Published on Monday, February 23, 2026
Abstract
Clara journal and guest editors Eliyahu Keller and Uri Wegman are launching a new call for papers on the theme Uncertainties for the thematic section of issue 14, to be published in early 2028. Clara #14 seeks to explore the architectural manifestations of uncertainty, probability, and chance around four distinct yet interrelated themes: measurement and tools, negotiation, representation, and narratives.
Announcement
Guest Editors
Eliyahu Keller and Uri Wegman
Argument
In 1927, Werner Heisenberg introduced the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics (Heisenberg, 1927), suggesting that it is “impossible to describe simultaneously both the position and the velocity of an atomic particle with any prescribed degree of accuracy” (Heisenberg, 1959: 39). Heisenberg’s principle indicated that the very act of observation–and the instruments with which observations are made–conditions the physical properties of the observed phenomena. By introducing an inherent limit to what could be known and promoting the notion of indeterminacy as an intrinsic characteristic of matter, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle challenged a deterministic worldview that prevailed in early modern science and complemented it with a vision of reality governed by probability and chance. As with other major scientific principles, uncertainty had implications beyond physics, as its counterintuitive logic reverberated across broader disciplines (Goldhaber and Crease, 2014). While cautioning against simplistic analogies between scientific discoveries and artistic production, Heisenberg himself nevertheless insisted that “the basic changes in modern science must yet be considered as expressions of changes in our very existence and thus as affecting every realm of life” (Heisenberg, 1959: 7).
Heisenberg’s description of scientific ideas as entangled with a larger cultural context closely aligns with arguments put forth by thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, and others, who viewed science not as an autonomous project but as an intrinsically situated discipline. Arendt, in particular, identified the uncertainty principle as emblematic of a widening gap between human experience and scientific knowledge. For Arendt, modern science instigated a condition in which humanity could act effectively upon the world while increasingly losing the capacity to comprehend or articulate the meaning of its actions (Arendt, 2006). A century later, the broader significance of the uncertainty principle and its related concepts–such as, probability and chance–is apparent across many fields and scales, including architecture.
In contemporary parlance, uncertainty is often evoked to describe our era. The past few years and months have witnessed the unraveling of the post-war geopolitical order, bundled with the escalation of catastrophic effects of anthropogenic climate change and an unrestrained technological arms race. Responding to these growing instabilities, philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggested that the epistemic models by which we could grasp contemporary reality, and, in fact, history itself, resonate with the uncertain and probabilistic notions articulated by quantum theory (Žižek, 2023). This suggestion is, in and of itself, a testament to the entanglement of our contemporary condition with uncertainty. As we inhabit a world whose political, environmental, and socioeconomic realities are increasingly uncertain and erratic, we also articulate our relation to it and to one another by probabilistic models of knowledge and action. Indeed, while uncertainty has arguably always occupied an ambivalent yet prevalent position within architecture, contemporary architectural culture is increasingly intertwined with probabilistic and uncertain protocols, such as simulation, prediction, adaptation, randomization, improvisation, and participation.
Marking the centennial of the uncertainty principle in the shadow of an uncertain era, Clara 14 invites critical reflections on the role and consequences of uncertainty, probability, and chance in shaping the built environment. We seek historically grounded, materially situated, and theoretically precise investigations that question how uncertainty operates within architectural practices, tools, representations, narratives and historiographies. We wish to examine how these notions shape, expose, transform, reverberate, resist, or manifest themselves in historical and contemporary architectural culture and how architecture measures, represents, designs, and narrates itself through them.
Thematic axes
Clara 14 seeks to explore the architectural manifestations of uncertainty, probability, and chance around four distinct yet interrelated themes: (1) measurement and tools, (2) negotiation, (3) representation, and (4) narratives. While these themes are intended to be focused but inclusive, we welcome contributions that might suggest other potential prisms across diverse cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. We strongly encourage contributions that are grounded in specific places, narratives, practices, materials, or tools. Comparative, cross-cultural, and non-Western perspectives are particularly welcome. While this call is written from within an architectural discourse shaped largely by Western modernity, it seeks to expand, complicate, and unsettle that frame.
1. Measurement, Standards, and Tools
From Vitruvius to Neufert, architecture has relied on measurement as a mediator between itself and the world. The various acts and techniques of architectural measurement promise objectivity, translatability, and control. While the uncertainty principle's measurement limits apply strictly to atomic and subatomic phenomena, they nonetheless cast a broader cultural shadow on the idea of measurement as a frictionless and definitive form of knowledge. Indeed, even outside the quantum realm, acts of measurement are never neutral. They select, exclude, and normalize; they embed cultural values, technical assumptions, and political priorities into seemingly objective procedures. What it suggests, therefore, is that measurement standards, tolerances, instruments, and protocols shape and condition architectural reality rather than merely record it.
We invite contributions that examine historical cases, practices, non-Western systems of measurement, standardization protocols, or critical methodologies that challenge the assumption of architectural measurement as a transparent and fixed mediation. What remains immeasurable in architecture, and why? How are acts and tools of architectural measurement entangled with conditions of uncertainty, probability, or chance? We are equally interested in the growing importance of measurement that is based on statistical prediction and stochastic approximation in design, construction, planning, and habitation across different scales. Potential examinations could cover the measurement of labor, risk, movement, crowd, fluid, or seismic behavior, as well as weathering and aging.
2. Negotiating Probability, Uncertainty and Chance
While in traditional architectural discourse, chance and intention are not only separated but opposites, the notion of probability renders them to be inseparable: design decisions are always conditioned and influenced by chance encounters. Indeed, manifestations of chance in design, construction, and habitation processes are frequently conceived as marginal, accidental, anecdotal occurrences that need to be limited if not outright eliminated. And yet probability, uncertainty, and chance are intrinsic to the life cycles of materials, labor conditions, construction processes, and modes of habitation, thus giving rise to many forms of frictions, negotiations, mitigations, and improvisations between the planned and the uncertain. Processes of extraction, production, installation, and maintenance of commonplace materials such as wood, concrete, steel, bricks, or glass, for example, are riddled with unpredictable and unstable behavior that architecture, for the most part, attempts to tame, minimize, or evade. Labor, even in its most mechanized and automated forms, is prone to fluctuations, errors, and malfunctions. Habitation or program, on their part, are also highly fluid and depend on the interaction of many volatile processes and phenomena.
We seek contributions that explore how these probabilistic conditions are negotiated with the intentional and the planned aspects of architecture. Under what circumstances and what categories are they mediated, considered, or addressed by architects? When and how do chance and probability become not merely tolerable but generative? What political or ethical roles might the uncertain performance values or material instability of, say, an earth brick, play in an architectural culture fixated with standardization, monitorization, and optimization?
3. Representation and Media
One of the most profound consequences of the uncertainty principle concerns the nature of representation itself. As Karen Barad argued, representational practices–if not the very possibility of representation–presume a severance between an observer and the observed. This separation, which is at the root of Western epistemology, is fundamentally called into question by the uncertainty principle (Barad, 2007). What this might suggest in the context of architecture is that instruments and practices of representation (drawings, models, simulations, renderings) might not assume an entirely external position to the reality they are meant to represent but rather form a more performative or “intra-active” (ibid.) relationship with it. Representation as an active mediation thus blurs the distinction between the act of representation and the phenomena being represented.
We invite contributions that examine the history of architectural representations as they pertain to uncertain and probable phenomena, by challenging the very notion of representability. How did architects confront the uncertain and the probable through representation in the past? How can the traditionally assumed gap between the subject and the object be mitigated and challenged through artistic, spatial, and architectural means? What alternative modes of active mediation between architects and the built environment have emerged historically or experimentally? And how and where does architectural representation engage in probabilistic principles to negotiate its relationship with an uncertain world?
4. Historiographies, Imaginaries and Narratives
The migration of scientific concepts into architectural imagination, theory, and practice is nothing new (Ponte and Picon, 2003). From Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Newtonian universe to early twentieth-century engagements with relativity by figures such as Siegfried Giedion or Erich Mendelsohn, and later appropriations of evolutionary theory, cybernetics, and complexity, architecture has often turned to science as a source of conceptual authority and cultural orientation. These translations, however, frequently turned scientific concepts into metaphors, formal protocols, or operational models, while leaving their deeper consequences only partially addressed. (Perez Gomez, 1999) Uncertainty, and the scientific field that it is part of, is, in some respect, the epitome of this condition. It challenges and undermines many of the concepts that structure a deterministic, linear worldview and that narrate our collective pasts. As Žižek recently noted in an interview, “quantum mechanics proposes a kind of new [...] ontological foundation of a different relationship to history,” as well as a different conceptualization of nature (Žižek, 2025).
Following, we invite contributors to explore how architectural history, historiography, and narratives respond to this framing. What kind of narrational structures could architecture employ to imagine its role in the context of global uncertainty and the uncertainty principle as a tenet of science? What are the possible architectural manifestations of a cosmology in which the uncertainty principle shapes the relation between humans and the universe? What are the implications of thinking about architectural history through the philosophical lens offered by quantum mechanics, and what kind of architectural history can retroactively emerge in light of our new understanding of reality itself?
Submission guidelines
Submissions may take the form of scholarly articles, or visual essays.
Proposals for contributions should be submitted to clara.archi[at]ulb.be by 1 May 2026 and must include an anonymized PDF file with:
For academic papers:
- a long abstract of 1000 words;
- a title (even if temporary).
For visual essays:
- a short presentation of 500 words outlining your conceptual approach, intentions, and the graphic methods or techniques employed—this text should help the peer reviewers assess the quality and relevance of the contribution;
- 3 to 5 figures or images that visually convey your ideas and creative direction;
- each figure or image may be accompanied by a title and/or caption (up to 100 words);
- a title (even if temporary).
The submission email should include the following information:
- the contributor(s)’ name(s) and academic affiliation (if applicable),
- a short bio of maximum 100 words/author.
Proposals for contributions may be submitted in English or in French.
The Editorial Board reserves the right not to consider proposals that do not comply with the present guidelines.
Provisional timeline
- 01/05/2026 Submission of abstracts by email to clara.archi[at]ulb.be, following the instructions hereabove. The pre-selection process will happen according to the abstracts’ quality and thematic relevance.
- Mid-May 2026 Notification of acceptance.
- Early November 2026 Submission of full papers (max. 50.000 characters) by email to clara.archi [at] ulb.be and start of double peer-reviewing process.
- January 2027 Feedback and comments from reviewers.
- April 2027 Submission of final papers. Start of the editing process.
NB: Authors must secure publishing rights for all images intended for use in their paper between the notification of acceptance (May 2026) and the submission of the final version (November 2026). The editorial team bears no responsibility for the acquisition of these rights or associated fees.
- Early 2028 Launching of Clara #14.
About guest editors
Eliyahu Keller is an architect and architectural historian whose work focuses on the intersection of architectural representation, speculation, and imagination with technological advancements and challenges. He currently serves as an assistant professor at the Technion - Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. In his current book project, Eliyahu explores how nuclear apocalyptic thinking influenced the work of speculative architects in Cold War US.
Uri Wegman is an architect, educator, and researcher. He taught at the Cooper Union, New York, EPFL Lausanne, and currently at the Faculty of Architecture at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he is also conducting doctoral research about the representation of air in architecture. His work has been covered by and presented in the New York Times and at the Venice Biennale, among other platforms.
About Clara
Clara is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal in architecture dedicated to topics, research methods, and tools specific to the field. Each issue comprises a main thematic section proposed by guest editors, and two additional sections: Archives, with articles based on the exploration of archival documents, and Position(s), with articles that take a stance on current developments or events in architecture. The latest and forthcoming issues of Clara address architectural criticism (#7), the architecture and landscapes of agrarianism (#8), intermediality in architecture (#9), collective housing (#10), and the ethics of detailing (#11), architects and planners cooperatives (#12), architecture’s soil problem (#13).
Subjects
- Urban studies (Main category)
- Society > Science studies > Philosophy of science
- Society > History > Urban history
- Mind and language > Representation > Architecture
Date(s)
- Friday, May 01, 2026
Attached files
Contact(s)
- Lefebvre Pauline
courriel : clara [dot] archi [at] ulb [dot] be
Reference Urls
Information source
- Valentine Debizet
courriel : clara [dot] archi [at] ulb [dot] be
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Uncertainties », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, February 23, 2026, https://doi.org/10.58079/15quv
