March 28, 2023

Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020)

Considering the spatial and cinematic dimensions of Kasten's transmedia creations

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Barbara Kasten, Books, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Humberto Moro, Irena Haiduk, Stephanie Cristello

Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten (born 1936) has developed her expansive photographic practice through the lens of sculpture, painting, theater, textile and installation. Well known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, the Chicago-based artist has recently begun to be reconsidered within the broader context of architectural theory. This survey contextualizes Kasten’s investigations into how moving images and light play within and through architectural forms.

Alongside full-color plates, the book features a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose 2019 Chicago Marathon stage was designed by Kasten, as well as a number of essays: artist Irena Haiduk discusses Kasten’s collaborations with corporations such as Polaroid; curator Humberto Moro explores the relationship between Kasten’s constructions and midcentury architects from Mexico and Brazil; curator Mimi Zeiger examines the Bauhaus movement from a feminist lens; and editor Cristello recalls historical moments that provide a “stage” through which to consider Kasten’s formulations of space as cinema.

Edited with text by Stephanie Cristello. Text by Irena Haiduk, Humberto Moro, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mimi Zeiger.

May 31, 2021

The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design

TAGS

Architecture, Books, Design, Fleur Watson

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The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design examines the challenges inherent in exhibiting design ideas. Traditionally, exhibitions of architecture and design have predominantly focused on displaying finished outcomes or communicating a work through representation.

In this ground-breaking new book, Fleur Watson unveils the emergence of the ‘new curator’. Instead of exhibiting finished works or artefacts, the rise of ‘performative curation’ provides a space where experimental methods for encountering design ideas are being tested. Here, the role of the curator is not that of ‘custodian’ or ‘expert’ but with the intent to create a shared space of encounter with audiences.

Mise-en-Scène

The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Landscapes

ORO Editions

TAGS

Books, De Nichols, Julia Czerniak, Mike Belleme, Sara Zewde

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Mise-en-Scène is an immersive exploration of the social lives of urban landscapes—the actors and actions that compose the daily theater of urban life. Conceived as a unique collaboration between an urbanist, Chris Reed, and a photographer, Mike Belleme, the book combines photo essays, original maps and drawings, newly commissioned essays, excerpts from historical writings, and interviews with residents. The result is a rigorous and artful examination of the social, cultural, environmental, and economic challenges of life in American cities today. Read More …

January 2021

Experimental Jetset – Superstructures

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Books, Dirk van den Heuvel, Experimental Jetset, Leontine Coelewij, Linda van Deursen

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Superstructures (Notes on Experimental Jetset / Volume 2) is an inquiry into the role of the city as an infrastructure for language (and simultaneously, into the role of language as an infrastructure for the city), as seen through the lens of four historical movements: Constructivism, the Situationist International, Provo, and the Post-Punk explosion. Based on a research project (and accompanying exhibition) by Experimental Jetset, the publication features footnotes written by Vasyl Cherepanyn, Leontine Coelewij, Linda van Deursen, Experimental Jetset, Owen Hatherley, Brad Haylock, Dirk van den Heuvel, Lieven Lahaye, Samata Masato, Tom McDonough, Kateryna Mishchenko, Other Forms, Mark Owens, Megan Patty, Adam Pendleton, Simon Reynolds, Ian F. Svenonius, McKenzie Wark, Lori Waxman, and Mimi Zeiger. The 420-page paperback comes with a 24-page zine, zooming in on the design typology of the original exhibition.

November 2020

33.3 This Point In Time: An Opacity Monograph

In Pursuit of Design Excellence

TAGS

Architecture, Books, HDR

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The title of our first Opacity monograph: 33.3 This Point In Time, marks the completion of our first Opacity cycle. It is a sweeping publication rich with content, from beautiful imagery and compelling infographics to thought-provoking essays by esteemed writers and critics: Mimi Zeiger on Context; Alissa Walker on Form; Susan Szenasy on Materials; Aaron Betsky on Program; Katie Gerfen on Space; and Chrysanthe Broikos on Sustainability.

Edited by Jenna M. McKnight, this monograph looks to both the past and the future; it also looks inward by exploring the people who make up the firm’s vast architectural practice. As this book makes evident, we are composed of many distinct threads that are woven together to form a powerful collective. The Opacity program celebrates the diversity of this collective, while underscoring the shared goal of design excellence.

September 2018

Clocks and Clouds

The Architecture of Escher GuneWardena

Birkhauser

TAGS

Architecture, Barbara Lamprecht, Books, Escher GuneWardena, Lilian Pfaff, Martino Stierli, Nicholas Olsberg, Sabine Eckmann

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Editor: Lilian Pfaff

Clocks and Clouds: The Architecture of Escher GuneWardena, a monograph covering about 30 selected projects – unbuilt and completed – spanning a period of 20 years. The work includes, in addition to expected building types of residential, commercial and institutional categories, projects outside of the architects’ usual realm: Escher, an expert on John Lautner (1911-1994), has edited/co-authored two books on this architect and the firm has restored the Chemosphere and the Eames House. Further, stemming from the principals’ interest in contemporary art, the firm has collaborated with artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Sharon Lockhart, Steven Prina, Mike Kelley and others, and has designed spaces for art and museum exhibitions nationally and internationally.

The book will include an introductory text and essays by various writers familiar with their work (Martino Stierli, Barbara Lamprecht, Nicholas Olsberg, Lilian Pfaff, Sabine Eckmann, Mimi Zeiger and Paulette Singley). The essays will convey recurring concepts in the architects’ work ranging from ideas of “order” and “system”, to “accidental form”, and the subtle manipulations that lie between these positions, or what philosopher Karl Raimund Poppers categorizes as “clocks and clouds”: that which can be measured exactly (clocks); and that which has indefinite occurrences (clouds).

September 2018

Standard Architecture Design

Artiface

TAGS

Architecture, Books, Standard

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Jeffrey Allsbrook and Silvia Kuhle
Introduction: Mimi Zeiger

Through an in-depth exploration of nine projects ranging from retail to residential design, Standard Architecture Design highlights the practice of Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary studio Standard while it deconstructs traditional conceptions of interior and exterior space.

By honing in on the malleability of the storefront and its transformative role across varying sectors of architecture and design, Standard presents an alternative understanding of the facade. The public/private divide becomes permeable, and cultural narratives can be written from the inside out—flowing from fundamental elements like space and light to the contextual meaning of place. In Standard’s world, transitional spaces such as doors, windows and openings come to define and bring meaning to our collective experience of place.

September 2018

LA Forum Reader

From the Archives of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

Actar Publishers

TAGS

Architecture, Books, Urbanism

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Editors: Rob Berry, Victor Jones, Michael Sweeney, Mimi Zeiger, Chava Danielson, Joe Day, Thurman Grant, Duane McLemore

Design: Still Room Studio

The LA Forum Reader brings together three decades of discursive writings and publications on architecture, urbanism, and Los Angeles culled from the archives of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Published under thematic sections: Experiments, Detours, Hunches, and Santa Anas, with interludes dedicated to Art and Architecture, Downtown, and the long-running LA Forum Newsletter, the collected essays and interviews track an uneven and lesser-known history of experimental architecture, postmodern geographies, and alternative urbanism in L.A. as told by the city’s key designers and thinkers.

Today, Los Angeles is a major architectural and urban player, but for decades the city was dismissed suburban and centerless. In republishing three decades of material on architecture and design in Los Angeles, the LA Forum Reader reclaims and reconsiders the city’s architectural and discursive histories. It establishes, or reestablishes, a textual context for critical experimentation and urban investigation. This anthological volume includes essays, interviews, and reproductions of publications that have long been out of print, including pamphlets by Craig Hodgetts and Margaret Crawford, as well as early writings by Aaron Betsky and John Chase.

Select Press:
Archinect, The LA Forum Reader Traces 30 Years of LA’s Architectural Discourse

May 2018

Dimensions of Citizenship

Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos

Inventory Press

TAGS

Architecture, Books

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Dimensions of Citizenship
US Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2018
4 1/4 × 7 inches, 256 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-19-4
Edited by Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Ann Lui, and Mimi Zeiger
Design by IN-FO.CO

Texts also available at e-Flux Architecture

Globalization, technology, and politics have altered the definition and expectations of citizenship and the right to place. Dimensions of Citizenship documents contributions from the seven firms selected to represent the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. This paperback volume profiles and illustrates each of the US Pavilion contributions and contextualizes them in terms of scale.

Made Up

Design's Fictions

Art Center Media Design Practices

TAGS

Anne Burdick, Architecture, Benjamin H. Bratton, Books, Bruce Sterling, China Miéville, Emmet Byrne, Fiona Raby, Geoff Manaugh, Julian Bleecker, Keith Mitnick, m-a-u-s-e-r, Metahaven, MOS, Norman M. Klein, Peter Lunenfeld, Stuart Candy, Susanna Schouweiler, Tim Durfee, Tim Durfee, Tom Marble

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Tim Durfee, Mimi Zeiger, editors

At a time when “fake news” is part of our daily cultural lexicon, Made Up: Design’s Fictions explores lies, fantasies, and other un-real scenarios as tools of design.

Through essays, interviews, and narratives by Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Sam Jacob and other significant voices in the field, this volume questions the initial discourses around “design fiction”—a broad category of critical design that includes overlapping interests in science fiction, world building, speculation, and futuring. Made Up: Design’s Fictions advances contemporary analysis and enactment of narrative and speculation as an important part of practice today.

Essays, interviews, and narratives by: Julian Bleecker, Benjamin H. Bratton, Anne Burdick, Emmet Byrne, Stuart Candy, Fiona Raby, Tim Durfee, Sam Jacob, Norman M. Klein, Peter Lunenfeld, Geoff Manaugh, Tom Marble, m-a-u-s-e-r, Metahaven, China Miéville, Keith Mitnick, MOS, Susanna Schouweiler, Bruce Sterling, Mimi Zeiger.

Size: 6.25 × 9.25 in. / 16 × 23.5 cm.
Pages: 108
Illustrations: One-Color
Cover: Softcover
Publication date: December 2017
Published By: Actar Publishers / Art Center Graduate Press
ISBN: English 978-1- 5323-4788- 7
Price: 13.50 € / $16 / £12