What is architecture NOW, today?  What is contemporary?

We architects spend so much of our critical and intellectual efforts looking either to the past or the future, we often have little left to reflect on what architecture is now, and what it can be at a time in which nostalgia is an Instagram filter and the future is a shiny smoothing effect.

Now That’s What I Call Music began life in 1983 as a music time capsule, capturing the tracks, trends and shifts of each year’s pop music culture. It represented and reproduced the mood and interests of the time in all its multifarious forms of both production and appeal.  Now That’s What I Call Architecture will do just that.  It will, much like the AA’s famed unit system, embrace the fact that architecture operates across a huge and exhilarating spectrum of ideologies, isms, form-making, political agency, methodologies, and media.  We will declare, design, and deliver the architecture of now and we will do it through an understanding of what the contemporary condition is, what its demands are, and how we can best infiltrate and shape it to reflect a true and collective now.