UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Architecture graduate students in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State are launching “Hyphen,” a new print journal that is intended to serve as a platform for speculation, experimentation, dialogue and debate within the discipline, at noon March 21 in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space.
Compiled and edited by architecture graduate students, the journal is designed to bridge the gap between the four specialized research clusters within the Department of Architecture — Culture, Society, Space; Design Computing; Material Matters; and Sustainability — and to spark new inquiries and collaboration across disciplines. It is the graduate students’ intention to print the publication annually.
“Hyphen is a student-led journal that captures the diverse explorations of graduate students in the Penn State graduate architecture program. The student leaders have worked incredibly hard during this multi-year effort to ensure the first issue of the journal is a success,” said Frank Jacobus, professor and head of architecture. “I'm looking forward to this journal being out in the world so that our students, students from other programs, our faculty and all our other partners can learn from it and enjoy it. I'm proud of the hard work and dedication of these young scholars.”
The theme of the first issue is "instability," and includes contributions from 15 authors, including students, faculty, researchers and artists from Penn State and external institutions. Editors and architecture doctoral candidates Nicolás Verdejo and Farzaneh Oghazian, with the support of assistant editor Sana Ahrar and the collaboration of Elizabeth Andrzejewski, oversaw the production of the journal. Former architecture faculty members Matthew Kennedy and Heather Ligler were advisers during most of the journal’s conception and production.
"The truth is that talking about instability, or even crisis, is nothing new,” explained Verdejo. “Apparently, we have become accustomed to living in states of crisis of all kinds, and the enormous production of information only accentuates this. However, we wanted to explore what our current instabilities are and how research or creation realizes uncertainties, disequilibrium, and discursive and disciplinary anxieties.”
Verdejo continued, “For example, we have a post-pandemic scenario right now that is still pulsing, high inflation in world economies, the rampant spread of misinformation and in-crescendo political polarization, among other conflicts. That is the context in which these works are placed, either directly or indirectly.”
According to Verdejo, the architecture department, the journal's advisory board and the editorial team believe the project holds great value for graduate students within the Stuckeman School, “where they will not only be able to give an account of our school's production but also link up with authors and contributors from a wide range of external institutions and parts of the world, from multiple fields and approaches.”
“That is one of Hyphen's most essential goals,” said Verdejo.
Learn more about the journal and download the first issue on the Hyphen website.