Architecture is shifting. It can no longer retreat into the formal, the local, the individual. The crises we face are systemic, planetary, and interconnected. Architecture must radically expand its brief – from the construction of physical form to the design of ethical frameworks, from tectonics to the tech-tonics of collective agency. In this moment of planetary precarity, our mandate is clear: to give form to planetary ethics, to catalyse and amplify, to design for the unrepresented.
Voice of Commons emerges as a planetary architecture of care. First launched at the 2025 Venice Biennale, it now reverberates through Chicago. Here, amid a legacy of radical experimentation, we call not for new buildings, but for new architectures of governance. Not for monuments, but movements. We call for architecture to become a staging ground for planetary citizenship.
We advocate for the legal and political recognition of our four Global Commons – Antarctica, the Ocean, the Atmosphere, and Outer Space. These immense, interconnected systems sustain all life on Earth. They are vast, vital, and yet voiceless. They lie beyond borders, with no Indigenous peoples, no parliaments, no embassies.
They are the architecture we inhabit without walls – the real foundation of every city and every structure we design.