Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency

Published: 02/09/2024

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven[…]

Analogical City

Published: 01/18/2024

In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of[…]

The Social Properties of Concrete

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

Concrete is a ubiquitous part of our world. It composes our dwellings and shapes our infrastructures. It unites and divides urban space and is used to wage both war and peace. Concrete is simultaneously an indicator of freedom and development and is an essential part of the carceral apparatus. The Social Properties of Concrete begins[…]

Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry is a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our urban reality. With a focus on the people who are paid to wash and fold, Hand Book explores the[…]

Notes on Trumpspace: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Fantasy of Home

Imprint: Dead Letter Office

Published: 01/19/2023

Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home. ~ Trump Tower advertisement In the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, considerable ink was spilled on the architecture and interior design of the buildings owned and inhabited by Donald J. Trump. In an effort to understand the inner workings of America’s[…]

Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods

Imprint: Advanced Methods

Published: 09/15/2022

What does it mean to “speak for the social” in projects of technical and infrastructural change? This is the problem that the contributors to Speaking for the Social: A Catalogue of Methods set out to explore through a series of creative interventions that reimagine the role for qualitative social science in understanding and shaping design[…]

Building Black: Towards Antiracist Architecture

Published: 05/19/2022

Building Black: Towards Antiracist Architecture brings together the forefronts of Black Studies and architectural theory. Only recently, architecture and urban planning have started to confront their constitution of race as a social referent, and their part in the establishment of racist logics. This confrontation usually results in projects that respond to their surroundings, that merge into[…]

Helicography

Imprint: Dead Letter Office

Published: 07/22/2021

Part art history essay, part experimental fiction, part theoretical manifesto on the politics of equivalence, Helicography examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson’s iconic 1970 artwork Spiral Jetty. In an essay and film made to accompany the earthwork, Smithson invites us to imagine the stone helix of his structure at various orders of[…]