This week, we’d like to focus the attention on the April issue of the Avery Review, which celebrates the students who submitted winning entries to the third annual Essay Prize. The essays are evidence of a commitment to deepening our collective understanding of the objects of architectural thought, and to testing the limits of the essay as a form. We are proud to re-present them here.

In issue 46, first prize winner Athena Do (University of California at Berkeley) parses the design guidelines of the Development Handbook for the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center; second prize winner Sameeah Ahmed-Arai (University of Cape Town) refracts the Sipopo Congress Center in New Guinea, and the development discourse that structures it, through an anti-“anti-politics” lens; second prize winner James Andrew Billingsley (University of Pennsylvania) composes an alternative portrait of Greenland that is layered, complex, diverse, and rogue; and Romy Kießling (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths) considers whether private property rights might be a way of addressing climate change accountability.

This week, we’d like to focus the attention on Avery Shorts, which launched Avery Shorts Live, a venue for off-season Shorts, to continue sharing timely, bite-sized reflections between our usual publication rhythms. Read more about the initiative here.

We’ve rounded up several Avery Shorts that consider (albeit obliquely) what it means to “show up” as a spatial practice and that advocate for methods for global solidarity.

From Season 1, After Belonging Agency exposes the inadequacy of abstract symbols of national production, instead arguing for more material approaches to belonging.

From Season 2, Laura Diamond advocates for the imprisoned activist and artist Shahidul Alam whose work challenges the Western image of Bangladesh.

And from Season 3, Elvia Wilk writes from the protests in Hong Kong, abandoning touristic assumptions of how the city should accommodate visitors, and instead meets the city on its own terms.

In the spirit of keeping connected during these extreme times, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City is going digital and uploading chapters from our newest titles once a week. This week, we’ve published excerpts from Ways of Knowing Cities, edited by Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley.

As for the Avery Review, we invite you to peruse The Institutions of Architecture, a collection of essays that reconsider the professional, pedagogical, curatorial, and critical institutions that construct architecture’s foundations, limits, and ambitions.

We suggest starting with two pieces that evaluate the ideas of two foundational figures: Brendan Cormier’s “I Watched Frank Gehry’s MasterClass So You Don’t Have To” and Amale Andraos’s “Beyond Bigness: Rereading the Peutinger Map.”

This week: a hodgepodge of readings from the Avery Review to complement your Weekly Broadcasts and to offer critical positions on the possibilities of a political practice.

We suggest reading Craig L. Wilkin’s piece “Innervisions” on the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice designed by MASS Design Group; Anna Puigjaner and Guillermo López’s fresh take on the fraught histories of Ricardo Bofill in their essay “Revisiting Systems”; Camila Reyes Alé’s piece “The Form of Dissent” on dissident architectural practice; and Marcelo López -Dinardi’s review of “Folk Politics at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.”