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Books, like buildings, are constructs of material, technique, and information that record, interpret, and re-present culture. Architects have a long history of appropriating the book as a device to test the limits of representation, clarify ideas, document process and form, and exercise design thinking through the translation of expression and technique from one form to another. This can be seen from Vitruvius’s first-century treatise on architecture, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” to Le Corbusier’s invention and critique in Towards a New Architecture (1923), to various publications by Rem Koolhaas, who consistently has used the form of the book in practice; first as a tool in his speculative, representational approach to architecture in Delirious New York (1978), then in S,M,L,XL (1995), and later as a site for the interrogation of the elements of built form in Elements of Architecture (2018).
This lecture will examine the shifting attitudes and potentials of media and representation in art, design, and architecture, while exploring how architectural thinking–from concept to object–can influence the design of books. The process of building a book will be discussed as the conception of a three-dimensional object deriving from a process—of content generation, curation, design, and production—that materializes ideas within defined structural parameters while responding to the inevitable frictions generated by spatial, structural, material, and performance limitations.
Join us in person for the Spring 2023 CAPLA / School of Architecture Lecture Series, in partnership with AIA Southern Arizona. The lecture will be held in Room 220, CAPLA West Building.
About Ashley Simone
Ashley Simone (M.ARCH) is a writer, editor, curator and educator based in New York, New York. She is the founding director of EDITRIX:, an editorial and curatorial consultancy focusing on the intersection of architecture, art and culture.
Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals published by Actar, BOMB Magazine, Lars Müller Publishers, Oro Editions, and Thames and Hudson. Among other volumes on architecture and urbanism, she is the editor of A Genealogy of Modern Architecture (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2015) and The Other Modern Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021) by Kenneth Frampton, Absurd Thinking Between Art and Design by Allan Wexler (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2017), Two Journeys by Michael Webb (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2018), Frank Gehry Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One, 1954-1978 by Jean-
Louis Cohen (Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 2020), Occupation : Boundary, art, architecture, and culture at the water, by Cathy Simon with Carrie Eastman (Oro Editions, 2021), and she is a co-editor of In Search of African American Space (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2020).
Before founding EDITRIX:, she worked for Bernard Tschumi Architects and managed construction projects with Ryan Associates. The Drawing Center in Soho, designed by WXY Architecture and Urban Design, is the last build project she helped to realize. Others include high-end residences in Manhattan and the BURST House *008, designed by Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston for the exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
She is an associate professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture and a lecturer for CAPLA at the University of Arizona. Her teaching focuses on writing, representation, and design in architecture. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in economics from the College of William and Mary.