The snows of Venice
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American author Ben Lerner and German film-maker and writer Alexander Kluge come from two different generations but share a single passion: an interest in the long-term effects of things. A line from Lerner’s poem “The sky stops painting and turns to criticism” that Kluge was struck by some years ago became the starting point for their first joint book project. Kluge(...)
The snows of Venice
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$55.00
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American author Ben Lerner and German film-maker and writer Alexander Kluge come from two different generations but share a single passion: an interest in the long-term effects of things. A line from Lerner’s poem “The sky stops painting and turns to criticism” that Kluge was struck by some years ago became the starting point for their first joint book project. Kluge responded to this celestial critique with a story about the technically controlled power of a squadron of bombers bossing the skies over Aleppo, which Lerner answered with a sonnet. Step by step this gave rise to poems, stories, and conversations in which the heavens show their bewitching and threatening qualities. This literary dialogue is published in 'The Snows of Venice'. A series of twenty-one photographs that Gerhard Richter took in Venice in the 1970s augments the interplay of texts and the principle of interconnecting poetic horizons.
Literature and poetry
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This cookbook by Taiwanese artist Pei-Ying Lin (born 1986) is an illustrated guide that showcases how ever-changing viruses affect our sense of taste. The core concept of ''Virophilia'' involves experiencing the viruses in food. Her performances combine different selections of recipes that use the viruses in different ways. The audience eats while listening to stories(...)
Pei-Ying Lin: Virophilia, 2070 revised edition of the postnatural cookbook
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This cookbook by Taiwanese artist Pei-Ying Lin (born 1986) is an illustrated guide that showcases how ever-changing viruses affect our sense of taste. The core concept of ''Virophilia'' involves experiencing the viruses in food. Her performances combine different selections of recipes that use the viruses in different ways. The audience eats while listening to stories about the viruses. Since 2055, viruses have become an important part of our everyday food culture. Those born before 2015 may still remember the fear of the natural order that the coronavirus brought us, but since 2055 we have known that such fear is also irresistibly tasty. Viruses that were once exclusive to the research and medical realms are now constitutive of our natural habitat. Pei-Ying Lin, currently based in the Netherlands, has recently been focusing on boundaries (invisible/visible, living/nonliving) and building tools and methods that facilitate their exploration.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Building in existing fabric conserves resources, saves energy, and reduces carbon emissions – good reasons to choose conversion over new build. Yet there is another, less tangible dimension: time. With additions and adaptations, patina and cracks, it leaves its mark and stores memories in the buildings. To carry these stories forward requires sensitivity to materials,(...)
Detail 11 2025 : Building in existing contexts
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Building in existing fabric conserves resources, saves energy, and reduces carbon emissions – good reasons to choose conversion over new build. Yet there is another, less tangible dimension: time. With additions and adaptations, patina and cracks, it leaves its mark and stores memories in the buildings. To carry these stories forward requires sensitivity to materials, spaces, and histories. Deciding what remains and what is replaced demands careful judgment. Some interventions are so discreet that only trained eyes notice them, often compared by architects to the restoration of a classic car. Others are more radical: ceiling panels titled and set diagonally into a room, or large atriums cut into the existing architecture. At times, we may need to rethink our ingrained aesthetics and ask whether materials with a problematic reputation – such as fibre cement panels (Eternit) – can still be used, or whether cut edges might be left uncovered.
Magazines
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In the first half of the 20th century, when architecture and literature dreamed of transparency, glass was the material these dreams were made of. However, the historiography of both fields usually focuses on a few canonical works by male authors to tell the story of this shared fascination. Departing from this imbalance, this essay takes the opportunity to explore the(...)
Architectural Theory
December 2023
Glass scenographies. Notes on spaces of one’s own
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In the first half of the 20th century, when architecture and literature dreamed of transparency, glass was the material these dreams were made of. However, the historiography of both fields usually focuses on a few canonical works by male authors to tell the story of this shared fascination. Departing from this imbalance, this essay takes the opportunity to explore the glass culture of modernity through the lens of female projects whose stories often take place simultaneously on different continents. While the former silent film actress Evelyn Word Leigh builds a glass house for herself in Nyack, New York, artists and writers based in Europe – like Claude Cahun, Anaïs Nin, and Hilda ‘H.D.’ Doolittle – flesh out imaginary glass domes as construction sites of artistic subjectivities. Whether homes or domes, these creative women used glass environments to question and renegotiate their assigned places in Western societies, challenging the boundaries of female agency.
Architectural Theory
Notes on the minor character
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In "Notes on the minor character" Bopha Chhay meditates on "the minor" - those secondary characters or objects that populate the background and seemingly only serve to support or surround the area of focus. Through a series of fragments we encounter the minor characters from paintings and novels; the minor anecdotes appended to the overarching ideology of state-hood; and(...)
Notes on the minor character
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In "Notes on the minor character" Bopha Chhay meditates on "the minor" - those secondary characters or objects that populate the background and seemingly only serve to support or surround the area of focus. Through a series of fragments we encounter the minor characters from paintings and novels; the minor anecdotes appended to the overarching ideology of state-hood; and the minor details, usually overlooked, that can become a great revealer of falsehood. Ranging from Bruegel The Elder to Jane Eyre, Y-Dang Troeung to Dostoevsky, we see 'the minor' played out in multiple ways out of the corner of our eye. Here Chhay proposes 'the minor' to be that which quietly disrupts the main narrative, and as we re-orient our focus to the outskirts we are given the opportunity to think through a different set of stories: the fan fictions, the non-player characters, and the un-heroic gestures.
Zines
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Hélène Cixous’s powerful new book, masterfully translated by Peggy Kamuf, is a vivid journey through fire. From the ashes of wars, wildfires, and upheaval, Cixous traces a dramatic path across time—from the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Oran to the European wildfires of 2022—weaving a rich, intimate narrative that merges history, autobiography, and myth.(...)
Incinarration: What do we carry?
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Hélène Cixous’s powerful new book, masterfully translated by Peggy Kamuf, is a vivid journey through fire. From the ashes of wars, wildfires, and upheaval, Cixous traces a dramatic path across time—from the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Oran to the European wildfires of 2022—weaving a rich, intimate narrative that merges history, autobiography, and myth. With her piercing, lyrical voice, Cixous confronts the human cost of destruction and upheaval, and asks a universal question: What do we carry with us when everything we know is falling to ashes? In ''Incinarration'' Cixous finds hope in the power of words, memory, and imagination to illuminate our darkest moments and redeem the future. As forests burn and regimes collapse, Cixous shows us how stories become a form of resistance—a way to remember, to bear testimony, and to find renewal in the face of oblivion.
Critical Theory
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The work of the recently deceased Bay-area photographer, Henry Wessel, is renowned for its fragmentary and compelling nature, each image urging imaginative leaps towards the fatalism and moral ambiguity of noir film and fiction. Every Wessel photograph is a gateway to a wild array of extraordinary storylines. This project, 'A Dark Thread', takes this semblance of an(...)
Henry Wessel: A dark thread (français)
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The work of the recently deceased Bay-area photographer, Henry Wessel, is renowned for its fragmentary and compelling nature, each image urging imaginative leaps towards the fatalism and moral ambiguity of noir film and fiction. Every Wessel photograph is a gateway to a wild array of extraordinary storylines. This project, 'A Dark Thread', takes this semblance of an idea further by commissioning over a dozen renowned noir writers to produce a short story in response to one or more of Wessel’s black and white photographs. This first version of the project brings together French translations of stories by Art Taylor, Ivy Pochoda, and Alexander MacLeod, together with the photographs that inspired them. Straddling the space between literary publishing and photobook, this slim volume offers a new and original means of understanding Henry Wessel’s photography and accompanies a retrospective of his work at the Maison de la Photograhie in Paris (June 2019).
Photography monographs
Potato (Object Lessons)
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''Object Lessons'' is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Baked potatoes, Bombay potatoes, pommes frites . . . everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food security (potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop). To 18th-century philosophers they promised(...)
Potato (Object Lessons)
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''Object Lessons'' is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Baked potatoes, Bombay potatoes, pommes frites . . . everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food security (potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop). To 18th-century philosophers they promised happiness. Nutritionists warn that too many increase your risk of hypertension. For the poet Seamus Heaney they conjured up both his mother and the 19th-century Irish famine. What stories lie behind the ordinary potato? The potato is entangled with the birth of the liberal state and the idea that individuals, rather than communities, should form the building blocks of society. Potatoes also speak about family, and our quest for communion with the universe. Thinking about potatoes turns out to be a good way of thinking about some of the important tensions in our world.
Food
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For generations, world-leading German prosthetics company Ottobock has been restoring mobility to people and developing wearable bionics to mobilize the human body. Published on the centenary of Ottobock, this book presents the future of human mobility as envisioned by Hans Georg Näder, chairman of the company and grandson of its founder. What roles will(...)
Hans Georg Näder: Futuring Human Mobility
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For generations, world-leading German prosthetics company Ottobock has been restoring mobility to people and developing wearable bionics to mobilize the human body. Published on the centenary of Ottobock, this book presents the future of human mobility as envisioned by Hans Georg Näder, chairman of the company and grandson of its founder. What roles will digitalization, robotics, prostheses, artificial intelligence and the imagination play in how we optimize and employ our bodies, and shape the development of humanity? Conceived and realized by Thomas Huber, with photos by Christoph Neumann, 'Futuring Human Mobility' explores these questions and their philosophical, ethical, social, economic and medical implications in our changing global community, and incorporates interviews, essays, short stories and artwork by 40 international experts including David Chipperfield, Philipp Craven, EVA & ADELE, Yuval Noah Harari, Hugh Herr, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Chandran Nair, Carsten Nicolai, Neo Rauch, Wolfgang Schäuble, Kevin Warwick and Ranga Yogeshwar.
Industrial Design
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Where is the space for dreaming in the twenty-first century? Lofty thoughts, like dreams, are born and live overhead, just as they have been represented in Renaissance paintings and modern cartoons. Ceilings are often repositories of stories, events and otherwise invisible oneiric narratives. Yet environments that inspire innovative thinking are dwindling as our world(...)
Architectural Theory
August 2019
Ceilings and dreams: the architecture of levity
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Where is the space for dreaming in the twenty-first century? Lofty thoughts, like dreams, are born and live overhead, just as they have been represented in Renaissance paintings and modern cartoons. Ceilings are often repositories of stories, events and otherwise invisible oneiric narratives. Yet environments that inspire innovative thinking are dwindling as our world confronts enormous challenges, and almost all of our thinking, debating and decision-making takes place under endless ceiling grids. Quantitative research establishes that spaces with taller ceilings elicit broader, more creative thoughts. Today, ceilings are usually squat conduits of technology: they have become the blind spot of modern architecture. The twenty essays in this book look across cultures, places and ceilings over time to discover their potential to uplift the human spirit. Not just one building element among many, the ceiling is a key to unlock the architectural imagination.
Architectural Theory