«The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city», wrote Leon Battista Alberti, echoed by Palladio. Since then, architects have repeated like a mantra this idea that, under the wide sky of architecture, the large and the small do nothing but correspond—tied by a web of analogies grounded in the rationality of the art of building (Pisani 2018). And yet, it is precisely the rejection of the idea of a direct correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm that we generally take as the beginning of the modern age: that is when Brunelleschi demonstrated to his fellow citizens that the wooden model of Santa Maria del Fiore and the church under construction were two different things, and that the size of the latter—the size, not the proportions—required, in order to be materially built, entirely original solutions that had never been conceived before. In this issue of SRSA, we invite you to reflect on a question that architecture has always had to grapple with: the problem of scale. What role do scale-related factors play in design and construction processes? In what ways, and with what degrees of awareness, have these factors been conceptualized throughout history? To what extent have the ideas of theorists and treatise-writers been reflected in the practical work of architects? And—shifting our focus from the objects of study to the lenses through which we observe them—to what extent do variations in focus allow us to grasp different aspects of historical dynamics? Below are a few hints, that can be freely developed.

Read more on the website: https://www.aistarch.org/studi-e-ricerche-srsa/srsa-call/.

Terms and deadlines:
Authors are invited to submit an abstract (max 1,000 words/7,000 characters) together with a concise bibliography, 5 keywords and a short CV to direzione.srsagmail.com (please indicate in the subject line: Call 16 - Rootless). If the proposal is accepted, the author will be asked to write a text of 20,000-50,000 characters (3,000-7,500 words), including spaces and footnotes, accompanied by 10-12 images, carefully following the journal’s guidelines. The texts will be double-blind peer-reviewed and the final decision on each publication will be made by the Editor-in-Chief, who may also seek the advice of other experts.

Deadline for abstract submission: April 27, 2025
Notification of abstract acceptance or refusal: May 4, 2025
Deadline for paper submission: September 28, 2025