ARCHITECTURE AT MACK
We are delighted to announce the launch of our new architecture list. Our first season of books spans a sourcebook for sustainable design practices by research and design group MATERIAL CULTURES, a survey of the relationship between post-war architecture and sculpture by PENELOPE CURTIS, a newly translated essay on Japanese architecture by MANFREDO TAFURI, edited and introduced by MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI, an investigation of a radical playground in 1960s Amsterdam by URSULA SCHULZ-DORNBURG, and the first volume of the Collected Works of influential architectural practice CARUSO ST JOHN.
This is a list we have spent years working on, and we can’t wait for you to embark on this journey with us into the enthralling world of architectural theory and practice.
WHY ARCHITECTURE?
From Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s survey of Soviet-era structures in Armenia to Guido Guidi’s draughtsman-like documents of the changing cityscapes of Italy, architecture has long been a core interest of our publishing and central to the work of many of the artists, photographers, and curators we collaborate with. When we began discussing the possibility of this list, it became apparent how much architecture is at the heart of so many of the subjects we cover, from politics and sociology to art and culture, across the spectrums of material and theoretical, local and global.
In this sense, our architecture list is both a natural progression of our expanding interests and a return home to a discipline and approach to the world which has shaped our work as publishers.
WHAT SHOULD I EXPECT IN MACK ARCHITECTURE BOOKS?
You can expect to encounter voices from diverse areas of practice and expertise covering topics including the built environment, urbanism, housing, infrastructure, history, and theory. Books on established and emerging practices will sit alongside surveys of understudied vernacular forms and challenging new approaches to the architectures of health, capital, and nationhood.
The book form itself will continue to be an integral focus as we pursue the possibilities of text, image, and materiality as means to particular understandings of the construction, inhabitation, and imagination of the built environment.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Among the books planned for 2023 are a disruptive graphic introduction to architecture based around a series of unusual dichotomies; a study of the ‘border ecologies’ of the built environment of the Gaza Strip; an intimate diary of the construction and inhabitation of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Upper Lawn Pavilion; a meditation on the life of Koechlin House, a home designed ‘inside out’ by Herzog & De Meuron; a book on tarpaulin as a multivalent material in provisional, preservative, and hyper-ambitious forms of architecture; and an examination of the effects of disease and health on urban planning.
Image credits (top to bottom): Junzō Sakakura, Japan Pavilion in the Paris Exposition (1937), public domain; Caruso St John, Orleston Mews (model); Caruso St John, New Art Gallery Walsall (section); Photograph © Jess Gough; Photograph © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg; Caruso St John, Nottingham Contemporary, photograph © Hélène Binet
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