“Recovery” is a fantastically metaphoric description of a historic preservation practice, because it immediately invites a search for a social subject. Whose recovery, and is it achieved by the simple safeguarding of physical artifacts or by intangible processes around them? The parallel usage of the term also expands Giles’ term beyond a literal description of manual labor to encompass a breadth of potential expert and non-expert relationships to the built environment. Recovery can be medical (the healing of the body from trauma or injury), mental (regulation or suspension of illness, abandonment of addiction), political (reclamation of colonized lands or stolen places and artifacts), economic (the return of lost value) and architectural (the restoration of erased, damaged or lost materials). The properties of the term “recovery” invite an inquiry that explores a set of human relationships to the built environment that may exist more evidently in affect than in the solid forms of artifacts.

This journal issue aims to explore potential theorizations of “recovery” as a method of making meaning with the built environment. The historic use of the term by Giles and others in architectural salvage, itself a contested and sometimes-orphaned historic preservation practice, deserves more full articulation in an age in which, per Keller Easterling, demolition is more often the product of the architect than design of new forms. Yet the other possible associations of “recovery” in the current age also could create a wider sense of the power of the term to define relationships of producing new versions of the built environment against the destructive forces of warfare, climate change, colonization, dispossession, genocide, economic deprivation, population decline and financialized capital. Some of the acts that contributors could consider are official, while others may be scholarly. Some are desperate acts under pressure, and others are deeply intentional projects with deep support. The volume aims especially to capture a sense of unauthorized processes, discourses and acts around the built environment, in the spirit of the outsider stance of Larry Giles. Theoretical essays, case studies and critical biographies of key figures are all welcome.