By Guillermo Acosta Navarrete & Gabriel Gutierrez Huerta

Architecture is the perfect form of camouflage. As buildings recede into the background of everyday life, the myriad forces that shape our natural, social, and political landscapes hide in plain sight. Embedded within the spatial and material organisations of the built environment are ideas of value, hierarchy, and control that tilt the ground and influence perception in the name of endless competing interests. Operating across multiple scales and media, architectural camouflage gives familiar form to obscure objectives. Design transforms and encodes our shared environments, from domestic domains to digital territories, through its material practices, aesthetics, and discourses. Immanent in the periphery, architecture's images are internalized as forms for understanding and reshaping the world. Camouflage, in turn, dwells in the architecture of our collective subconscious. This issue of Perspecta considers the complexities and potentialities of architectural concealment, obfuscation, and mimicry; of the power inherent in architecture's expanding capacity as media.