In a time of extreme crises, major social issues, intense market forces and precarious working conditions, architects are seeking new ways to express their commitment. Increasingly, they are taking the initiative themselves, with unsolicited and experimental practices that contribute to urgent themes, deepen architectural practice and at the same time hold up a mirror – to themselves and to the sector. In doing so, they seek free space, parallel to regular building practice, detached from economic logic and functional expectations. In these practices, architecture not only provides an answer to a client’s question, but the architect himself asks the questions.

For this issue on parallel practices, A+ asked Evelien Pieters to act as guest editor. Commissioned by the Flemish Architecture Institute, she and Bart Tritsmans conducted research into these unsolicited practices of architects. They interviewed nearly thirty architects, who spoke about a diversity of parallel practices ranging from design research to artistic interventions, and from material experiments to participatory or activist projects. For the architects, the added value of this type of project lies in the enrichment of their own practice through experimentation and reflection, in innovation and knowledge sharing in the field, and, last but not least, in the added value for society.