Some selected things I have written, or written about, recently.
I reviewed Nerea Calvillo’s Aeropolis in BOMB Magazine in June, 2023. In a terrible coincidence, the same month that Canadian wildfire smoke descended on New York City and across the Eastern Seaboard.
“Human, Nature” was published in The Avery Review in 2020—a long-form essay weaving together histories of the picturesque, contemporary. poetry, and navigating a world of new landscapes.
“Let Go” appeared in Project Issue 7, November 2018. It is a short essay on automation and ornament, and reads the act of building as one of interpretation.
Ornament is a curious place to interject this variability, but… perhaps it’s precisely where indeterminacy should lie--to communicate a a set of irreducible values. And this ‘open’ is full of a new kind of potential: that that is responsive to its condition while multivalent in its meaning… and one whose instability and looseness leaves open a much larger possibility for interpretation.
“Responding to the Queer Archive”, with Monroe Street, appeared in Pidgin 23, Spring 2018. It is a conversation on oral history and the archive as an ephemeral place.
In a dumb way I’m advocating looking at the extremes of typology (the domestic interior versus the open space program) as more interesting in reading an archive than spaces that are now (since the 19th century) called archive.
“Working Queer” appeared in Log 41, November 2017. It is the introduction to a section I edited that investigated new forms of applying queer ideologies and practices to design through sixteen contributions ranging from homofascism to camp materialism; technological infrastructures to acts of negational resistance.
“Paradigm Lost, Paradigm Found” appeared in Ed #1, Fall 2017. It is a short essay on the history of paradigms in architecture that ostensibly shape thinking but oftentimes produce specific forms.
Borrowing bits and pieces of discourse around form…we might reconstitute the Platonic shape with the potential to act in new ways and represent new kinds of political power…So we find the value of the paradigm is as one of the foundational building blocks of architecture--to strike a balance between a resonant cultural project and a disciplined formal one.
“A Conspiracy of Small Things” appeared in the Home Show Book, edited by Asad Raza. It is a compilation of anecdotes about New York’s housing history alongside collages featuring work from Home Economics.
Here, a stool…tries to find a home in New York’s ultra-competitive housing market: between projects and condos; desires and realities and through the languages of the home that began as sales jargon and that have somehow become our reality. There it sits, a scaleless domestic object.
“Cher” appeared in After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit, the catalogue of the Oslo Architecture Triennale. Lars Muller Pubilshers, 2016.
“So Through a World of Piety We Make Our Way” appeared in Imagining Architecture Beyond the End Times, edited by Joseph Bedford. It’s a loose-form essay about ways that we ‘queer’ disciplinary knowledge through translating theoretical and/or historical claims into design work; an act of interpretation and internalization.