CRIT 84: TERRITORY continued to pioneer a new approach to CRIT and selected for this issue’s theme the term “territory”, which explored ever expanding definitions of territory in a an age when growing desires to define our spaces have become every more complicated by entirely new methodologies of definition.

How do we define our relationship to the land, area, and space we inhabit? Architects speak often of “placehood” and its influence on a design, but in order to understand such an idea a clear understanding of what place even means must be achieved. Though at the low point of its usage in the modern era – a fact indicative of the present lack of spatial understanding unto itself – the word “territory” provides a uniquely clear path to conceiving of and reading space as it relates to human inhabitation. Rooted in the Latin terra, literally “earth, or land”, and related to terrain with its accompanying geographic implications, the modern notion of territory collapses into a single term physical and intangible constructs: the built and unbuilt features of our landscape, and the legal, cultural, and socio-political agreements used to define space.

Through this collapsing, territory provokes interdisciplinary investigations in our designed - and un-designed, though not necessarily unchanged - environment. How do we produce architecture related to and comprehensive of its place in such a way as to meaningfully achieve the often spoken about, rarely experienced “placehood”? How can and do we use design to register or mark space in a way that relates land to architecture, and vice versa? What responsibilities does design have to reinforce our understanding of a territory, and when does it have an obligation to blur or even dissolve the lines of our territories in the form of cities, states, nations, and other such metaphysical fabrications? How does design that is in communication with its territory lead us to a greater sense of ourselves and a better relationship with our environment?