Publishing Practices – Book Survey!

We strongly encourage you to participate in a survey on architectural publications and their influence, for a research project currently being undertaken by Michael Kubo on publishing practices to be exhibited at Pinkcomma gallery in Boston in September 2009.   The project is the second installment of an exhibition on the legacy of architectural publications, titled Publishing Practices, shown at the University at Buffalo in May as part of the Banham Fellowship for 2008-2009. The survey is intended to study the reception and influence of architectural publications for those who have received an architectural education and are currently practicing in various design-related fields.  The survey should take no more than 15-20 minutes to complete and all responses are anonymous and confidential.

‘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.

Delirious New York 1978

The exhibition investigates the history and influence of the architecture book, through case studies of canonical publications that have constituted this parallel form of practice in the past century. Information graphics contrast the production of these books with their reception, mapping the impact of architectural publications through an international survey of practitioners, scholars, and educators in the field. The investigation reveals the history of publications as an alternative form of architecture, parallel to and frequently more agile than the production of work more typically understood as architectural.’

Vers Un Architecture 1923

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One response to “Publishing Practices – Book Survey!”

  1. Lucas Dietrich Avatar
    Lucas Dietrich

    Dear Michael Kubo,

    I write to you as architecture editor of Thames & Hudson publishers in London. Please let me know if I can be of any help in your research or exhibition preparations.

    Kind regards,
    Lucas Dietrich

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