Architecture Is All Over
2017
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
288pp. 6.5 × 9.25" 2017
Overview

Architecture Is All Over, co-edited by Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter, investigates architecture’s simultaneous diminishment and ubiquity in the early twenty-first century. As a diagnostic and tactical guide, this collection features original texts and design proposals from emerging and established scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art, the history of science, media studies, and philosophy. Together these pieces probe architecture’s relationship to liminal zones and immaterial systems, reframing instability and mutability as enduring qualities that form architecture’s motive core—a perspectival shift that carries with it new possibilities for architectural agency and resistance.

Contributors

Matthew Allen & Cyrus Peñarroyo, Caitlin Berrigan, Adrian Blackwell, Keith Bresnahan, D. Graham Burnett, Jill H. Casid, dpr-barcelona & Francesco Vedovato, David Gissen, John Harwood, K. Michael Hays, Patty Heyda, Sandi Hilal, John J. May, Marta Guerra Pastrián & Pablo Pérez Ramos, Trevor Patt, Troy Schaum & Rosalyne Shieh, Jonathan Tate, Olga Touloumi, and Andrew Witt.

Designed by Neil Donnelly and Ben Fehrman-Lee.

Architecture Is All Over

Architecture Is All Over investigates architecture’s simultaneous diminishment and ubiquity in the early twenty-first century. As a diagnostic and tactical guide, this collection features original texts and design proposals from emerging and established scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art, the history of science, media studies, and philosophy. Together these pieces probe architecture’s relationship to liminal zones and immaterial systems, reframing instability and mutability as enduring qualities that form architecture’s motive core—a perspectival shift that carries with it new possibilities for architectural agency and resistance.

The pieces in this book range from contrarian investigations of the opportunities inherent in scarcity, bureaucracy, and banality to projections of architecture as a mediatic practice or automated process. Case studies that propose new architectural strategies are placed alongside provocative historical examples to tease out the implications of architecture’s indeterminacy in agonistic ways. In each contribution, a particular facet of the discipline’s apparent obsolescence or endurance becomes a way to critically evaluate the ethical and entrepreneurial dimensions of architectural practice and theory. Taken together, the pieces in this volume reinterpret architecture’s “all over-ness” as an untapped disciplinary property rather than a temporary or terminal condition.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction: The Crisis of the Crisis by Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter
  2. "Unfinished State" by Caitlin Berrigan
  3. "Some Thoughts on the Pathology of Architecture" by K. Michael Hays
  4. "Subtractive Urbanism: The Morphology Ideology Homology" by Matthew Allen and Cyrus Peñarroyo
  5. "Design and Kenosis; Or, The Architect’s Abdication" by Keith Bresnahan
  6. "Erasure Urbanism" by Patty Heyda
  7. "The Nebulous and the Infinitesimal," A Conversation by D. Graham Burnett and David Gissen
  8. "Reimagining Shrinking Villages" by Marta Guerra Pastrián and Pablo Pérez Ramos
  9. "Less and More: On the Political Potential of a Virtual Architecture" by Adrian Blackwell
  10. "Sponge Urbanism" by Troy Schaum and Rosalyne Shieh
  11. "Contentious Electronics, Radical Blips" by Olga Touloumi
  12. "If We Wake Up to Find We Have Been Too Well-Trained," A Conversation by John Harwood and John J. May
  13. "Landscapes, Spaces, Meshes: A Cultural Narrative of Design Technics" by Andrew Witt
  14. "Performance Review: In Praise of the Possibility of Architecture" by Trevor Patt
  15. "A Plaza in a Camp: A Play in Four Acts" by Sandi Hilal
  16. "M. Monachus, Feral Urbanist" by Jonathan Tate
  17. "A Taxonomy for Architects" by dpr-barcelona and Francesco Vedovato
  18. "Landscaping for Chimeras" by Jill H. Casid
Reviews

Mollie Claypool, "Architecture Is All Over," The Journal of Architecture, vol. 22, issue 7 (Sept. 2017).

Robert Wiesenberger, Review of Architecture is All Over, Art Papers, Winter 2017/ 2018.

Press

Sammy Medina, " Is Architecture Finished? Depends on How You Define It." (Interview) Metropolis Magazine, June 2017.

Christopher Hawthorne, "Two decades after Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, where does architecture stand?," Los Angeles Times, October 2017.

Sammy Medina, "The Architecture Book Is Alive But Evolving," Metropolis Magazine, December 2017.

Zachary Petit, "This is What Post Digital Print Should Look Like," AIGA Eye on Design, June 28, 2018.

Acknowledgments

This project was produced with support from The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Related

Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Neil Donnelly