INNOVATION

With 1.2 billion Google results, innovation is now the omnipresent buzzword used in the domain of advanced capitalism to encapsulate the processes by which environments and societies recombine, evolve, dispute with, and reproduce themselves. Innovation creates a fiction in which problems are resolved, material inflation makes things better, and linear progress is possible. But this doesn’t work: innovation has been reduced and weaponized to become the tool to consolidate the promotion of consumerism. This issue of Ardeth gathers architectural thinkers to examine specific cases of architectural innovation in detail, with the mission of situating the term innovation in the terrain of realism and to help rethink how architectural innovation is discussed, imagined, and practiced.