Publishing Practices / Strategic Organizations

Please join for a panel discussion to celebrate the opening of Publishing Practices / Strategic Organizations, on Tuesday May 5th starting at 11am. The exhibition features the work developed this semester under the Banham Fellowship through a seminar (Publishing as Practice) on publishing as a critical form of architectural practice, and a studio (Strategic Organizations) to design a contemporary headquarters for the RAND Corporation, the world's first think tank. A panel of invited faculty will discuss publishing and the book as a form of architectural practice; the discussion will also serve as a public review of the final book projects published by students in the seminar. Drinks and snacks will be served. --- Throughout the last century, the history of architecture has been closely related to the history of books produced by architects. Just as buildings produce discourses in and of themselves, so the discourse of the book has often been used by architects to excavate a conceptual space in which (their) buildings can be both produced and understood. Many of the most prominent architects of the past century have also been prolific publishers, whether as editors of magazines and journals (Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, Le Corbusier, Aldo van Eyck, Ernesto Rogers, Rafael Moneo, Peter Eisenman, among others) or as authors of manifestoes and other book formats (Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Buckminster Fuller, among many others). The production of architecture has been inseparable from the production of a related discourse—through magazines, journals, manifestoes, monographs, pamphlets, transcripts, films, interviews—as parallel strands of work that are assumed to support each other, but which in reality often reveal a provocative (and in some cases deliberate) misalignment. Publishing has become a strategic weapon in the architect’s arsenal, deployed for its unique capacity to frame the practice of the architect and to perform as a critical form of architecture itself. The seminar investigates the history of architectural publishing in the past century, studying books by architects that have constituted this parallel form of practice. This investigation is based on an understanding publications as an alternate form of architecture, parallel to and frequently more agile than the production of projects more typically understood as architectural.