A half-day symposium that will bring together practitioners active in producing and disseminating media about architecture to discuss means, methods, and issues relevant to interpreting and representing built form. Organized by Professors Ashley Simone and Adam Elstein, the symposium's participants will position print media—books, photographs, and drawn narratives—as processes and forms of abstraction, translation, and criticism that are integral to the evolution of architecture culture.
In examining various ways books originate and develop, Diana Murphy will discuss the printed book and her professional career in publishing while responding to a series of questions: Is there a future for the physical book? Who writes books on architecture and urbanism, and why? Why do (some) architects write? Weaving figures such as Esther McCoy and Denise Scott Brown into her narrative, Murphy will present several titles published by Metropolis Books on subjects in architecture, architectural history, and urbanism.
The role of bookmaking in contemporary architectural culture and how digital publications have facilitated the reimagination of the physical book—instead of precipitating its demise—will be discussed by Reto Geiser. His recent book Liberated Dwelling (Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), the first English translation of Sigfried Giedion’s Befreites Wohnen (1929), will serve as an exemplar for the complexity of adapting content, be it textual, material, or visual.
James Graham will discuss printing techniques—from the woodcut to the xerox to ubiquitous digital methods—and the frictions of materializing architectural publications. In so doing, Graham will explore how architectural knowledge changed with technological advances in printing and the role of print in canon-making and colonial knowledge structures.
Creating structural conceits for projects is a critical aspect of Glen Cummings’ work as a graphic designer. In a discussion about the role of thumbnails as tools for structuring content in the publication design process, Cummings will reveal multiple ways to read books while touching on the notions of scale, temporality, and phenomenology.
Drawing from his recent book Epics in the Everyday: Photography, Architecture and the Problem of Realism (Park Books, 2020), Jesús Vassallo will address the manifold reciprocities that can exist between architectural and photographic practice. Both disciplines occupy the space between fine art and applied craft, leaving them subject to interpretation and abstraction. Seeking to locate the potential for realism in representation, Vassallo will outline an alternative history of modern architecture and photography.
In a parafictional account of a chronicler inspired by the writing of Walter Benjamin, and drawing on magical realist scenarios from modern literature, Mustafa Faruki will explore storytelling as craft through the media of architectural drawing. Faruki will position representation as a generative and rhetorical device, a strategy characteristic of both his speculative work in the field of architecture and his pedagogical methods.
Glen Cummings is a graphic designer and creative director at MTWTF. Glen collaborates with a wide range of clients to translate complex content into engaging experiences and objects. Recent publication work includes Toward an Urban Ecology, by Kate Orff/Scape; LOT-EK: Objects + Operations; The Revolution Will Be Stopped Halfway: Oscar Niemeyer in Algeria by Jason Oddy; Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image by Caitlin Blanchfield and Farzin Lotfi-Jam; and The Art of InEquality: Architecture Housing and Real Estate: A Provisional Report, published by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for The Study of American Architecture. Glen served on the Yale University School of Art faculty from 2002-2013 and has taught at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mustafa Faruki is an educator and founder of theLab-Lab for architecture, a purveyor of unbuilt work, unpublished volumes, and unsolicited pleasures that are instigated by clients such as humor, desire, memory, irony, alienation, vulgarity, and loss. Projects by theLab-Lab have received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Drawing Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. In 2017, theLab-Lab was awarded the prestigious League Prize for Young Architects and Designers by the Architectural League of New York. In 2020, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the firm’s work, where it is currently on view in the exhibition Broken Nature. Following his selection as the 2018 Reyner Banham Fellow by the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning, he has recently returned to teach in the School’s graduate program.
Reto Geiser is an architect and a scholar focusing on intersections between modern architecture, pedagogy, and media. He is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Rice University, where he teaches history, theory, and design. As a founding partner of the Houston-based design practice MG&Co., Reto develops spatial strategies to accommodate objects that range in scale from books to buildings. The studio’s work includes the installation Rooms for Books featured at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial and the exhibition design for Building a New New World, realized in 2019 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The publication of his recent book Liberated Dwelling (2019), the first English translation of Sigfried Giedion’s 1929 book Befreites Wohnen, follows other books by him that include Giedion and America (2018), House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House (2016), and Reading Revolutionaries (2014).
James Graham is an architect, historian, and assistant professor at the California College of the Arts who previously was the director of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and founding editor of the Avery Review at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. James practices and writes about architecture’s discursive forms, whether as editorial platforms or experiments in digital and print publication. His dissertation—Psychotechnical Modernism: Architecture, Design, and Occupational Therapy, 1914–1945—received the Graham Foundation's Carter Manny Award in 2017 and his work has been published widely in scholarly journals, online platforms, and edited volumes.
Diana Murphy is a publisher of architecture, art, and design books. She is currently Publisher at the Guggenheim Museum. Previously Diana was a publisher at Metropolis Books, where she developed award-winning titles on architecture, design, urbanism, and land use, establishing the imprint as one of the leaders in the field. Prior to joining Metropolis Books, she ran an independent publishing consultancy working with museums and other cultural organizations, university presses, and scholarly journals, as well as architects and independent scholars. Over the course of her career in independent, nonprofit, and commercial publishing, she has created books with the Architectural League of New York, Architecture for Humanity, Bryan Bell, Deborah Berke, the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Brad Cloepfil, Alice T. Friedman, Deborah Gans, Greg Goldin, Green Dragon Office, Fritz Haeg, Heavy Meta, Gere Kavanaugh, Sam Lubell, McGinty, Mary McLeod, Pentagram, Emily Pilloton, Public Architecture, Moshe Safdie, Louise Sandhaus, Denise Scott Brown, Kathryn Smith, and Volume, among many others.
Jesús Vassallo is a Spanish architect and writer, and an associate professor at Rice University where he is the director of the Affordable Housing Laboratory, which provides research and development strategies for community development corporations and other nonprofits in the affordable housing sector. His criticism focuses on the problem of realism in architecture. Vassallo is the author of Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture (Park Books, 2016) and Epics in the Everyday: Photography, Architecture and the Problem of Realism (Park Books, 2019). His articles have been published internationally in magazines such as El Croquis, AA Files, 2G, Log, Harvard Design Magazine, Domus, or Arquitectura Viva.
Ashley Simone is an editor, writer, photographer, and educator whose practice operates at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals published by Actar, BOMB Magazine, Lars Müller Publishers, Oro Editions, and Thames and Hudson. Among other volumes on architecture and urbanism, she is the editor of A Genealogy of Modern Architecture (Lars Müller, 2015) and The Other Modern Movement (Yale University Press, 2021) by Kenneth Frampton, Two Journeys by Michael Webb (Lars Müller, 2018), and Frank Gehry Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One, 1954-1978 by Jean-Louis Cohen (Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 2020). Ashley is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn, where she teaches courses on representation and transdisciplinary writing.
Adam Elstein is a designer, photographer, and writer whose work engages architecture, urbanism, and critical theory. He is the principal of Adam Elstein Studio, a photography and architectural rendering practice based in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Adam's photographic work has won numerous awards and has been exhibited in the US and Europe. He teaches master classes in architectural photography at the Santa Fe Workshops in New Mexico and speaks regularly at photographic industry conferences. Adam holds an M.Arch degree from Pratt Institute and has worked as an architectural designer and fabrication consultant in the studios of several internationally known artists, including Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, and Kelley Walker. He has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt since 2007, and has taught classes on a wide variety of subjects, including computer modeling and visualization, architectural photography, real estate finance and development, special topics in theory, and advanced design studio. Adam is currently a Phd candidate in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland.
“There are many kinds of architectural realities and interpretations of those realities, which include the major issue of representation or re-presentation. Whatever the medium used… a process is taking place. Some sort of distortion is occurring, a distortion that has to do with the interpretation and reinterpretation of space and all the mysteries the word space encompasses, including its spirit.”
—John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth
Media is a conduit for the cultivation of architectural culture. In the context of the discourse and production of architecture, media translates and re-presents ideas, objects, environments, and the spatial dimension. This process takes place before and after a building is realized or a thing is made. Representation that comes before realization is speculative or indexical; in either of these cases, it is an abstraction integral to the materialization of ideas. Media such as written discourse, photography, or a book that is developed after a subject exists inevitably is a form of interpretation and critique. The representational media of the discipline, then, is a form of criticism that becomes integral to the evolution of architecture culture. As such, the means and methods by which architecture’s representational analogs are conceived warrant investigation. Analysis of the relationship between architecture and the mediums that represent it often focus on the reductive capacity of media instead of its reciprocal possibilities for built form, citing its potential to subvert architecture’s spatial integrity and suppress its phenomenological dimension. Recognizing the role that media plays in both documenting and advancing culture, BLOW-UP: Architecture in Print seeks to explore counterpoints to this condition by bringing together practitioners active in the interpretation and dissemination of discourse and media about architecture. The exploration will be structured as a series of conversations with professionals operating as writers and editors, photographers and image-makers, and publishers and graphic designers. Each conversation will focus on the representation of architecture and explore the means and methods by which it embodies and advances culture through reciprocal and synergetic means.
A half-day symposium that will bring together practitioners active in producing and disseminating media about architecture to discuss means, methods, and issues relevant to interpreting and representing built form. Organized by Professors Ashley Simone and Adam Elstein, the symposium's participants will position print media—books, photographs, and drawn narratives—as processes and forms of abstraction, translation, and criticism that are integral to the evolution of architecture culture.
In examining various ways books originate and develop, Diana Murphy will discuss the printed book and her professional career in publishing while responding to a series of questions: Is there a future for the physical book? Who writes books on architecture and urbanism, and why? Why do (some) architects write? Weaving figures such as Esther McCoy and Denise Scott Brown into her narrative, Murphy will present several titles published by Metropolis Books on subjects in architecture, architectural history, and urbanism.
The role of bookmaking in contemporary architectural culture and how digital publications have facilitated the reimagination of the physical book—instead of precipitating its demise—will be discussed by Reto Geiser. His recent book Liberated Dwelling (Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), the first English translation of Sigfried Giedion’s Befreites Wohnen (1929), will serve as an exemplar for the complexity of adapting content, be it textual, material, or visual.
James Graham will discuss printing techniques—from the woodcut to the xerox to ubiquitous digital methods—and the frictions of materializing architectural publications. In so doing, Graham will explore how architectural knowledge changed with technological advances in printing and the role of print in canon-making and colonial knowledge structures.
Creating structural conceits for projects is a critical aspect of Glen Cummings’ work as a graphic designer. In a discussion about the role of thumbnails as tools for structuring content in the publication design process, Cummings will reveal multiple ways to read books while touching on the notions of scale, temporality, and phenomenology.
Drawing from his recent book Epics in the Everyday: Photography, Architecture and the Problem of Realism (Park Books, 2020), Jesús Vassallo will address the manifold reciprocities that can exist between architectural and photographic practice. Both disciplines occupy the space between fine art and applied craft, leaving them subject to interpretation and abstraction. Seeking to locate the potential for realism in representation, Vassallo will outline an alternative history of modern architecture and photography.
In a parafictional account of a chronicler inspired by the writing of Walter Benjamin, and drawing on magical realist scenarios from modern literature, Mustafa Faruki will explore storytelling as craft through the media of architectural drawing. Faruki will position representation as a generative and rhetorical device, a strategy characteristic of both his speculative work in the field of architecture and his pedagogical methods.
Glen Cummings is a graphic designer and creative director at MTWTF. Glen collaborates with a wide range of clients to translate complex content into engaging experiences and objects. Recent publication work includes Toward an Urban Ecology, by Kate Orff/Scape; LOT-EK: Objects + Operations; The Revolution Will Be Stopped Halfway: Oscar Niemeyer in Algeria by Jason Oddy; Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image by Caitlin Blanchfield and Farzin Lotfi-Jam; and The Art of InEquality: Architecture Housing and Real Estate: A Provisional Report, published by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for The Study of American Architecture. Glen served on the Yale University School of Art faculty from 2002-2013 and has taught at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mustafa Faruki is an educator and founder of theLab-Lab for architecture, a purveyor of unbuilt work, unpublished volumes, and unsolicited pleasures that are instigated by clients such as humor, desire, memory, irony, alienation, vulgarity, and loss. Projects by theLab-Lab have received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Drawing Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. In 2017, theLab-Lab was awarded the prestigious League Prize for Young Architects and Designers by the Architectural League of New York. In 2020, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the firm’s work, where it is currently on view in the exhibition Broken Nature. Following his selection as the 2018 Reyner Banham Fellow by the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning, he has recently returned to teach in the School’s graduate program.
Reto Geiser is an architect and a scholar focusing on intersections between modern architecture, pedagogy, and media. He is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Rice University, where he teaches history, theory, and design. As a founding partner of the Houston-based design practice MG&Co., Reto develops spatial strategies to accommodate objects that range in scale from books to buildings. The studio’s work includes the installation Rooms for Books featured at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial and the exhibition design for Building a New New World, realized in 2019 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The publication of his recent book Liberated Dwelling (2019), the first English translation of Sigfried Giedion’s 1929 book Befreites Wohnen, follows other books by him that include Giedion and America (2018), House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House (2016), and Reading Revolutionaries (2014).
James Graham is an architect, historian, and assistant professor at the California College of the Arts who previously was the director of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and founding editor of the Avery Review at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. James practices and writes about architecture’s discursive forms, whether as editorial platforms or experiments in digital and print publication. His dissertation—Psychotechnical Modernism: Architecture, Design, and Occupational Therapy, 1914–1945—received the Graham Foundation's Carter Manny Award in 2017 and his work has been published widely in scholarly journals, online platforms, and edited volumes.
Diana Murphy is a publisher of architecture, art, and design books. She is currently Publisher at the Guggenheim Museum. Previously Diana was a publisher at Metropolis Books, where she developed award-winning titles on architecture, design, urbanism, and land use, establishing the imprint as one of the leaders in the field. Prior to joining Metropolis Books, she ran an independent publishing consultancy working with museums and other cultural organizations, university presses, and scholarly journals, as well as architects and independent scholars. Over the course of her career in independent, nonprofit, and commercial publishing, she has created books with the Architectural League of New York, Architecture for Humanity, Bryan Bell, Deborah Berke, the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Brad Cloepfil, Alice T. Friedman, Deborah Gans, Greg Goldin, Green Dragon Office, Fritz Haeg, Heavy Meta, Gere Kavanaugh, Sam Lubell, McGinty, Mary McLeod, Pentagram, Emily Pilloton, Public Architecture, Moshe Safdie, Louise Sandhaus, Denise Scott Brown, Kathryn Smith, and Volume, among many others.
Jesús Vassallo is a Spanish architect and writer, and an associate professor at Rice University where he is the director of the Affordable Housing Laboratory, which provides research and development strategies for community development corporations and other nonprofits in the affordable housing sector. His criticism focuses on the problem of realism in architecture. Vassallo is the author of Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture (Park Books, 2016) and Epics in the Everyday: Photography, Architecture and the Problem of Realism (Park Books, 2019). His articles have been published internationally in magazines such as El Croquis, AA Files, 2G, Log, Harvard Design Magazine, Domus, or Arquitectura Viva.
Ashley Simone is an editor, writer, photographer, and educator whose practice operates at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals published by Actar, BOMB Magazine, Lars Müller Publishers, Oro Editions, and Thames and Hudson. Among other volumes on architecture and urbanism, she is the editor of A Genealogy of Modern Architecture (Lars Müller, 2015) and The Other Modern Movement (Yale University Press, 2021) by Kenneth Frampton, Two Journeys by Michael Webb (Lars Müller, 2018), and Frank Gehry Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One, 1954-1978 by Jean-Louis Cohen (Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 2020). Ashley is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn, where she teaches courses on representation and transdisciplinary writing.
Adam Elstein is a designer, photographer, and writer whose work engages architecture, urbanism, and critical theory. He is the principal of Adam Elstein Studio, a photography and architectural rendering practice based in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Adam's photographic work has won numerous awards and has been exhibited in the US and Europe. He teaches master classes in architectural photography at the Santa Fe Workshops in New Mexico and speaks regularly at photographic industry conferences. Adam holds an M.Arch degree from Pratt Institute and has worked as an architectural designer and fabrication consultant in the studios of several internationally known artists, including Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, and Kelley Walker. He has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt since 2007, and has taught classes on a wide variety of subjects, including computer modeling and visualization, architectural photography, real estate finance and development, special topics in theory, and advanced design studio. Adam is currently a Phd candidate in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland.
“There are many kinds of architectural realities and interpretations of those realities, which include the major issue of representation or re-presentation. Whatever the medium used… a process is taking place. Some sort of distortion is occurring, a distortion that has to do with the interpretation and reinterpretation of space and all the mysteries the word space encompasses, including its spirit.”
—John Hejduk, The Flatness of Depth
Media is a conduit for the cultivation of architectural culture. In the context of the discourse and production of architecture, media translates and re-presents ideas, objects, environments, and the spatial dimension. This process takes place before and after a building is realized or a thing is made. Representation that comes before realization is speculative or indexical; in either of these cases, it is an abstraction integral to the materialization of ideas. Media such as written discourse, photography, or a book that is developed after a subject exists inevitably is a form of interpretation and critique. The representational media of the discipline, then, is a form of criticism that becomes integral to the evolution of architecture culture. As such, the means and methods by which architecture’s representational analogs are conceived warrant investigation. Analysis of the relationship between architecture and the mediums that represent it often focus on the reductive capacity of media instead of its reciprocal possibilities for built form, citing its potential to subvert architecture’s spatial integrity and suppress its phenomenological dimension. Recognizing the role that media plays in both documenting and advancing culture, BLOW-UP: Architecture in Print seeks to explore counterpoints to this condition by bringing together practitioners active in the interpretation and dissemination of discourse and media about architecture. The exploration will be structured as a series of conversations with professionals operating as writers and editors, photographers and image-makers, and publishers and graphic designers. Each conversation will focus on the representation of architecture and explore the means and methods by which it embodies and advances culture through reciprocal and synergetic means.