Online platform E-flux Architecture and the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) are delighted to collaborate on the Horizons series, an editorial series that brings together prolific architects, writers, artists, philosophers, and sociologists to reckon with the challenges of thinking and making futures today.

Architecture has long been one of the most powerful means of imagining, visualizing, and constructing futures. Like a projectile, the architectural project is thrown forward, reaching into and determining the conditions of what is to come. But where architecture ultimately lands – and what actually makes it to the end of the trajectory – can never be known fully in advance. Not to mention the multifarious costs and effects – the value – of bringing it down to earth.

We live among the ruins of past futures. Their promises turned out to be lies. The future is a threat, pressing itself onto the present with ever more force and urgency. And so we need another future, other futures. Looking around, we can learn from past mistakes. But it is never enough to merely know what went wrong. We must also detect and cultivate vectors of practice that both reorient and start moving toward new horizons.

Situated within the context of the IABR’s 10th edition, IT’S ABOUT TIME, curated by Derk Loorbach, Véronique Patteeuw, Léa-Catherine Szacka, and Peter Veenstra, Nick Axel guides this editorial collaboration on behalf of E-flux Architecture. The participating authors are selected for their particular interest in the various ways in which time can serve as a lens to understand how futures have been and can be made, successfully or not: spaces, materials, technologies, practices, organizations, rituals, and beyond. Our confirmed contributors are: Rahel Aima, Paul Bouet, Carson Chan, Amica Dall, Gökçe Günel, Tim Ingold, Joost Vervoort, and Stephanie Wakefield.