Folly, Issue 2: Cultivation

About Folly:

Folly is an irregular journal that supports both playful and critical writing on and around architecture.

In this issue:

Folly 02 was published in the Autumn of 2025 on the theme of Cultivation.

The starting point was the fourteenth-century Codex Mediceus Laurentianus, which contained Vitruvius’ De Architectura (On Architecture) and was appended with Cato’s De Agri Cultura and Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum (On Agriculture). Seldom such an early communion of arts – architecture and agriculture – could be more fertile. The two, since their origins, have long cultivated one another: from the rudimentary shelters of architecture’s mythic beginnings to the manicured gardens of country houses, from the ancient surveyor’s division of land to the ruthlessness of industrialised farming. This proximity lies in cultivation itself: the term, inextricably linked to culture, rooted in the Latin colere and cultura, carries the profound duplicity of tilling the soil and founding homesteads. Broadly speaking, cultivation consists of a series of acts, including to establish, process, develop, nurture, and form. Thus, the authors responded to this edition.