Evil

AUDC is again teaching a studio at Columbia this fall. This time our topic is evil.

Evil

Advanced Studio V
Fall 2009
Kazys Varnelis
Robert Sumrell
AUDC
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

Arguably the entirety of architectural production in the last forty years has been dominated by the problem of complexity. Whether architecture that wears the difficulty of complex programs and requirements of contemporary society on its sleeve, that tries to reduce such complexity by providing a neutral background, or that aims toward resolution through a complex but smooth multiplicity (be it a folded or bloblike), complexity is the main problematic facing architecture since high modernism.

This should come as no surprise. As a political project, modernism ran aground on complexity, its processes of abstraction unable to adequately describe the multifarious conditions of modern culture. Our society may well follow it. As archaeologist Joseph Tainter describes, complexity is a toxic by-product of advanced societies, slowly choking them as it demands such societies invest ever-higher levels of energy to maintain their structures. Our daily experiences with bureaucracy, jammed infrastructure, and failing technology serve as clear evidence of this.

Tainter offers two solutions to the problem of complexity. The first is collapse. Once societies can no longer provide sufficient returns, individuals make the choice to leave the complex society, to “walk away” from it all. As the society sheds layers of complexity, it reverts to a more primitive order. To a minor degree, last year’s stock market crash was an example of that, as society strove for a “reset” against the surreal complexity of financial instruments such as derivatives and credit default swaps. More dramatically, the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrates a condition where individuals left an intolerable condition en masse. Or in the case of the fall of the Roman Empire, for many of the individuals involved, the collapse seemed to be progress. The second solution is more optimistic and is the one that the majority, but not all, of the members of this school would support: technological innovation. Technologies that allow for greater efficiency or new sources of energy allow complexity to endure, even when it would have produced collapse under an older condition.

But collapse is hardly a model for a studio and endless promises of technological innovation lead to boredom. A third option, perhaps more potent option presents itself: evil.

If one simply does not care about playing by the rules of the game, but only about seizing power to further one’s own ends, it becomes possible to shed layers of complexity and thereby continue society.
The human cost, of course, is quite high, as Mussolini’s quest to get the trains to run on time in Italy demonstrates. Still, with the recent economic success of authoritarian regimes—and the open advocacy of such regimes as clients by notable architects such as OMA—evil is on the table again as an option for architects to pursue.

Nor is this new to architecture. The history of architecture is marked by numerous works for evil patrons, for example, the Tempio Malatesta, the Casa del Fascio, the Palace of the Soviets, the Zeppelin field at Nuremberg, the Glass House, Neverland, Ryungong, CCTV.

This studio is conceptual, aimed at developing arguments and polemics, but it sets out to do so using the tools of the architect. Dispensing with the prospect of realizing buildings as constructions of matter, we instead maintain that buildings can be constructions of thought, conceptual machines that produce arguments and state positions.

Although we expressly abandon any interest in construction, we nevertheless aim at designing buildings, or rather conceptual structures that look and perform very much like buildings. Our methodological inspiration is the radical architecture of the 1960s—e.g. Superstudio and Archizoom—but today we live in a world that has transformed more thoroughly than these architects could have ever predicted. Thus, we set out to seek other strategies and to look within architecture to seek what intelligence it still has to offer. To this end, this studio examines how architects can respond to evil. Irony, sarcasm, and direct complicity are too simple and are not options.

Against the dominant forms of architectural education today, this is not a scripting studio, nor a place for unbuildable Hollywood fantasy, nor by any means is it a last refuge of the real or its friend, tired from too many hours surfing the Internet, the hand. Against these outmoded positions, we propose architecture based on rigorous design, architecture as a system of thought that makes abstract knowledge experiential and conceptual thought objective, rigorous and understandable. In setting out to design buildings not diagrams, our goal is to see what the world is telling us, not what we are telling the world.

Bibliography

Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations 1956-76. New York, NY: Prestel Pub., 2005.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Meridian. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.
———. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
———. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem; a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York,: Viking Press, 1963.
Arquilla, John, David F. Ronfeldt, and United States. Dept. of Defense. Office of the Secretary of Defense. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001.
Badiou, Alain. “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art [Excerpt].”  https://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm
———. “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art.” Lacanian Ink no. 23 (2004): 100-19.
Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. New York ; London: M. Boyars, 1985.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London New York: Verso, 1993.
———. The Illusion of the End. Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 1994.
———. The System of Objects. New York: Verso, 1996.
———. Screened Out. London ; New York: Verso, 2002.
———. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. English ed. Oxford ; New York: Berg, 2005.
Baudrillard, Jean, Paul Foss, and Julian Pefanis. The Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983. London ; Concord, Mass.: Pluto Press in association with the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1990.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress; Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. New York,: Free Press, 1967.
———. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Bloom, Howard K. The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. 1st ed. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984; originally published in French as La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
Branzi, Andrea. The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design. 1st MIT Press ed. [Cambridge, Mass.]: MIT Press, 1984.
———. No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati, Librairie De L’architecture Et De La Ville. Orléans: HYX, 2006.
Branzi, Andrea, and Germano Celant. Andrea Branzi: The Complete Works. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Edited by Wlad Gozich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, originally published as the second edition of Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974, 1980.
Caillois, Roger, Claudine Frank, Camille Naish, and ebrary Inc. “The Edge of Surrealism a Roger Caillois Reader.” Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Eisenman, Peter, Giuseppe Terragni, and Manfredo Tafuri. Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques. New York: Monacelli Press, 2003.
Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo; Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. [Rev. ed. New York,: Norton, 1952.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York,: Liveright, 1970.
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.
Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Electronic Mediations V. 21. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Greene, Robert. The Art of Seduction. New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2001.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Jarzombek, Mark. On Leon Baptista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.
Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. New York, N.Y.: Monacelli Press, 1995.
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Mannoni, Octave. “I Know Well but All the Same.” In Perversion and the Social Relation, edited by Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj Zizek. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Milgram, Stanley. “The Perils of Obedience.” Harper’s Magazine, December 1973, 62-77.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Marion Faber. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New ed, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Douglas Smith. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic: By Way of Clarification and Supplement to My Last Book, Beyond Good and Evil, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford ;: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Rorty, Amélie. The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives. London ; New York: Routledge, 2001.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Sumrell, Robert, and Kazys Varnelis. Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies. Barcelona: Actar, 2007.
Varnelis, Kazys. The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Barcelona: Actar, 2008.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London ; New York: Verso, 2007.
Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York,: Basic Books, 1971.
Zimbardo, Philip G. The Cognitive Control of Motivation; the Consequences of Choice and Dissonance. [Glenview, Ill.]: Scott, 1969.
———. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2008.

Michael Jackson, What Have You Done?

Long overdue… a post on Michael Jackson. 

First, a quote from AUDC‘s Blue Monday:

Individuals … long to become virtual and escape into ether. It is through this physical apparatus that, Hollywood stars, celebrities, and criminals obtain another body, a media life. Neither sacred or living, this media life is pure image, more consistent and dependable than physical life itself. It is the dream we all share: that we might become objects, or better yet, images. Media life can potentially be preserved for eternity, cleansed of unscripted character flaws and accidents – a guaranteed legacy that defies aging and death by already appearing dead on arrival. The idols of millions via magazines, film, and television are disembodied, lifeless forms without content or meaning.

But the terrifying truth is that, although a media image may be eternal, like Michael Jackson, its host is prone to destruction and degradation. Data itself is not free of physicality. When it is reduplicated or backed up to file and stored via a remote host it suffers the same limitations as the physical world. It can be erased, lost, and compromised. The constant frustration of CDs, DVDs, and hard drives is that they don’t last forever, and all data is lost at once. Up to 20% of the information carefully collected on Jet Propulsion Laboratory computers during NASA’s 1976 Viking mission to Mars has been lost. The average web page lasts only a hundred days, the typical life span of a flea on a dog. Even if data isn’t lost, the ability to read it soon disappears. Photos of the Amazon Basin taken by satellites in the 1970s are critical to understanding long-term trends in deforestation but are trapped forever on indecipherable magnetic tapes. 

As you probably know, Michael Jackson’s death caused huge delays on the Internet and even prompted Google to think they were under attack. See here. Jackson’s passing from heavily-modified physical form to pure media was a giant ripple in the Net.

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Blue Christmas

It’s amazing how much attention my post about the lack of good architecture these days got compared to how nobody remarked on last Saturday’s post on newspapers. It’s also amazing how quickly I got buried again. This must change fast. 

In the meantime, how about a shameless plug? 

With Christmas coming up, if you’re thinking of giving (or receiving!) presents, think about two books with beautiful shades of blue in the cover, e.g. Networked Publics and the Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Don’t ask me why the latter is not at Amazon yet or why ACTAR just shipped it to them yesterday. I don’t know. On the other hand, the MIT Press bookstore has it, as does St. Mark’s (two left on hand) and Hennessey and Ingalls. If those aren’t options, then how about Blue Monday? And don’t forget Philip Johnson feeling blue, which he recounts in The Philip Johnson Tapes: Conversations with Robert A. M. Stern, which I also edited. See Michael Beirut’s blog post about that book (and two other books he and his team designed) here

People have been asking me what I’m up to lately, what better way to find out than to buy a book for your holiday reading?

 

 

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curiosities and the hawthorne effect

I was at the MIT Press bookstore the other day where I saw that the Infrastructural City is already available. Since Amazon has apparently already run out of stock, just minutes after the book finally became available there, MIT is your best bet for a few days.

I also bought the new issue of Perspecta on “the Grand Tour” since it features AUDC’s most recent piece “An American Pastoral.” This is our first project since Blue Monday and marks a new direction for us, away from the model of the cabinet of curiosities and toward a more universal understanding. If we were suspicious of master narratives when we began writing Blue Monday, by the end we realized that—pace to that grand narrativist Lyotard—fantasies of escape from the master narrative were dubious, if not impossible. To lead to anything at all, curiosities, like life demand master narratives (more, from a more theoretical perspective, on this soon!). After all, just because the academy gave up its ambition in favor of minor narratives doesn’t mean that power did. Take a good look at the last eight years for evidence of the utter failure of that strategy on the part of the academic left. In any event, our new work, of which this is a fragment, sets out as nothing less than an inventory of the contemporary world.

A few of you who saw the piece complained about the design making it hard to read the text. I know. I’m not really sure what to say about it except to observe that our experience is that many graphic designers think that a straightforward text with straightforward photos need a non-straightforward layout. Architecture is like that too, I suppose. Maybe it’s the Hawthorne Effect? Robert and I often observe that the Hawthorne Effect is nothing less than the operative principle for all culture. Is that, perhaps, the title for our next book? I ran it by Robert and he thinks so. Could be! 

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hatch

AUDC is featured among the “114 architects who will define the physical fabric of our cities for the next 30 years, as well as the theoretical and interpretive background of architectural practice worldwide” in Hatch: The New Architectural Generation. Although some of the info is off (there’s a photo of Robert labelled as me!) and the introduction mentions that Enrique Ramirez (who deserves congratulations for being included too) is the only blogger in the book, it was an honor to be included and nice to see the collection break out of the usual selection of eye candy. Instead, editor Kieran Long understands practice much as Dean Mark Wigley does, as an expanded field, not limited to the production of buildings (or floating blobs in space).

You can see some of the spreads at the publisher’s Web site.

this will kill that

AUDC presented our first studio yesterday at school. The studio abstract follows, below.

Advanced Studio V
Fall 2007
Kazys Varnelis
Robert Sumrell
AUDC
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

This Will Kill That

This studio begins with our observation that the process of building cannot keep pace with the conceptual ambitions of architecture. Buildings are dead before they are built.Take CCTV—endlessly hyped, it is the building of the year, complete with a MoMA exhibition on it even before it is finished. Who will want to see it now? Oversaturated in media, its Bilbao-Effect already spent in a junkspace of print, CCTV, like many buildings, is exhausted in advance of its occupation. Buildings today exist for the media, for journals, for books, for the Web. Even when constructed they serve chiefly as visual wonders to see during sporting events on television or as backdrops for photoshoots in fashion magazines. In this radical present—a condition in which the past and the future become impossible to conceive of—critical architecture is so slow and expensive as to be nonexistent. We set out to seek other strategies and to look within architecture to seek what intelligence it still has to offer.

If today the building is an after-effect of media, our method is to go against logic and turn back to it. This studio is conceptual, aimed at developing arguments and polemics, but it sets out to do so using the tools of the architect. Dispensing with the prospect of realizing buildings as constructions of matter, we instead maintain that buildings can be constructions of thought, conceptual machines that produce arguments and state positions.

Although we expressly abandon any interest in construction, we nevertheless aim at designing buildings, or rather conceptual structures that look and perform very much like buildings. Against the dominant forms of architectural education today, this is not a scripting studio, nor a place for unbuildable Hollywood fantasy, nor is it a last refuge of the real or its friend, tired from too many hours surfing the Internet, the hand. Against these outmoded positions, we propose architecture based on rigorous design, architecture as a system of thought that makes abstract knowledge experiential and conceptual thought objective, rigorous and understandable. In setting out to design buildings not diagrams, our goal is to see what the world is telling us, not what we are telling the world.

Rather than lamenting the servility of architecture to media, we engage media head on, not innocently, but rather as a praying mantis embraces her mate. 

Long ago, Victor Hugo suggested that the book will kill the building. As a dominant producer of social meaning and order, it did. But now the book is dying. This studio examines the crisis of the library, one of the oldest and most important institutions in society.

The goal of architecture has long been to become incorporated into the library, to be absorbed into the flimsy papers that would be placed on the stacks. If this will kill that, that was a suicidal masochist who wanted to die. Libraries are repositories of dead information, where things go to expire. Architecture knew this, but still always desired the stillness of the book as its real goal. Nor were architects somehow more perverted than anyone else. On the contrary, as Freud suggested in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the universal goal of life is stillness. The library gave us what we wanted, a tomb we could all dwell in, a place in which thought would quiet down once and for all, a place of silence in which noise and disruption was forbidden.

Under pressure from the pornographic thrill of the Internet, libraries, like architecture, are themselves dying. Year after year, circulation plummets and readership declines. Paradoxically, however, as both architecture and the library expire, they become pervasive. If buildings are obsolete (the current building boom being analogous to the manic expansion of Borders and Barnes and Noble in the last two decades), the strategies of architecture have become pervasive. Design is now everywhere. The tools of architecture are accessible to anyone.

The Internet and digital technology has made the library’s promise of access to knowledge laughable. One hard drive is now capable of holding as much data as a medium-sized city library. In spite of this, libraries are special places. Not only is the Internet (like television) largely filled with garbage, more importantly, books are the first products of immaterial production, and thus they anticipate the dominant economic order of the information economy. But they are also their own worst enemies, heavy objects that lie inertly, gathering choking mold and dust. Still, libraries are ideal research sites for architects, their systems of organization clear, conceptual diagrams of knowledge. As these systems of classification are undone by a world in which "everything is miscellaneous," and Open Source software and peer-to-peer file sharing annihilate any concept of property, the uniqueness and even the physicality of the objects in libraries is threatened. For any book, even the most expensive would be much more valuable if you could perform a full text search on it, something Google understands full well. Soon, books may not be valuable except for the odd collector item. When they wear out, nobody will care.

But is that the fate of the library? Against the idea of the library as a base for knitting clubs and youth sex leagues or as an Internet café for the homeless, we propose to investigate the institution itself as a system of conceptual thought, and as a form of social organization. Thus, the library becomes an ideal place for architecture to re-discover its own methods of thought, its theoretical purposes.
 
Exit Utopia:  Architectural Provocations 1956-76. New York, NY: Prestel Pub, 2005.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.
———. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. New York: Verso, 1996.
———. Screened Out. London ; New York: Verso, 2002.
Baudrillard, Jean, Paul Foss, and Julian Pefanis. The Revenge of the Crystal:  Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983. London ; Concord, Mass: Pluto Press in association with the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1990.
Bourriaud, Nicholas. Postproduction. London: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005.
Branzi, Andrea. The Hot House:  Italian New Wave Design. 1st MIT Press ed. [Cambridge, Mass.]: MIT Press, 1984.
———. No-Stop City:  Archizoom Associati, Librairie De L’architecture Et De La Ville. Orléans: HYX, 2006.
Branzi, Andrea, and Germano Celant. Andrea Branzi:  The Complete Works. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
Carpo, Mario. Architecture in the Age of Printing:  Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford ; Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Cavallo, Guglielmo, Roger Chartier, and Lydia G. Cochrane. A History of Reading in the West, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
Chandler, Alfred D, and James W. Cortada. A Nation Transformed by Information:  How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings:  Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer, New Cultural Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Chartier, Roger, and Alain Boureau. La Correspondance:  Les Usages De La Lettre Au Xixe Siècle, Nouvelles Études Historiques. [Paris]: Fayard, 1991.
Chartier, Roger, and Lydia G. Cochrane. Cultural History:  Between Practices and Representations. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea:  Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Colomina, Beatriz, and Joan Ockman. Architectureproduction, Revisions—Papers on Architectural Theory and Criticism. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988.
Couldry, Nick, and Anna McCarthy. Mediaspace:  Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, Comedia. London ; New York: Routledge, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University Press, 1981.
Eisenman, Peter. Ten Canonical Buildings:  1950-2000. 1st ed. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 2008.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo; Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. [Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1952.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Liveright, 1970.
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol:  How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic:  The Aesthetics of Consumerism. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Ito, Toyo. Toyo Ito:  Blurring Architecture. Milano: Charta, 1999.
Ito, Toyo, and Andrea Maffei. Toyo Ito:  Works, Projects, Writings, Documenti Di Architettura. Milano: Electa, 2002.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, and Ervin H. Zube. Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson. [Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture:  Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large:  Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. New York, N.Y: Monacelli Press, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits:  A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.
———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.
Mattern, Shannon Christine. Public Places, Info Spaces:  Creating the Modern Urban Library. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2005.
———. The New Downtown Library:  Designing with Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy; the Making of Typographic Man. [Toronto]: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, and Moisés Puente. Conversations with Mies Van Der Rohe. 1st ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Palmer, Alvin E, and M. Susan Lewis. Planning the Office Landscape. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.
Rattenbury, Kester. This Is Not Architecture:  Media Constructions. London ; New York: Routledge, 2002.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain:  The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media:  Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing:  Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. 1st paperback ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Sumrell, Robert, and Kazys Varnelis. Blue Monday:  Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies. Barcelona: Actar, 2007.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture:  Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land:  Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London ; New York: Verso, 2007.
Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
 

 

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