Decoys & Depictions: Images of the Digital took the form of a symposium and set of three exhibitions organized and curated by assistant professor of architecture, Constance Vale. Vale suggests that the artifacts of digital production have expanded the theoretical discourse concerning images and that their outcomes are better framed as decoys and depictions. “Decoys” are defined as objects that share characteristics with images, and “depictions” as images that have the qualities of objects. These are not oppositions, but bookend the working space in which architects and artists who are invested in images operate. Decoys and depictions cannot be easily categorized given their complex nature—they are not exclusively picture or data, flat or thick, phenomenal or analytical. 

The exhibition and panel discussions explored the complex material status of the products of digital imaging, raised questions about how digital media is changing building and practice, and examined the sociopolitical potential of digital modes of display and distribution. The project also represents a significant effort to create a taxonomy of contemporary architects and artists who are working through digital images.

The three concurrent exhibitions included projects by symposium participants exhibited in Des Lee Gallery, artworks in the permanent collection shown in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and work by students at Washington University, which were displayed throughout the campus of the Sam Fox School, concentrated in Steinberg Gallery. The latter of those exhibits, entitled Performing Pedagogy, encompassed selected work from graduate and undergraduate architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design students from fall 2018 and fpring 2019. The show displayed a panoramic picture of the school’s pedagogy, especially as it relates to discourse surrounding digital images. Exhibition furniture was designed for compact storage so it could be saved for exhibitions. Seeing the work of Sam Fox School students allowed for a greater understanding of the collective voice of the School to advance our curriculum with one another and share our embodied knowledge with external audiences.

Chandler Ahrens, Aaron Sprecher (Editors)

2019

New York: Routledge

ISBN 978-1138583986

274 pages

Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities: Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach architecture: images, objects, and discipline.

The first section of the book, “Images: Effect and Affect in the Digital Representation of Architecture,” examines how the nature of images has evolved from a representation of something to the evidence of the process by which they were generated. The second section, “Objects: Topological Evolution of the Architectural Entity,” explores how the impact of intensive computational capacity of today’s information technologies is propelling a pivot away from the ideal, fixed architectural object toward an unstable and variable condition that promotes potentiality. The third section, “Discipline: Transdisciplinarity and Potentialities,” reveals the increasing porosity of the architectural discipline to other fields of knowledge —architects transgressing traditional boundaries into other professions and non-architects entering the field of architecture.

Instabilities and Potentialities aims to bridge theoretical and practical approaches in digital architecture by bringing together original texts from some of the most important historians, theoreticians, and experimental practitioners today, including contributions by: Georges Teyssot, Antoine Picon, Mark Linder, David Freeland, Brennan Buck, Dana Cupkova, Viola Ago, John Carpenter, Nicholas de Monchaux, Martin Bressani, Volkan Alkanoglu, Thom Mayne, Alvin Huang, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Alessandra Ponte, Laurent Stalder, Satoru Sugihara, Greg Lynn, Tom Shaked, Uri Dubin, Jose Sanchez, and Theodora Vardouli.

Eric Mumford

2018

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

ISBN 978-0-300-20772-9

360 pages

This textbook is a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution, and a detailed history of designers’ efforts to shape modern cities. Beginning with an overview of technical and social changes in mid-nineteenth century London and Paris, the book also examines varied efforts to shape urban extensions and central new interventions elsewhere.

Topics include tenement reform efforts for the working class in 19th century London and New York, Städtebau in Germany, the Garden City Movement, the American City Beautiful movement, “Town Planning” in Britain, and “urbanisme” in France. It further explores less well-known topics such as urban modernization in East Asia before 1930 and suburban planning in the United States from the 1910s and 1930s. Mumford also addresses social change and modern urbanism in Europe in the 1920s, including the emergence of CIAM (International Congresses for Modern Architecture), 1928–1956; the political, technological, and urban transformations of World War II; the expansion of racially segregated decentralization in the United States; global urbanism and modernism after 1945; and European and Latin American postwar urbanism. It then takes up urbanistic aspects of postwar architectural culture, including critiques of modernist planning and responses to the ongoing challenges posed by efforts to create organized self-build settlements and to make more ecologically sustainable cities.

Eric Paul Mumford, M.Arch., PhD., is the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches courses in the history of modern architecture and urbanism. He has published numerous books and articles on related topics, including The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (2000) and Modern Architecture in St. Louis (2004). Mumford also co-curated the exhibition, Ando and Le Corbusier, at the new Tadao Ando designed Wrightwood 659 Gallery in Chicago and is editing the forthcoming catalogue for the Alphawood Foundation.

Robert McCarter

2018

New York: Phaidon Press

ISBN 978-0714875941

256 pages

Grafton Architects, founded in Dublin 40 years ago by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, has emerged as one of the most important, influential, and celebrated architectural practices of the early 21st century—as well as one of the very few such firms led by female partners. This first comprehensive monograph on the firm reveals the constructive relationship Grafton Architects have forged between their contemporary practice and disciplinary history, as well as the way their practice has emphasized the enrichment of experience and the engendering of spatial generosity that goes far beyond the brief given the architect. Their practice is “committed to the cultural ethics of building,” and this principled approach allows their work to serve as an important example of transforming modern architecture by grounding it in the specifics of its particular place, while simultaneously improving and enriching the larger lifeworld.

In writing on architects, McCarter begins and ends with the interior space of experience and inhabitation; a space that is, paradoxically, rarely talked about in most writings on architecture, but which remains the primary purpose of architecture’s construction. His approach is founded in McCarter’s own architectural practice, teaching in schools of architecture, analysis of the design processes of architects as they are recorded in both drawings and built works, as well as his own experiences of “being there” in architectural spaces. McCarter’s writings present a criticism that is both constructive and clarifying, and which acts to bind together the perspectives of scholars, critics, practitioners, and most importantly, the public who are the inhabitants of architecture—precisely because these are almost always considered to be mutually exclusive discourses. It is this truly comprehensive analysis of the experience of inhabitation and of the design process that leads to its realization in architecture—the beginning and the end of architectural design—that is the focus of McCarter’s teaching, practice, research, and publications.

Robert McCarter is the author of 22 books, a practicing architect, and the Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis since 2007. He previously taught at the University of Florida (1991–2007) and Columbia University (1986–1991), among others. In 2018, McCarter was an International Exhibitor in the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture, and in 2009 he was recognized in Architect as one of the “Ten Best Architecture Teachers in the U.S.” McCarter is also the author of Place Matters: The Architecture of WG Clark (ORO Editions, summer 2019).

Zeuler R. Lima

2018

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press in association with the Fundació Joan Miró

ISBN 978-0691191195

140 pages

Between February 14 and May 26, 2019 the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona featured a curatorial and editorial project by Zeuler R. Lima presenting a selection of 100 drawings by architect Lina Bo Bardi. The exhibition will also be hosted by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh winter 2019–2020. Lima produced an accompanying catalogue in Catalan and Spanish, and published the peer reviewed book Lina Bo Bardi, Drawings.

Over the span of her life, Bo Bardi collected more than 6,000 drawings and sketches in her personal archives in São Paulo, Brazil. More than a designer’s tool, to her, drawing was a primary expressive means driven by a strong sense of curiosity and doubt. Bo Bardi never claimed drawing to be an independent artistic language, though she embraced it with artistic purpose. She approached drawing both as a noun and a verb, outcome and process, object and relationship. While proficiency in freehand drawing has lost prominence in the arts in general and in architectural practice in particular, Bo Bardi’s drawings remain an always fresh reminder of the continued importance and value of free, authentic thinking and of skillful, educated hands.

Zeuler R. Lima, associate professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, has a PhD. in urbanism and postdoc in comparative literature. He has published extensively about modern design and art, and is Bo Bardi’s biographer.

Catalina Freixas, Mark Abbott (Editors)

2019

Cham, Switzerland: Springer

ISBN 978-3-319-72955-8

621 pages

Segregation by Design uses St. Louis as a point of departure for examining the causes and consequences of residential and urban racial segregation and proposes potential tactics for mitigation that can shape an equitable future for the American metropolis. Segregation can be deconstructed into a timeline of causal relationships illustrating how past actions and policies constructed the divided cities of today. Over time, the constant reinvention of mechanisms for maintaining residential segregation institutionalized inequality through its ramifications in determining access to education, employment, healthcare, transportation, and the distribution of political power. Policy produced segregation, and it is only through policy that it can be undone. A historical analysis of housing and urban policies that affected our built environment and shaped the divided American city is the foundation for this body of research.

Catalina Freixas is engaged in urban humanities research and practice with a focus on resiliency. She has developed a series of research questions and metrics for analysis that connect the natural, economic, and social facets of the urban environment, and a quantitative model to evaluate eco-urbanism strategies. Her work has also focused on the broad range of consequences and mitigation strategies of urban segregation that inspired this book.

Mark Abbott, PhD., is the former director of the Harris-Stowe State University Center for Neighborhood Affairs, an institute that provides technical and planning assistance to underserved communities in St. Louis. He has written extensively about urban planning and the history of St. Louis.