Guest-edited by Peter J Baldwin

It is not without irony that in an age characterised by the dissolution of certainty – a consequence of digital dematerialisation and the catastrophic destabilisation of our social institutions and natural world – architecture, for so long the repository for our myths and the vessel for our intangible narratives and rituals, has been stripped bare. Increasingly preoccupied with the physical, material and measurable, architecture has forfeited its original purpose as a mediating link between the tacit and the tangible. Drawing on our enduring fascination with the ethereal and uncanny, this AD frames the spectral as a deconstructive gesture that undermines the fixedness and certainties of binary logics, a means to develop new practices and positions from which to address our contemporary uncertainties. Gathering a body of work that explores architecture’s long romance with the incorporeal, the issue is intended as a catalyst through which latency, contingency and indeterminacy can once more be valued, cultivated and nurtured.