design theory

The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators

Published: 09/06/2024

In The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators, Zamler-Carhart impersonates the 12th-century Byzantine princess and historian Anna Comnena as she comes out as trans and tries to write her father’s imperial biography, The Alexiad, while in exile in contemporary West Africa. Outside the Empire,[…]

Building Black: Towards Antiracist Architecture

Published: 05/19/2022

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

ΠCase Files, Vol. 01

Published: 05/13/2021

Over the past ten years, the journal Organs Everywhere (Œ) has promoted conversations that approach architectural design from the edges of the discipline—testing its boundaries, technologies, methods and (e)valuation systems, and keeping them unstable. It has valued transdisciplinary, speculative, and irreverent explorations over strict publishing formats and academic purity, promoting a profanatory and open-ended ethos.[…]

Nothing in MoMA

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Published: 09/22/2018

Nothing in MoMA is a series of photographs captured in areas of Manhattan museums in which there are no artworks, written words, or people. Addressing the “grammar that organizes and secures our scene of looking,” in the words of art historian David Joselit’s introduction, the book imagines a composite empty museum or a narrative of[…]

Liquid Life: On Non-Linear Materiality

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Published: 12/18/2019

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a “machine” would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations[…]

Urban Re-industrialization

Published: 07/25/2017

Urban re-industrialisation could be seen as a method of increasing business effectiveness in the context of a politically stimulated ‘green economy’; it could also be seen as a nostalgic mutation of a creative-class concept, focused on 3D printing, ‘boutique manufacturing’ and crafts. These two notions place urban re-industrialisation within the context of the current neoliberal[…]

Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street

Published: 04/25/2016

It always seems useful to situate a discourse in the wider context of one’s ongoing research. This new book begins where the previous one, Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence, ended. I wrote it in 2010 and my friends Baraona Pohl and César Reyes had the kindness to publish it in 2012. That book started with the hypothesis that architecture is inherently violent because of the way it dissects space and because of the resulting spatial organization of bodies. Architecture is a social discipline, and therefore this violence always ends up as an instrument of politics, whether it’s done consciously or not.

The Funambulist Papers, Volume 2

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Published: 04/09/2015

This book is the second volume of texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011. The editorial line of this second series of twenty-six essays is dedicated to philosophical and political questions about bodies. This choice is informed by Léopold Lambert’s own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Corporeal[…]