Natalia Escobar Castrillón founded O B L / Q U E in 2016 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and serves as the editor of the three issues.

O B L / Q U E Volume 3 deals with three main themes: Monuments and Trauma, Embodied Memory, and Landscapes and Collective Memory. The three themes build upon the thesis of the journal which challenges architectural conservation by positing that there is no neutral historic site, space, or narrative. Historians cannot attain an objective point of view external to their historic moment, and neither can architects.

Escobar Castrillón writes “Rather, history is a contested, dynamic and incommensurable process, and its representations are always partial, exclusionist, and ideologically tainted.”

O B L / Q U E postulates that conservation architects have the opportunity and responsibility to renegotiate history and power relationships embedded in buildings and landscapes through design.

“From this perspective, conservations means questioning, revisioning and, and subverting dominant versions of the past rather than its passive and complicit perpetuation,” Escobar Castrillón argues.