The architectural detail is a site of pride for architects where practice and theory are expressed; where intent and outcome are most potent.

 

 It is at the level of the detail where designers are simultaneously challenged and comforted. While the visceral precarity of international political and financial realms is felt in increasing detail, our anxieties can be soothed by the fetishization of a favourite space at a certain scale. Inflection vol. 13 explores the potential of detail to understand, alter, and improve the built environment. We invite multidisciplinary contributors to create scholarly insights that explore detail.

 

The word ‘detail’ derives from the French ‘de tailler,’ meaning “to cut up into pieces.” [1] One of its earliest uses in an architectural context is in Philibert de L’Orme’s Nouvelles inventions pour bien bastir et a petits fraiz (1561), where the term appears many times alongside “pierre,” together meaning “cut stone.” [2] Here, detailing involves both the act of cutting and the production of a cut stone. The implication is that detail oscillates between the abstraction and production of a realised moment, and possesses agency in design.

 

Details obfuscate, bring nefarious elements into light, and create desirable outcomes through revelation or concealment. Details distill something to its essence, which, in turn, is prone to unpredictable extrapolation or interpretation. Details draw out commonalities and differences, serving to differentiate or unite individuals and cultures in our increasingly complex social and political milieu.

 

Beyond depicting how materials come together in a building, the architectural detail exists as an abstract agent of intent that expresses political realities. Discovering a concealed detail elicits a drastic re-evaluation and, in so doing, reveals the character. It is in this pursuit of re-evaluation and discovery that the topic of detail becomes a prescient tool in navigating our calamitous times.

 

Edward Ford treats detail not only as ornament or tectonic, but as a site of meaning and agency. Across his texts [3], he rejects the idea that details merely express a larger concept. Instead, he argues that details carry ideas that the building as a whole cannot express. For Ford, joints are not neutral connections; they express social relationships, hierarchies, tolerances, and boundaries. What details reinforce, contradict, complicate, or expose tensions of architecture? A building’s language becomes legible through detail, and yet detail can be developed autonomously, revealing and manipulating architecture’s inherent condition as a marriage between the tangible and the intangible. 

 

Details exist independently of buildings themselves; economics, values, authorship, and culture operate as abstract, nonphysical components of architecture. Are non-physical details in conflict with physical components? Do architects consider details within a vacuum, disconnected from their environment? In The Poetics of Space [4], Bachelard details how spaces are experienced through memories and feelings. Places become repositories of experiences, where smells, textures, and spatial conditions trigger recollection, suggesting that environments hold and activate memory through their details.

 

The 2022 Architectural Association’s lecture series, titled  God is in the Details, [5] discussed labor and the politics of construction. These scholars emphasize how craftsmanship elevates standard materials through precision, care, and assembly, encouraging a holistic design approach. Christine Wall’s [6] contributions further examine the invisible systems of labor and material production that underpin architectural detailing. Her work interrogates how the details of construction processes, contracts, and economies shape what is ultimately created.

 

Micro-scale details significantly contribute to macro-scale outcomes; this phenomenon [7] tells us that details are the point where precision and imprecision propagate. The exponential consequences of details determine the magnitude of time, labour, and resources a project consumes and, in so doing, give significant weight to them. Zaha Hadid’s One Thousand Museum [8] had a misalignment of three millimeters at the base of a column, multiplied vertically, resulted in a gap of  25 millimeters eight floors above: halting construction. Negligible at the scale of a single joint becomes catastrophic at the scale of a skyscraper. 

 

In examining detail as a site of revelation, concealment, propagation, and as a cultural language, Inflection vol. 13 invites contributions that explore the role of detail in the built environment. We invite full paper drafts of academic pieces (up to 4,500 words), practice-related pieces (up to 1,000 words), abstract or fictional works (up to 500 words), and visual artworks that explore these themes.

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Abstracts (500 words) of academic and practice-oriented pieces can be submitted to inflectionjournal@gmail.com until March 31st, 2026.

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Notes

 

1. Eric Bellin. Delineating the Detail: The Communication of Architectural Particulars, 1750–1872. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, n.d.
2. deDL’Orme, Philibert. Nouvelles inventions pour bien bastir et à petits fraiz. Paris: Federic Morel, 1561.
3. Ford, Edward R. The Architectural Detail. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
   Ford, Edward R. The Details of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
   Ford, Edward R. Five Houses, Ten Details. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
4. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
5. Architectural Association School of Architecture. God Is in the Details. AA Lecture Series. YouTube Playlist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPdWj2bqSvM&list=PLI1nDzeohfnmyPJyPSUGI7cBYysAYI2U0
6. Wall, Christine. Constructing Brutalism: In Situ Knowledge and Skill on London’s South Bank. In Producing Non-Simultaneity, 16. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2017.
7. Smith, Peter. The Butterfly Effect. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 91 (1990–1991): 247–267. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545139
8. Public Broadcasting Service. Impossible Builds: The Scorpion Tower. Season 1, episode 1. 2018. Available to stream on PBS.org and via PBS apps.

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Vol. 13 Editors

Alex Crowe
Moatasem Esmat
Darcy Jane Resch
Mia Richter
Elena Stefanos

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Submissions must adhere to the Inflection referencing style guides and image requirements, as outlined below:

 

Referencing Style Guide

• In general, Inflection uses the Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition) as a guide for grammar, punctuation and referencing. The Chicago Manual of Style is available online to subscribers at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org. A freely available citation guide can be found at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html, or through the University of Melbourne’s citation tool, http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/recite/citations/chicago/generalNotes.html. When preparing work for publication in Inflection, we ask that authors follow the Chicago Manual as closely as possible to maintain stylistic consistency and ensure all work is fully referenced. Inflection uses Australian or British English spelling, and asks that authors prepare their work accordingly.

• Inflection uses endnotes in preference to footnote or in-text citation. When preparing work for submission, please make sure that notes are formatted as endnotes. A separate bibliography is not necessary. In general, the basic format for referencing in Inflection is as follows: Given Name Surname, Title (Location: Publisher, Date), page number(s).

• In general, references should be as concise as possible. For example, only a city name is needed when referencing a place of publication – the country or state of publication is not required.

• In the second and subsequent note to a previously referenced text, a short form reference should be used, in the following format: Surname, Title, page number-page number.

• When a reference is immediately followed in the endnote sequence by an identical reference, use: Ibid.

• Where the next reference is from a different page of the same text, the correct format is: Ibid., page number(s).

• Under Inflection’s endnote referencing style, notes will typically not occur on the same page as their reference number. For this reason, we recommend that contributors avoid using notes for supplementary remarks. Where possible, comments should be incorporated into the body in parentheses.

 

Image Guidelines
Images must be (ideally) 300dpi and in TIFF format. For black and white images, the colour profile must be set to grayscale, and for colour images, the profile must be set to CMYK. This can be adjusted in Adobe Photoshop (Image>Mode).

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