This issue of Materia Arquitectura delves into night life in the urban environment, inviting us to rethink architecture in a broader context: from its governance and temporality to pleasure, intimacy, and collective diversity. For DAVID CARALT, the guest editor of this issue, the night city is a territory of liberation, strangeness, and conflict, a universe of emotions and transgressions. Interviewed in this issue, MARC ARMENGAUD the night is always surrounded by ambiguity. For him, the night transforms architecture into a means to stage emptiness, relationships, or the climate. ROBERTO ZANCAN and JAVIER FERNÁNDEZ CONTRERAS present Scènes de Nuit, a research project on the role of the night in shaping contemporary cities and societies that proposes a nocturnal epistemology of architecture. CARLO DEREGIBUS explores the habitus of intimacy in the urban context, proposing that, at night, windows become the true thresholds between what is public and what is private. CHRISTIAN SAAVEDRA investigates the ludic night city, specifically the practice of skateboarding to understand how night transforms the city into a propitious scenario for the emergence of alternative public spaces. Based on the film Night Falls, GEORGINA CEBEY analyzes the night as an instance that shapes urban imaginaries,
problematizing the relationships between darkness, the city, and the subjects in the context of Mexican modernity. Emphasizing the importance of night studies in academic research, public policy, and activism, CRISTINA CONTANDRIOPOULOS and VALERIA TÉLLEZ NIEMEYER discuss “Montreal by Night”, a seminar focused on the tension between the official images of the city and its nocturnal activities. The recent Venice Architecture
Biennale is the subject of criticism offered by SOL PÉREZ MARTÍNEZ, who highlights it as a starting point for a collective process of revealing, tracking, and speculating about a future committed to racial and environmental justice. In one of the graphic reports in this issue, NICOLÁS SÁNCHEZ presents images that evoke a fascinating mixture of terror and attraction to the uncertain, the diffuse, and the incomplete; in the other, CHIARA CARPENTER and GIOVANNA SILVA immerse us in Nightswimming, a history of discotheques, told through the spaces they occupy.

Guest editor David Caralt