The Architectural Review Apr 2021

 Featured on the cover of the April issue, Mimei Thompson’s fantastical cave painting reveals the strata sedimented into our planet’s rocky crust, striped through with minerals and other richnesses and beckoning us further inside. Far from being a blank or inconsequential space, the underground is a critical and contested site, full of foundations, infrastructures, and junk; hidden architectures tucked neatly underneath the surface. Excavated, extracted from, dug up and bored through, the underground is made messy so that things on the surface can be kept clean. This issue, we peel back the skin of the earth to look at what goes on under.