Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series examines architecture's role in the construction of the contemporary security apparatus and its global spaces of exception, from detention camps to embassies, from Faraday shields to smart cities. The publication brings scholars and professionals from diverse disciplinary backgrounds—including architects, artists, human rights experts, military officials, policymakers, hackers, and novelists—to investigate shifting notions of privacy, safety, and their spatial manifestations; to discuss the consequences of the civilian appropriation of military technologies; and to set an agenda for design professionals to engage on a technological, cultural, and political level through the exploration of five main topics—drones, retreat, missions, compounds, and adhocracy.

Ethel Baraona Pohl is a critic, writer, and curator. She is cofounder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory and the social milieu. She is editor of Quaderns d'arquitectura i urbanisme and contributor to several magazines and books. Her writing appears in Open Source Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2015), Volume, MAS Context, The New City Reader, and Uncube, among others. Associate curator for Adhocracy, initially commissioned for the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial and exhibited at the New Museum (New York, 2013) and Lime Wharf (London, 2013). Curator of the third Think Space program with the theme Money; she recently curated (together with César Reyes and Pelin Tan) the exhibition Adhocracy ATHENS at the Onassis Cultural Centre in 2015. Since 2016, dpr-barcelona is a platform member of Future Architecture, the first pan-European platform of architecture museums, festivals, and producers. She is director of Foros, the architecture lecture series of the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture.

Marina Otero Verzier is head of Research and Development at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Between 2014 and 2017 she was chief curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 with the After Belonging Agency. Previously she was director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, a global network launched by the GSAPP at Columbia University in 2008. Otero studied architecture at TU Delft and ETSAMadrid, where she completed her PhD in 2016. In 2013, as a Fulbright Scholar, she graduated from the MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. Otero has coedited Promiscuous Encounters (GSAPP Books, 2014), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (dpr-barcelona, 2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016). Her current research is concerned with how changing notions of privacy and safety, and their articulation with global circulatory regimes, have an effect on our contemporary spaces of residence.

Malkit Shoshan is founder of the architectural think-tank FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory). She is the author of the award-winning book Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine (Uitgeverij 010, 2010) and coauthor of Village: One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise (Damiani Editore, 2014). She is a member of the editorial board of Footprint, the TU Delft architectural theory journal and her work has been published in Volume, Abitare, Frame, Haaretz, the New York Times, and other publications. She has also exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2002, 2008), the Het Nieuwe Instituut (2014), and the headquarters of UN in New York (2016), among others. In 2015, she was a finalist for the Harvard GSD's Wheelwright Prize. In 2014, as a research fellow at The New Institute, she developed the project Drones and Honeycombs, as a continuation of her research on architecture and conflict. She was the curator of the Dutch pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions. Currently, she is a lecturer at Harvard GSD and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.

As a group, these three collaborators have brought their experiences to develop, in partnership with the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory, Het Nieuwe Instituut, dpr-barcelona, and Columbia University's Studio-X, a series of public events and projects, including: the Drone Salon, the seminar Missions and Missionaries, and the exhibition and panel discussion Lexicon of Retreat at the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial.