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[…]

Paris Bride: A Modernist Life

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Published: 02/21/2020

In July 1905, in Paris, a young Anglo-French woman called Marie Wheeler became the bride of a Swiss émigré, Johannes Schad. Immediately after the wedding, Marie and Johannes moved to London. And there they lived for nineteen years. In 1924, however, something happened to change their lives, and Marie, in many respects, simply disappeared. Paris[…]

Barton Myers: Works of Architecture and Urbanism

Published: 07/05/2019

Drawing on the vast archival resources of its Architecture and Design Collection, the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum (University of California, Santa Barbara) presents an assessment of 50 years of design by Barton Myers (b. 1934), beginning with his work in the Toronto firm A.J. Diamond and Barton Myers (1967–1975) to his own offices[…]

The Imagery of Interior Spaces

Published: 03/29/2019

On the unstable boundaries between “interior” and “exterior,” “private” and “public,” and always in some way relating to a “beyond,” the imagery of interior space in literature reveals itself as an often disruptive code of subjectivity and of modernity. The wide variety of interior spaces elicited in literature — from the odd room over the[…]

Treatise on the Marvelous for Prestigious Museums

Published: 06/20/2018

Wrapped in modernist architect Marcel Breuer’s 1971 addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art, A Treatise on the Marvelous for Prestigious Museums considers the global ecological catastrophe by way of a speculative address to the art museums of the future, revisiting mid-century modes of site-specificity and speculative collage as utopian practices for the present. Written over[…]

Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century

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Published: 05/15/2014

Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the[…]

Intimate Bureaucracies

Published: 03/09/2012

Intimate Bureaucracies is a history from the future looking backward at our present moment as a turning point. Our systems of organization and control appear unsustainable and brutal, and we are feeling around in the dark for alternatives. Using experiments in social organization in downtown New York City, and other models of potential alternative social[…]