SOARC
The Society for Architecture
Qamishli, Syria

Foto: Stephan Jung

Archive: SOARC
Funds: ALAD, SEJU
SOARC
The Society for Architecture
Qamishli, Syria

Foto: Stephan Jung

Archive: SOARC
Funds: ALAD, SEJU
SOARC
The Society for Architecture
Qamishli, Syria

Foto: Stephan Jung

Archive: SOARC
Funds: ALAD, SEJU
The Society

The aim of SOARC is to promote architecture and design, especially by improving the public understanding of architecture’s social significance and complex relationships with the environment. This is done through an attitude, which encourages the understanding of architecture inside the framework of disciplines with which it interacts continuously, especially the applied arts, landscape and craftsmanship in its various forms.

That is why architecture is understood here as a knowledge of doing, as a material practice with its very own effective toolset, capable of intervening everywhere, a practice which — by shaping how things look like and what they can do — is able to reveal hidden potentials or produce them, to start productive processes where there have been none.

Architecture in fact is a way of relating to the world around us by doing as well as seeing. Sometimes it is about inventing that what is not there, while other times it is about seeing what is there but has not been seen yet.

Sections

The main sections of this website are the visual atlas, programmes, editorial, collection as well as the shop.

The visual atlas is a curated selection of best practices in architecture, landscape, interior and design. Its main aim is to show the reality of architecture where even very simple interventions can already produce a very rich outcome. As a matter of fact, the luxury of a place is not defined by its cost but by the potential produced by the invention, which conceived it. For this reason, the visual atlas does not discern between professional or educational projects but instead concentrates on the documentation of the physical interventions. For each case both the work as well as the designer, group or studio is presented.

The programmes section presents an overview of the different curatorial projects of SOARC. Conferences and exhibitions are presented in sequence or according to the programmatic series they are part of.

The editorial section presents an overview of the different editorial projects in particular SAFTzine, SAFT - the modular book as well as the two series Experiments and Readers.

The collection is a way of understanding the world through the procedures of selecting, observing and categorizing. Different materials related to experimental practice as well as teaching practice in architecture and design produced since the early 1950s are reunited in a scientific archive and organized in a series of funds.

Collaborations
Supporters