Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce the new monograph Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech, edited by the GSD’s K. Michael Hays and Andrew Holder. Hays and Holder have assembled projects from over 100 practices in a critical survey of contemporary architecture. Countering the widely-held view of today’s architecture as a fragmented field, Hays and Holder demonstrate that it is ordered by common impulses: design work that looks deliberately familiar, direct, even ancient, or rudimentary, an effort that is connected by an ambition to initiate a new, shared undertaking through architecture.
Hays and Holder observe today’s architecture finds progressive energy through this embrace of immediate, manual forms. Through these forms Hays and Holder argue the field can build audiences that are plural and not monolithic, and that architects can anticipate responding—and have already responded—to different, if not diverging, points of view. The book reveals shared cultural engagements, agreements, and fantasies of architecture’s origins—all part of a larger theory of the structural relationships that bind and organize the apparent delirium of the contemporary field.
Featuring essays by Catherine Ingraham, Lucia Allais, Stan Allen, Phillip Denny, Edward Eigen, Sylvia Lavin, Antoine Picon, and Marrikka Trotter, Inscriptions presents an editorial exhibition of 112 architecture practices, illustrated by 750 photographs and images. Illustration is organized by scale of image; as related categories of projects are referenced and illustrated throughout the book, the projects’ illustrations grow larger, encouraging a slowing-down and a refocusing of attention as the reader proceeds. In offering a snapshot of today’s moment, Hays and Holder have curated a representational slice of contemporary architects and architecture, with emphasis on designers of the emerging generation, and on those who have a foot in both academy and practice. Their comprehensive survey of today’s field reveals architects’ impulse to speak to a broad, diverse public, and to create architecture the general public might envision themselves participating in rather than spectating.
Through Inscriptions, Hays and Holder counter the predominance of a market-based look at architecture, observing instead that today’s generation of emerging designers have found clever ways to make peace with the material and economic demands of modern society, while not compromising a sense of speculation, possibility, and hope for a different future.
Book specifications
Hardcover
$60.00 • £48.95 • €54.00
ISBN 9781934510797
Publication date: Spring 2022
624 pages / 8-/2 x 11 inches / 750 illus.
Distributed by Harvard University Press
For sales inquiries: sales_hup@harvard.edu.
For other inquiries: Joshua Machat, Assistant Director, Communications and Public Affairs, jmachat@gsd.harvard.edu.
