In 2019 started as an email newsletter; delivered once a month it aimed to explore architectural history through a light-hearted approach. It was rooted in a fascination with the ridiculousness of architecture, taking the Folly as our primary reference—a foolish entity with no apparent function. But it is precisely this fanciful mode that we strive to exist in. It is a fertile space where we can play with forms of writing and methodological approaches. Growing organically it started to include a range of voices, asking new contributors to expand this curious approach. At the end of each year, we published a collection of texts; the profits for these were donated to the Architecture Foundation's New Architectural Writers.
In 2024, we decided to transition from digital to analogue, creating Folly Journal. Its aim is to continue championing forms that push and test the discipline. It is an irregular journal that supports the absurd and experimental in critical writing about architectural history. Folly is now stocked around the world, distributed by Public Knowledge Books.
Our first edition was about 'Loss', and presented a range of texts from a fictional exploration of place and essays on the abandonment of architectural typologies, to observations on conservation in contemporary building. You can read more about the first issue here,
Folly seeks submissions for its second issue on the theme of 'Cultivate'. To cultivate is to establish and develop, to care continuously. To nurture and form, whether it is for plants or culture. When humans started to cultivate the land, the structures they built to store grain were the first architectures. Both agriculture and architecture have been intertwined since the Neolithic Era: cultivated in conversation with each other, from the mythic origins of architecture’s beginnings, the agricultural texts of Vitruvius and Varro, the manicured gardens of country houses, to industrialised farming. We invite text and images that speak to this relationship, looking at the intimacies between selves and others, objects and sites. Orientation matters, so what and who have we attended and tended to?
The open call closes on the 31st March 2025, with the journal set to be published in July 2025.
