterland both on land and ocean? A deciding factor in the WWII turning of the tide was the Allied landings on D-Day across a number of beaches in Normandy, not ports, but seaside towns. Corniches, promenades, these are the fronts of cities: the seawalls that defend from tides and armies. If, as we are told, the future of battle is drone warfare, why are great flotillas of warships and aircraft carriers amassed in the Caribbean, the South China Sea?

The more you think about this thin but potent edge condition, the more examples one can find.

We would like proposals for articles, essays, photo-essays, prose and poetry, drawings and ideas for On Site review 49 by June 1 2026. Please outline your subject, how you might treat it, illustrate it and format it. There is a page of specifications here: https://www.onsitereview.ca/specs for proposals and final submissions; do read it, as it gives a direction to how you might think about a submission to On Site review.

For proposals, please use the contact-us form: https://www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us

This form does not take images. Its purpose is for you to send a description of what you would like to eventually submit. We receive this contact-us message, reply by email, and from then on conduct our correspondence through email, which does take attachments.