(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture306090 books, Volume 15

(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) ArchitecturePublished by 306090, Inc.350 Canal Street, Box 2092New York, NY 10013-0875info@306090.orgwww.306090.org

EditorDavid L. Hays

Series EditorsEmily AbruzzoDavid L. HaysJonathan D. Solomon

Copy EditorT.J. Fitsell

Graphic DesignThumb — Luke Bulman and Jessica Young

Advisory BoardM. Christine BoyerMario GandelsonasDavid L. HaysMark JarzombeckRalph LernerPaul LewisMichael SorkinChristian UnverzagtSarah Whiting

(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture is supported by grants from the Brenton and Jean Wadsworth Endowment, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and by the generosity of Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown. Special thanks to Sara Herda and Polly Rubin for their consistent interest and ideas.

© Copyright 2013, 306090, Inc.All rights reserved. Printed and bound in China. All images courtesy the author unless otherwise noted. All reasonable at-tempts have been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in future volumes. No part of this volume may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

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First Edition, 2013ISBN: 978-0-615-77951-5Please contact the publisher for Library of Congress catalog-in-publication information.

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FictionNora Wendl

Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect

us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and

cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves.

Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little

too frank about the limits of human nature and never

prepared us for our eventual end.

—J.G. Ballard, “A Handful of Dust” (2006)

The epigraph above offers a glimmer of the first work to be termed “architectural fiction.” A genre imagined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling in 2006 in response to J.G. Ballard’s essay “A Handful of Dust,”1 architectural fiction stretches the boundaries of what architecture is and where it might exist—“in novels and video games and other non-physical places,” in publications, in exhibitions, in photographs—in a realm decidedly beyond the brick.2

Put simply, architectural fiction is fiction in which architecture participates actively. It com-prises stories both “inspired by, or imposed upon, buildings and the built environment,” in the words of Rob Walker, whose Hypothetical Development Organization, co-founded in 2010 with G.K. Darby and Ellen Susan, situates this genre within the abandoned and “unpopular places” of New Orleans.3 Architectural fictions do not need to be “real”—meaning, we need not make of them the typical and life-sustaining demands we make of normative architecture. Yet they do exist in reality, and just as real are the reactions they prompt.

To be clear, architectural fictions are not spa-tial narratives; those long preceded architectural fiction and might comprise one facet of it. George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Victor Hugo, to name only a few important authors, treat the built environment as character, chief metaphor, and setting for their social critiques and literary explorations. Of course, theorists and philoso-phers have also long troped the built environment, constructing spatial metaphors as vehicles for their ideas. For Michel Foucault, the panopticon embod-ied institutional control and surveillance, whereas, for Gilles Deleuze, folds of space, movement, and time were vehicles for comprehending the monad,

a model for expression in contemporary aesthetics. In contrast, architectural fiction comprises

wide-ranging products—for instance, The Aqua Line (2000), an installation by the design collabora-tive Heavy Trash situated along a 15-mile “route” in Los Angeles. It comprised eight signs announc-ing a fictional but ostensibly forthcoming subway track connecting downtown to the west side—and incited dialogue about the city’s ongoing transit and transportation problems. Or, on the quieter end of the spectrum, the Vitruvian Figure series in which artist Paul Pfeiffer takes on the architec-tural task of rebuilding the Vitruvian figure again and again, realizing, in turn, plans of existing Renaissance-era cathedrals and models of futur-istic stadia as speculations both of and about the past, present, and future consequences of a built environment in which the crowd is increasingly atomized. Or, technologically, the app “Museum of the Phantom City,” produced by Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder, allowing users to see images and in-formation detailing proposed projects in a specula-tive, utopian, future New York City never-to-be.4

Though diverse in its manifestations, architec-tural fiction has one trait in particular: it has much in common with what architects do every day. Every architectural project begins life as a work of fiction. Only in writing or speaking fiction are any subsequent acts of architecture possible. The design brief that the studio professor produces for his or her students is an utter fabrication necessary to make possible the practice of practicing architec-ture at the desk. And each studio project created in response is another fabrication, a fiction told in models, drawings, and material mock-ups never to be realized at full-scale precisely because that sort of realization is not, in fact, the intention. Fiction begets fiction.

For a discipline so inextricably bound to the art of generating fictions, it is curious that this necessary body of disciplinary knowledge has not been fully articulated, explored, defined, or even generally acknowledged. Perhaps we have trouble suspending our disbelief. Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDGBLOG, writes, “Architecture will always

1. J.G. Ballard, “A Handful of Dust,” The Guardian, March 19, 2006, accessed March 15, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/mar/20/architec-ture.communities, acknowledged as “ar-chitectural fiction,” a term coined in the same article by Bruce Sterling, “Science Fiction and Architecture Fiction,” March 20, 2006, accessed July 1, 2012, http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/2006/03/20/science-fiction-and-architecture-fiction/.2. For more about architectural fiction’s most recent manifestations, and a sum-mary of its history, see Rob Walker, “Im-plausible Futures for Unpopular Places,”

The Design Observer, July 25, 2011, accessed March 15, 2012, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/implausible-futures-for-unpopular-places/28738/. For more on how contemporary art might manifest a fictional architecture, see Isabelle Loring Wallace and Nora Wendl, eds., Contemporary Art about Architec-ture: A Strange Utility (Farnham, Surrey, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate: forthcoming 2013). 3. The Hypothetical Development Or-ganization finds unsuitable buildings (neglected and with no prospects for the future) and imagines possible futures for

them. In each case, an artist is asked to create a rendering based on an imaginary concept, to be printed 3’x5’ on a develop-er’s sign then attached to the “unpopular” building. 4. Rob Walker has amassed a number of links to appropriate examples of archi-tectural fiction in his article “Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places,” The Design Observer, July 25, 2011, accessed March 15, 2012, http://places.designob-server.com/feature/implausible-futures-for-unpopular-places/28738/.

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involve telling stories—it is as much fiction as it is engineering and materials science.”5 While that is true, courses in story-telling or fiction have yet to emerge in architectural pedagogies alongside courses in engineering and materials sciences, even though seeing architecture realized relies as much on a designer’s ability to compose a plausible fic-tion as it does on his or her grasp of structure and materials. It seems that, though we might teach and speak comfortably about the tangible elements that compose architecture, the art of thinking speculatively and crafting the fiction of an architec-tural proposal eludes articulation, definition, and certainly celebration within the discipline. Perhaps a mastery of fiction is not “essential” knowledge at the moment of joining two bricks—that moment when, according to Mies van der Rohe, architecture begins. But it is certainly “non-essential” knowl-edge, knowledge that enriches, knowledge accrued daily in the act of speculating about architecture, knowledge needed at-the-ready in the field, or in the mine-field of politics, policy, finance, building codes, and client relations.

Let me be clear: architecture is dependent upon fiction. In the absence of fiction, nothing happens.

˚ ˚ ˚As the fortieth anniversary of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project passed on March 16, 2012, who might have been on the site that afternoon to mark the occasion, to celebrate forty full years of a site in the un-making? Where within those thirty-three remaining acres of now lush, ver-dant urban wilderness did they sit to imagine the future of the most narrativized dirt in the history of architecture?

Happily, we can date the death of Modern

Architecture to a precise moment in time…Modern

Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15,

1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous

Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab

blocks, were given the final coup de grace.

—Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern

Architecture (1977)

Three decades before Ballard’s “A Handful of Dust,” Charles Jencks produced a masterwork of architectural fiction.6 The implosive demolitions of towers A-16 and C-15 in fact happened on March 16 and April 21, 1972, respectively, with most demolition taking place by headache ball over the course of the following five years. Nevertheless, Jencks invented a convenient foothold for defining

the beginning of the Postmodern movement. He also effectively institutionalized a narrative that had, as it turns out, little to do with modern architecture. In an influential article, historian Katharine Bristol resurrects this story, referring to Jencks’s narrative as the “Pruitt-Igoe Myth”—a myth that the housing project’s thirty-three tow-ers were demolished because modern architec-ture failed, placing the blame on the architects, George Hellmuth, Minoru Yamasaki, and Joseph Leinweber.7 Bristol calls attention to that equation as nothing more than a convenient story, one that eclipsed the fact that the project failed due to insti-tutional and structural problems in its financing, planning, construction, and maintenance—not to mention the political economy of post-World War II St. Louis and entrenched urban practices of racial segregation. Yet, the image of a building implod-ing next to the headlining phrase “The Death of Modern Architecture” suggests in a powerful way that the story is over. The End.

The future of architecture depends entirely on the ability of architects to speculate—not only about the present but also about the past. With that in mind, in June 2011, I launched the Pruitt-Igoe Now competition with collaborator Michael R. Allen, founder of the Preservation Research Office in St. Louis, Missouri. This call to re-imagine the 57 acres on which the Pruitt-Igoe towers were once located was extended to the international design community, individuals, and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape archi-tects, designers, writers, and artists of every me-dium. We sought design ideas that would re-invigo-rate the abandoned site. In the spirit of the original St. Louis architectural competition—to which the Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch stands as witness—the competition imagined the current site of Pruitt-Igoe as a frontier: the threshold between North St. Louis, which is showing signs of stabiliza-tion after decades of decline, and the new design for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.8 We were determined to see the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe building C-15 not as an end but as a beginning.

In reframing end-as-beginning, our own ver-sion of the Pruitt-Igoe myth, new truths came to light: – that the Pruitt-Igoe towers have never been en-tirely removed from the site became very

clear as we surveyed the acres in the summers of 2010 and 2011; – that, even after camera crews left the site of the televised implosion, demolition took another five years, until 1977, and was conducted largely by lo-cal wrecking crews using the decidedly less cin-ematic headache ball; – that, of the original 57 acres that comprised the Pruitt and Igoe housing projects, 33 are cur-rently owned by the city’s Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, ceded from the Housing Authority in 1991, after which all site maintenance ended—resulting in the contemporary landscape of the site, an unmarked, seemingly-natural (but en-tirely artificial), verdant open space in the city’s north side, strewn with fragments of buildings, patches of original paving, an electrical substation, a mid-centu-ry modern school building, and a lone streetlight. – that the continual dumping of detritus from other demolition projects within St. Louis transforms the site nearly daily, with mounds of old computers, fax machines, building insulation, siding, and brick rubble as common fare.9

Why hold a competition? This was St. Louis’s question to us: why? City officials pointed out that several plans for the site have been adopted since the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe: an industrial park, a golf course, and a shopping center. Yet none have been built, ostensibly due to lack of funding. But there is arguably another reason why those and other speculative redevelopment plans for the Pruitt-Igoe site—not to mention for other sites on the near north side of St. Louis—have failed. They are bad fictions. They are generic speculations that fall very flat, neglecting to respond to either the historical conditions of the site or even the practi-cal needs of the entirely residential, largely African American constituency, a neighborhood with some of the highest poverty levels in the city of St. Louis. A golf course? A mega-plex shopping center? Storage? These speculations are unbelievable, two-dimensional, and garish.

Speculation has become a dirty word, one as-sociated with the boom-and-bust cycle of building pro forma, a term that might never come clean. But, as it was first recorded in the late fourteenth century, speculation referred to “contemplation based upon observation”—a practice akin to pro-ducing fiction. To produce credible architectural fiction requires intensive study and awareness of the context that one is drawing from, in order to fabricate anew. And the art of architectural specu-lation is lost if it never returns to the built envi-ronment—if the fictions produced aren’t rooted in some seed of truth and if they don’t return to

transform the construction of the world around us, or our understanding of it.

˚ ˚ ˚The Pruitt Igoe Now competition closed on March 16, 2012, the fortieth anniversary of the demoli-tion of the housing project’s tower C-15.10 Seven jurors—Teddy Cruz, Professor in Public Culture and Urbanism, Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego; Co-Founder, CUE/Center for Urban Ecologies, Sergio Palleroni, Associate Professor of Architecture, Department of Architecture, Portland State University, Theaster Gates Jr., Artist in Residence and Director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago and Founder, Rebuild Foundation, Diana Lind, Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief, Next American City, Bob Hansman, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, Joseph Heathcott, Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Senior Director, Participatory Citizenship and Community Activism Initiative, The New School, and Sarah Kanouse, Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Iowa—then selected three winning entries for first-, second-, and third-place prizes out of a total of 31 finalists chosen from 352 submissions.

The goal of the competition was to reward bold ideas—fictions that considered the surrounding area, the context in which the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing projects belongs. The competi-tion welcomed proposals that were products, as well as those that were processes, and invented or emergent architectural typologies were anticipated. The jury asked: How do we proceed from here? Who should have say? Who is most affected? Who has the most compelling claim to this space? Who stands to profit?

The author would like to acknowledge and thank Michael

R. Allen for his role as co-organizer in the Pruitt-Igoe

Now competition. His knowledge of and passion for the

city of St. Louis are simply unparalleled.

5. Geoff Manaugh, The BLDGBLOG Book (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009), 14.6. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 9.7. Katherine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44: 3 (May 1991): 163-171.8. For more on the competition particu-lars, see http://www.pruittigoenow.org

9. Michael R. Allen and Nora Wendl, “After Pruitt Igoe: Narratives of an Urban Forest as Cultural Resource,” was pre-sented in April 2012 at the Society of Ar-chitectural Historian's Landscape Chapter 2012 Symposium, Landscapes in Time.10. Here is another bit of architectural fiction. In fact, the submission-entry site remained open until April 1, 2012.

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This page: Recipe Landscape: Reinstat-ing Collective Ritual, Foreground design agency: Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison Hirsch (New York, NY, USA). 2012. Second Place. Top: In this proposal, the footprints of the buildings are excavated and planted with gardens. By mixing the fruits of these gardens with milk and honey (generated on site through animal husbandry and an apiary), ice cream is produced on a scale that serves the city and larger region.

Bottom: Urban agriculture, environmen-tal stewardship, and cultural rituals of food preparation and consumption are foregrounded in this proposal, as the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex is transformed into a place of production, growth and sustenance.

Opposite page: What If?, Kerry-Anne Ves-selle (Paris, France). 2012. It is the empti-ness of the former site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex that inspires and calls for alternative futures. What if the solu-tion was to be reasonable without being realistic? What if, one day, houses start to lift from the ground? What next?

Above and following: A selection of images from winning and finalist entries in the Pruitt-Igoe Now competition (2011-2012).

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Double Moon, Clouds Architecture Office: Ostap Rudakevych, Masayuki Sono, Yuko Sono (New York, USA). 2012. An artificial, twin moon hovers over the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex.

Hinterland, Jaewoo Chon (Mississauga, Canada). 2012. Hinterland proposes trans-forming the site into an extensive bio-swale and wetland; a productive landscape that encourages recreational inhabitation of the site and acts as a catalyst for the dissipation of the residual negative senti-ment concerning Pruitt-Igoe’s history.

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Urban Expedition(s), Djamel Kara (Ile-de-France, France). 2012. What if Pruitt-Igoe and “the new American ruins” were the necessary counterpart of the Ameri-can dream, and the tangle of individual choices shaping a suburban American were actually sustained by public policies? The very essence of the city would be at odds with the image of suburban happi-ness. This proposal maintains that the city is “man’s attempt to remake the world,” in the author’s words, and attempts to en-gage residents in the process of envision-ing the site anew.

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Finding Traces, Sung Jin Cho. 2012. This project advances a potential process for exploring, transforming, and experienc-ing the natural caves that (may) underlie the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, foregoing political, architectural

or socio-cultural concerns. Holes are drilled, and poles are installed to support a roof, beneath which are two paths that can be followed into the (potential) natural caves.

Wilderness Disturbanism, Tawab Hlimi (Toronto, Canada). 2012. Responding to the low population density, a wilder-ness is cultivated in the urban prairies of the North Side of the city of St. Louis. Through a long-term strategy, the urban wilderness and prairies of St. Louis are manipulated to produce oak dominated forests, using planned disturbances of fire and silviculture to stimulate its generation of valuable timber, acorns (for wildlife) and wilderness recreation.

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About the ContributorsGreg BartonGreg Barton is an MSc candidate in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University. Previous publications include texts in Volume and CLOG. Barton was recently a research fellow at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY.

McLain ClutterMcLain Clutter, BArch (Syracuse), MED (Yale), is an architect, writer, assistant professor at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and principal of the design and research practice MCRD. Clutter lectures and exhibits internationally, and his essays have appeared in Grey Room, MONU, and the edited volume Formerly Urban: Projecting Rustbelt Futures (2012).

Ludwig EngelLudwig Engel studied cultural sciences, economics, and communication sciences in Berlin, Shanghai and Frankfurt/Oder. With raumtaktik-office from a better future (www.raumtaktik.de), he works at the intersection of urban planning, architecture, and futurology addressing strategic questions concern-ing the future of the city. His forthcoming doctoral dissertation concerns urban utopias at the begin-ning of the 21st century.

Mark EricsonMark Ericson, BA (Rutgers), MArch (SCI-Arc), is an assistant professor of architecture at Woodbury University in Los Angeles and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked for AGPS in Los Angeles/Zurich and Erdy McHenry in Philadelphia. His research and teaching focus on the construction of representational strategies rela-tive to technological developments in the discipline of architecture.

Simone FerracinaSimone Ferracina, MArch (Accademia di Architettura/USI-AAM, Mendrisio, Switzerland), is a New York-based designer and founding editor of Organs Everywhere (Œ), an independent online journal at the intersection of architecture, technol-ogy, media, and ecology (organseverywhere.com). His research and writing have appeared in Kerb (2011), Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions (2012), and prominent online blogs. His project Theriomorphous Cyborg took first place in the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards.

Johannes GabrielJohannes Gabriel is a freelance researcher, con-sultant, and doctoral candidate working on envi-ronmental analysis, future studies, and scenario planning. He is a non-resident fellow of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), Berlin, and is en-gaged in its Global Governance 2022 Program. He is also a fellow with Berlin-based consultancy Die Denkbank. Research interests include philosophy of science, Asia's transition societies, informal net-works, and international security.

Ellen HartmanEllen Hartman researches military landscapes at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center. Her work with the Department of Defense encompasses historic landscape preservation planning, environmental policy effects on Army operations, and land and resource management patterns on military instal-lations. She holds an MLA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

David L. HaysDavid L. Hays, MArch (Princeton), PhD (Yale), is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a founding principal of Analog Media Lab. His research interests include garden and landscape de-sign in early modern Europe, with a special focus on France; contemporary theory and practice of land-scape architecture; and the history of cartography.

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Irene HwangIrene Hwang, BA (UPenn), MArch (Harvard), teaches architecture at Northeastern University and has also taught at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she was the 2010-11 Oberdick Teaching Fellow. A founding partner of Constructing Communication (Barcelona), her work focuses on the discursive and productive con-texts by which the project and artifact of architectural activity can be re-imagined and re-deployed.

Miriam KellyMiriam Kelly is a senior architect at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios in Bath, UK, where she special-izes in the creative reuse of historic buildings. She worked previously in Edinburgh, London, and with the German Development Service in Nepal. Accredited in building conservation, her current projects include restoration of Lowther Castle and Gardens, improving visitor facilities at Windsor Castle, and housing the British Postal Museum and Archive in London.

Robert J. KrawczykRobert J. Krawczyk is a professor of architecture and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Academics Affairs in the College of Architecture at IIT. His teaching and research of over three decades focus on digital craftsmanship, and his work covers digital methods and artwork integrating science, mathematics, architecture, and technology. He is the author of The Codewriting Workbook: Creating Computational Architecture in AutoLISP (2008).

Jonathan MasseyJonathan Massey is an architect, historian, and associate professor at Syracuse University. His research showing how architecture mediates power by giving form to civil society, shaping social rela-tions, and regulating consumption has appeared in many journals and essay collections as well as the books Crystal and Arabesque (2009) and Governing by Design (2012). Massey is a co-founder of the Transdisciplinary Media Studio and the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative.

Gisli PalssonGísli Pálsson holds a BA from Harvard, an MA in landscape archaeology from the University of Iceland, and an MSc in landscape architecture with a focus on the historic environment from the University of Bath. He is currently involved with archaeological research in Iceland and Malaysia. His academic interests include landscape, the visual culture of archaeology, and the material culture of twentieth-century public parks.

Eeva-Liisa PelkonenEeva-Liisa Pelkonen, MArch (Tampere University of Technology), MED (Yale), PhD (Columbia), is an associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture. Her research focuses on twentieth-century European and American architecture with special interest in the genesis and meaning of form within national and historical contexts. A noted authority on Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, and Kevin Roche, her work has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, among other agencies.

Eduard Sancho PouEduard Sancho Pou holds graduate degrees in architecture and construction engineering and a PhD cum laude from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona (UPC). His book Architectural Strategies (2012), studying the approaches used by architects to secure commissions, sell projects, and erect buildings, was published with support from the Graham Foundation. Sancho Pou is a member of the Cercle d´Arquitectura research group at UPC and is the founder and former director of the Barcelona Centro de Arquitectura gallery.

CatherineSeavitt-NordensonCatherine Seavitt Nordenson, BArch (Cooper Union), BLA (CCNY), MArch (Princeton), is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the City College of New York and principal of Catherine Seavitt Studio, a practice integrating architecture, landscape, and infrastructure. Research interests include design adaptation to sea level rise in urban and natural environments; rethinking landscape restoration practices given the dynamics of climate change; and the history, processes, and ethics of the de-domestication of large herbivores for grassland restoration and land management.

Amir SoltaniAmir Soltani, BA (Fine Arts, San Francisco State), MA (Environmental Design, Berkeley), is a designer and researcher in architecture and audio-visual studies and a doctoral candidate in architecture at Cambridge University, where he is a researcher at DIGIS (Digital Studios for Research in Design, Visualization and Communication). He is actively involved in the production of electroacoustic music and contributes regularly to electronic arts publica-tions and festivals in the UK and abroad.

Hermione SpriggsHermione Spriggs, BSc (Anthropology, University College London), is an MFA candidate at the University of California, San Diego. She is inter-ested in the overlap between being human and being “thing.” Spriggs is a fellow of Mildred's Lane and part of the research networks The Culture of Preservation (AHRC, UCL) and Something from Nothing: Fearless Speculations in Art, Science and Activism (UCSD Centre for the Humanities).

Jimmy StampJimmy Stamp, MED (Yale), is a writer, researcher, and recovering architect whose work has been featured in numerous print and web publications. Interests include contemporary interpretations of Postmodernism, the integration of new media tech-nologies into the built environment, and the role of narrative in architecture. He is currently writing a book documenting the history of architectural education at Yale.

Chris TeeterChris Teeter, BArch (UKansas), MArch (UPenn) is a licensed architect based in New York City and teaches 3D modeling software at Parsons the New School of Design. He consults for architects, landscape architects, artists, and engineers and is the founding principal of the design build company Metamechanics. He writes electronic music and is a board member for the Center for Contemporary Environmental Art.

Nora WendlNora Wendl, BArch and MArch (Iowa State), is an assistant professor of architecture at Portland State University. Her research explores intersections between contemporary art, literature, and archi-tecture and their historiography. Wendl is co-editor, with Isabelle Loring Wallace, of Contemporary Art about Architecture: A Strange Utility (2013) and has collaborated with artists Harmen Liemburg and Theaster Gates. She was a resident at the Jack Straw Writers Program and, with Michael Allen, co-organized the international design competition Pruitt Igoe Now (2012).

Andrew WittAndrew Witt, MArch and MDes-History and Theory (Harvard), is a Los Angeles-based de-signer, Director of Research at Gehry Technologies (GT), and a lecturer in architecture at Harvard University, where he teaches about geometry and digital design. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has consulted on parametric design, geometric approaches, new technologies, and integrated practice for clients including Gehry Partners, Atelier Jean Nouvel, UN Studio, and Coop Himmelb(l)au.

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