Gordon Matta-Clark
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Born in New York and trained in architecture, Gordon Matta-Clark is most famous for his slicing through façades, walls and floors of derelict buildings. This ‘deconstructing’ gesture, provocative and extreme, turns architecture into astonishing sculptures, where the mass of the building is entwined with the light and air that penetrate it. Matta-Clark’s interventions are(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
April 2003, London
Gordon Matta-Clark
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Born in New York and trained in architecture, Gordon Matta-Clark is most famous for his slicing through façades, walls and floors of derelict buildings. This ‘deconstructing’ gesture, provocative and extreme, turns architecture into astonishing sculptures, where the mass of the building is entwined with the light and air that penetrate it. Matta-Clark’s interventions are always grounded in social or political convictions. Some of his projects include opening a restaurant (Food, 1971)in the then-neglected district of SoHo in New York, purchasing at auction fractions of unusable urban land in New York (Reality Properties: Fake Estates, 1973), dispensing oxygen to passersby in the streets of New York from a self-made cart (Fresh Air Cart, 1972), and other visionary urban projects that he conceived as a founding member of the New York-based Anarchitecture group. His practice remains one of the most unique, unequalled, and hugely influential of the past decades. A richly documented essay by Professor Thomas Crow presents new perspectives on the work of the artist. Also included are original essays by Judith Russi Kirshner and Christian Kravagna, as well as a ‘Documents’ section composed of key unpublished and hard-to-find essays and interviews, compiled by editor Corinne Diserens.
Contemporary Art Monographs
Alex Katz: Gathering
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Across decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of ''absolute awareness'' in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of ''quick things passing,'' compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
December 2022
Alex Katz: Gathering
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Across decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of ''absolute awareness'' in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of ''quick things passing,'' compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artist’s first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, ''Alex Katz: Gathering'' offers a definitive account of Katz’s artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artist’s work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production. Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artist’s practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding ''cutouts'' and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artist’s oeuvre.
Contemporary Art Monographs
Architecture and abstraction
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In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from(...)
Architecture and abstraction
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In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, Architecture and Abstraction presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.
Architectural Theory
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This volume presents the ''Circle of Doing Research'' : a model to get you started in art and design research. Conceived within the contextual setting of the art school, it is holistic, multidisciplinary and prioritizes practice. It consists of six actions. The basis of the circle is formed by the following: research by making, research of context and participatory(...)
Hands on research for artists, designers & educators
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This volume presents the ''Circle of Doing Research'' : a model to get you started in art and design research. Conceived within the contextual setting of the art school, it is holistic, multidisciplinary and prioritizes practice. It consists of six actions. The basis of the circle is formed by the following: research by making, research of context and participatory research, where information, prototypes, encounters and experiences are gathered and produced. The remaining three actions are concerned with documenting research, publicizing research and reflecting on research. The ''Circle of Doing Research'' is an open, accessible and non-linear model. Each action can be an entry point, whether you want to start with material experiments, conversations with others, or in the library. All actions are connected and inform each other which encourages a process of iteration and constant reflection. The ''Circle'' can be enriched with methods, sources and focal points according to specific disciplines and needs. The book contains research trajectories of art and design students throughout, illustrating the rich possibilities to be uncovered in the unfolding of a research project. This illuminating model can be useful to all, from those beginning to learn about research in art and design to more advanced practitioners.
Museology
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Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat—together with their team at Daily tous les jours—have been creating celebrated interactive art and narrative experiences for public spaces around the world for over 15 years. Their groundbreaking work is part of an emergent practice that combines technology, storytelling, performance, and placemaking to build a new infrastructure for the(...)
August 2025
Strangers need strange moments together: Designing interaction for public spaces
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Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat—together with their team at Daily tous les jours—have been creating celebrated interactive art and narrative experiences for public spaces around the world for over 15 years. Their groundbreaking work is part of an emergent practice that combines technology, storytelling, performance, and placemaking to build a new infrastructure for the human spirit. In ''Strangers Need Strange Moments Together'', Andraos and Mongiat invite a broad range of readers—fellow practitioners, urbanists, policy makers, educators, and engaged citizens—to take a joyful approach to building resilient urban communities and re-enchanting public space. In times of unprecedented pace of urban growth, with increasing loneliness and division, they shed light on the importance of moving beyond purely data-driven urban planning methodologies—which prioritize productivity, efficiency, and automation—and forging new modes of public interaction. Cities must be spaces for the whimsical, unexpected, and weird, and for the wasted time and strange moments of serendipitous encounter. Andraos and Mongiat use the raw material of the “daily everyday” to propose new models of living together in the 21st century, and to foreground the dimensions of life that characterize what it means to be human in the first place.
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For Denise Scott Brown (born 1931), who is among the most important architects of the postwar era, photography has long served as a critical medium through which to perceive, document and think about the world in which designers operate. Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown took photographs for fun, research and teaching, and later as a component of(...)
Encounters: Denise Scott Brown photographs
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For Denise Scott Brown (born 1931), who is among the most important architects of the postwar era, photography has long served as a critical medium through which to perceive, document and think about the world in which designers operate. Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown took photographs for fun, research and teaching, and later as a component of design and planning projects. Through the lens of her Alpa camera she sought to penetrate the irreducible complexities of life around her—and to make a case for the architect and planner's role in intervening within it. "Encounters" gathers an essential collection of Scott Brown's photography from the 1950s to the 1970s, presented here for the first time. The book focuses on the formative decades during which Scott Brown departed her childhood home of Johannesburg to study in London, traveled through Europe, moved to the United States, met her partner Robert Venturi and eventually developed the profound interest in postwar suburbia from which her most famous work, "Learning from Las Vegas", would emerge. Moving thematically rather than sequentially through Scott Brown's photographic oeuvre, "Encounters" opens up new ways of reading this body of work, presenting it less as a continuous historical record than as the product of a careful and studied practice of observation.
Photography monographs
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"Memoryscapes," the second volume in the "Architecture Connecting" series, co-published with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, examines the role of human narratives in shaping the spaces of tomorrow. Focusing on the intersections of architecture with anthropology, archaeology and geology, the book presents the work of two studios whose practices engage deeply with the(...)
Architecture ecologies
April 2026
Architecture connecting: Xu Tiantian & Tsuyoshi Tane
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"Memoryscapes," the second volume in the "Architecture Connecting" series, co-published with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, examines the role of human narratives in shaping the spaces of tomorrow. Focusing on the intersections of architecture with anthropology, archaeology and geology, the book presents the work of two studios whose practices engage deeply with the past through both broad investigative research and precise architectural responses. Bound back-to-back, the publication comprises two volumes presenting the distinct approaches of DnA Architecture and Design (Beijing) and Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects (ATTA, Tokyo and Paris). DnA’s practice of "architectural acupuncture" focuses on the social and economic regeneration of rural Chinese communities through targeted interventions that revive long-standing cultural practices, while ATTA’s "Archaeology of the Future" draws on the layered memories of places to create future possibilities across architecture, urban planning and exhibition design, in an international context. Led by Xu Tiantian and Tsuyoshi Tane, respectively, the two studios share an approach that connects social traditions, cultural heritage, craftsmanship and production conditions within complex, site-specific frameworks. Through illustrated essays and project dossiers, the publication traces how these practices draw on lived histories and place-based knowledge to generate new architectural narratives, bridging the past and the future in response to contemporary needs.
Architecture ecologies
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The Austrian architect-artist Hans Hollein was appointed in 1972 to design a new museum for the post-industrial city of Mönchengladbach in West Germany which transformed it into a centre for contemporary art. This book reveals the full story of this innovative masterpiece. Opening in 1982, Museum Abteiberg was instantly lauded by international critics and Hollein was duly(...)
Hans Hollein's Masterpiece: Art, architecture and the city
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The Austrian architect-artist Hans Hollein was appointed in 1972 to design a new museum for the post-industrial city of Mönchengladbach in West Germany which transformed it into a centre for contemporary art. This book reveals the full story of this innovative masterpiece. Opening in 1982, Museum Abteiberg was instantly lauded by international critics and Hollein was duly awarded the 1985 Pritzker Prize. The book provides a timely and comprehensive reappraisal of the museum from concept, through the design process to its completion. It explains that Hollein was at his core a conceptual artist, perceiving the museum as provocative land art, with an architectural collage as exterior and a labyrinthine, ‘'democratic'’ interior, designed around the collection. It features a triptych of characters - Hollein, director Johannes Cladders and artist Joseph Beuys – whose close collaboration resulted in a museum which transformed thinking about how art, architecture and context – historical, cultural and geographical - should all relate. Radical at the time, many of the ideas that they first realised in this building have now become the norm in museum practice. Broader than a simple building study, this is a story which not only connects art with architecture and with the city, but with finance, corporate power and capital investment.
Architecture Monographs
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This volume expands David Reinfurt’s uniquely pragmatic and experimental approach to pedagogy into a collaborative project that weaves together a multiplicity of voices to present a polyphonic approach to design history and teaching. Three of Reinfurt’s new Princeton University graphic design courses—C-i-r-c-u-l-a-t-i-o-n, M-u-l-t-p-l-i-c-i-t-y and(...)
Graphic Design and Typography
August 2025
A Co* program for graphic design
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This volume expands David Reinfurt’s uniquely pragmatic and experimental approach to pedagogy into a collaborative project that weaves together a multiplicity of voices to present a polyphonic approach to design history and teaching. Three of Reinfurt’s new Princeton University graphic design courses—C-i-r-c-u-l-a-t-i-o-n, M-u-l-t-p-l-i-c-i-t-y and R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h—developed explicitly in the context of remote teaching and in light of urgent realignments around whose stories get told and who does the telling, are presented in this follow-up to A *New* Program for Graphic Design (Inventory Press/D.A.P., 2018). C-i-r-c-u-l-a-t-i-o-n examines the distribution networks for graphic design including electronic and conventional means. M-u-l-t-p-l-i-c-i-t-y, taught with mathematics professor Philip Ording, explores graphic design from the perspective of topology and topology through the practice of graphic design. R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h is an advanced graphic design class which cultivates an exploratory and expansive design process and investigates what the term ""design research"" has meant at different points in design history.
Graphic Design and Typography
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Homelessness is one of the most pressing social challenges of our time, and is closely linked to issues of urban design and architecture. Homeless people are part of urban society and depend on accessible public spaces and urban infrastructure. Yet, in cities around the world, local governments use policies and urban planning to ward off street people, aiming at making(...)
The roofless truth: planning and architecture for homelessness
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Homelessness is one of the most pressing social challenges of our time, and is closely linked to issues of urban design and architecture. Homeless people are part of urban society and depend on accessible public spaces and urban infrastructure. Yet, in cities around the world, local governments use policies and urban planning to ward off street people, aiming at making them invisible in the cityscape and deliberately impeding certain forms of stay. Urban design always reflects power structures—it can exclude or open up avenues for participation. ''The Roofless Truth'' brings together contributions by international researchers and practitioners from the fields of architecture, urban development and design, sociology, ethnology, social work, and education. It offers academic analyses and essays, field reports, and student proposals for interventions in public space, and features award-winning projects and initiatives in Canada, Germany, Iran, Switzerland, and the US. The book highlights how public spaces should be designed to offer protection, dignity, and opportunities for homeless people, and to facilitate encounters and interaction. The featured examples impressively demonstrate that even the smallest spatial decision can determine inclusion or exclusion. ''The Roofless Truth'' paints a multifaceted picture of planning and design as a social practice beyond representation and prestige.
Humans and cities