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A Conversation With Miles Gertler
No full textMiles Gertler is an artist and co-director of Common Accounts, an office for architectural inquiry that currently operates between Toronto and Madrid. His work in architecture, academia, and visual art examines self-design in virtual and material realms, and documents design intelligence that often passes under the radar of the discipline in areas like fitness, death, military logistics, and ritual. Gertler’s work and writing has been featured in Perspecta, e-flux, 032c, PIN-UP, Arquitectura Viva, Canadian Architect, Frame, Neo2, El Pais, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, The Globe and Mail, The Architectural Review, and the Avery Review.
He has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the MMCA Seoul, the Seoul Museum of Art, Matadero Madrid, Art Jameel, Azkuna Zentroa, the Cube Design Museum, the Bienal de Arquitectura Española, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Seoul Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, MOCA (Toronto), a83 gallery, and Corkin Gallery. Gertler was a 2023 resident at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy, and has served on the Board of Directors at Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art, since 2019. He is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and studied architecture at Princeton and the University of Waterloo. Gertler was a recipient of the 2023 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers from the Architectural League of New York
Drafting Liminalities: A Roundtable Discussion
No full textOn February 7, 2025, the Scaffold* editorial team brought together four scholars across built environment and visual disciplines to reflect on the volume theme of ‘drafting liminalities’. The public event, positioned as a discursive primer, was hosted at the Daniels Building and convened students from within and outside the faculty—many of whom contributed manuscripts to this project. From graphic design to urbanism and experimental fieldwork, each scholar delivered a brief presentation of their work as it related to the composite concepts of drafting and liminalities—beginning at the scale of the pixel and concluding with patterns of movement within and beyond city limits. The diversity of materials shared not only demonstrated the possibilities of interpretation, but clarified some directions arising from the call for submissions.
For some, ‘drafting’ referred to the act of the drawn image, both analogue and digital, while for others, it was interpreted as the process of continuous iteration and revision. This first concept was further modified by various descriptions of ‘liminalities’, from the supposedly empty voids taken for granted to activities intentionally hidden from the outside gaze. Individual presentations were followed by a roundtable discussion, moderated by Claire Allen, editorial director, and Emma Hwang, managing director. The conversation followed the contours of three streams set out by the call—the use of drafting toward counterpractice (challenging hegemonic narratives and representations), drafting and worlding (speculative drawing and fabulation), and the tools and technologies involved in drafting
The Beirut Metro Line: Stitching a Fragmented City
No full textAt the time of writing, a metro line connecting East and West Beirut belongs to the realm of fiction. And yet, it is also very real. It exists already—running through the pages of our sketchbooks, unfolding across scattered sheets of tracing paper, embedded in digital files on our laptops, and traveling across the shared cloud space where we collaborate. It also appears in this article, through our words and the Figure that accompany them.
The Beirut Metro Line thus lingers in the constructed reality of what Henri Lefebvre once described as l’espace conçu, or conceived space: the domain of abstract representations of space, where architects, planners, and spatial thinkers imagine forms before they are built, and where a city is drawn into being before it is lived. At first glance, when looking over our various drafts and early explorations, the design guidelines of the Beirut Metro may appear inconsistent, even contradictory. At times, the line traces a plausible path, resembling what a metro system might look like in today’s Beirut. At others, it delves into the surreal, weaving through suspended buildings in a cityscape that defies scale, gravity, and logic
Le possibilità alternative dei metodi riparativi in Ernesto di Umberto Saba e nel film Ernesto (1979) di Salvatore Samperi
No full textThis essay applies Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concepts of paranoid and reparative readings to Umberto Saba’s novella Ernesto, written in 1953 and published posthumously in 1975, and Salvatore Samperi’s 1979 film, Ernesto. This essay argues that the creative process Saba undertook in the writing of Ernesto constitutes a form of Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a tool of recovery and imaginative, generative reconstitution. In contrast, Samperi’s film version of Saba’s novella adopts paranoid tones of narration through restrictive forms of imaginative retelling. This essay conducts a paranoid reading of Samperi’s film, supported by the commentaries of scholars William Van Watson and Mario Mieli, in order to acknowledge the forms of queer alienation that the films engages in. The paranoid reading of Samperi’s film lays the groundwork for an intentionally reparative one. This essay conducts a reparative reading of Samperi’s depiction of emotion through hands as a way of regaining the expansive and hopeful potentialities of Saba’s novella.Questo saggio applica i concetti di lettura paranoica e riparativa di Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick al racconto Ernesto di Umberto Saba, scritto nel 1953 e pubblicato postumo nel 1975, e al film Ernesto di Salvatore Samperi (1979). Questo saggio sostiene che il processo creativo adottato da Saba nella formazione di Ernesto costituisce una forma di lettura riparativa Sedgwickiana come strumento di recupero e una ricostituzione immaginativa e generativa. Al contrario, la versione cinematografica di Samperi in base al racconto di Saba adotta toni paranoici di narrazione attraverso forme restrittive di rivisitazione immaginativa. Questo saggio conduce una lettura paranoica del film di Samperi, supportata dai commenti degli studiosi William Van Watson e Mario Mieli, al fine di riconoscere le forme di alienazione queer che il film mette in atto. Però la lettura paranoica del film di Samperi getta le basi per una lettura intenzionalmente riparativa. Questo saggio basa una lettura riparativa sulla rappresentazione emotiva delle mani nel film come un modo per recuperare le potenzialità espansive e ottimiste del racconto di Saba
The Spiritual Automaton in the Transpersonal Spacetime of Class Struggle: Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden
No full textPietro Marcello’s film Martin Eden (2019) was received by critics and the public alike as an innovative approach to adaptation, launching a marginal director of socially engaged documentaries onto the international cinema scene. In this essay, I discuss the political implications of a film that scrambles temporal and spatial references in its reprisal of Jack London’s 1909 eponymous classic, transposing its setting from San Francisco to Naples and expanding its historical reach from a main temporality going from the 1910s to the early 1980s. I argue that Marcello uses the posthuman sensibilities allowed by writing, recording, and filming techniques to reveal the transtemporal nature of class struggle. As a successful writer, Martin Eden finally understands that what the ruling classes cannot tolerate is not only economic but also intellectual and artistic emancipation.
 
Elisa Segnini and Michael Subialka, eds. Gabriele D’Annunzio and World Literature: Multilingualism, Translation, Reception
No full textThe 21st Century Has Arrived: Three Short Reviews
No full textThree short reviews are made of the following books:
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari (2016)
A.I.: Rise of the Lightspeed Learners, by Charles Jennings (2018)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff (2019
The Philosophical Topicality of Marshall McLuhan
No full textDespite the flourishing literature on these matters in the past century, McLuhan’s work stands out as one of the most pioneering and original attempts to understand media: not just because he considered media with an unprecedented and ‘omni-inclusive’ level of breadth, but rather because he brought to light their inherently productive, performative, and ‘poietic’ character. McLuhan’s theory of media, which emerged from the great ferment characterizing the Toronto School, influences and inspires the philosophical reflection on the transformations in the most diverse areas. The present paper identifies the particularly interesting and fruitful connection between McLuhan’s perspective and the research on technology and its formative and transformative effects on the human being. It’s not a matter of thinking exclusively of issues pertaining to the post-human, the cyborg, and alike, but rather of the philosophical, anthropological and sociological scholarship on anthropogenesis that came to prominence in the past decades. This kind of study emphasizes the ‘technical life’ of humans or, to put it in more significant terms, the technical genesis of homination and the role of material culture for humanization. The McLuhanist theory of media is then explored from an eminently philosophico-genealogical perspective, in order to reveal the way in which human experience can receive a new significance by the action of technological prostheses
Marshall McLuhan\u27s General System Thinking and Media Ecology
No full textIt is argued that the most important contribution McLuhan made to the study of media was his general systems theory approach consisting of his figure/ground analysis and his general systems or field approach. 
