Exploring architecture as a form of concealment and obfuscation in engendering new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and reshaping the world. Architecture is the perfect form of camouflage. As buildings recede into the background of everyday life, the myriad forces that shape our natural, social, and political landscapes hide in plain sight. Embedded within the spatial and material organizations of the built environment are ideas of value, hierarchy, and control that tilt the ground and influence perception in the name of endless competing interests. Operating across multiple scales and mediums, architectural camouflage gives familiar form to obscure objectives. Design transforms and encodes our shared environments, from domestic domains to digital territories, through its material practices, aesthetics, and discourses. Immanent in the periphery, architecture’s images are internalized as forms for understanding and reshaping the world. Camouflage, in turn, dwells in the architecture of our collective subconscious. Latent within architecture’s deceptions is a profound capacity to reflect the elusive intentions and surreal ambiguities of our ecological entanglements. In masking hierarchies and shifting sensitivities to what escapes perception, architecture can engender vital questions around the agency and significance of its world-making practices. Mediating with and within the background, architecture can awaken new modes of attention to material and social layers previously unimagined or hidden and engage directly with the mirrored frameworks that define reality. This issue of Perspecta considers the complexities and potentialities of architectural concealment, obfuscation, and mimicry; of the power inherent in architecture’s expanding capacity as media. In the veiled extents of our physical and digital worlds, what is still not found? Contributors APRDELESP and Xavier Nueno Guitart, Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann, Esther M. Choi, feminist architecture collaborative, Marianela D’Aprile and Douglas Spencer, Theo Deutinger and Christopher Clarkson, DESIGN EARTH, David Freeland and Brennan Buck, Linda Gordon, Noah Kalina, Dana Karwas, Andrew Economos Miller, M.C. Overholt and Alex Whee Kim, Trevor Paglen, Lukas Pauer, Nina Rappaport, David Sadighian, Matthew Soules, Jerome Tryon, Michael Young

Considering a redefinition of global space. As much as it is a neoclassical compositional principle, the ensemble today is shifting into a new critical focus: it is a central figure in nascent developments in probabilistic mathematics and a critical logic in the development of artificial intelligence algorithms. Statistical ensembles are a specific adaptation of Markov processes. They produce and are produced by a highly circumscribed definition of creativity—that of a predictive state inherently based on a chain of linked, given events, thus a computational intelligence predicated on the established patterns of the database. Are these mathematical ensembles different from those of neoclassical composition? How are the new ensembles characterized and materialized relative to their conceptual tradition? This fifty-second issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—is a projective art history of ensemble as form and politics. It uses theories of ensemble to propose both alternative extensive stagings of design objects, as well as other resistant assemblies of the corps of architects. Ensemble is posed a lens to theorize object-parts and states of motion at once, together: an architecture of the city. The volume includes a new photographic essay on the contemporary city of Bengali by American and Indian artists. A collection of essays by interdisciplinary contributors interweave this new creative work, pointing toward a compositional project for an architecture that is multiple, extensive, spontaneous, collective, durational, temporary. Contributors Charlotte Algie, Hayden Bassett, Anya Bokov, Kim Bowes, Alex Bremner, Matteo Burioni, Swati Chattopadhyay, Jean-Louis Cohen, Mark Crinson, Arko Datto, Samia Henni, Heyward Hart, Mark Jarzombek, Vladimir Kulić, Jimenez Lai, Hannah Le Roux, John Loring, Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani, Emily Mann, Christina Maranci, Edward Mitchell, Brian Norwood, Itohan Oyasimwese, Cristina Osswald, Curtis Roth, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Hans Tursack, Yasmin Vobis, Aaron Forrest

Atopia as both the site of architecture’s critical confrontation with hegemonic systems and the theoretical space in which its own processes can be challenged. A literal no-place, atopia represents the spatial end-product of a society seemingly flattened by supra-territorial flows of information and material. It expresses both a physical artifact and condition of mass culture, and like the global systems of production and consumption from which it is conceived, atopia is both nowhere and everywhere at once. For the contributors of Perspecta 54, the ephemeral conditions of atopia are also an invitation to an equally unconstrained critical practice. Blurred boundaries—geopolitical, virtual, technical, disciplinary—offer sites for transgressive speculation and critique from beyond the limits of traditional design agency. What results is a form of design practice that ambiguously straddles impossibility and hyperreality. Atopia rejects both the escapist fantasy of utopia and the nihilism of dystopia, favoring instead a conceptual middle ground from which real-world conditions can be productively engaged and challenged. Architecture’s traditional objectives of critical inquiry—particularly the location of modes of complicity, agency, and resistance within larger structures—are mediated and reframed through nontraditional strategies of speculative design and fiction. For a profession that is routinely asked to navigate extreme complexity with limited tools, this approach suggests an expanded operational domain and possibilities for reinvigorated creative thought. From urban crises and climate emergencies to border disputes and geopolitics, Perspecta 54 examines atopia as both the site of architecture’s critical confrontation with hegemonic systems and the theoretical space in which its own processes can be challenged.

Ruminations on the paradoxical nature of amnesia: can the gaps it creates provide spaces for invention? Architecture, the most durable of the arts, is inextricably linked to issues of memory, nostalgia, and history. Yet, in this impatient century, the discipline's relationship to the past has become increasingly fraught. The stream of readily accessible information has trapped us in a perpetual present, and our attention spans have been reduced to 140-character bursts. As archives overflow and data multiplies, these accumulating facts lack any theory of significance. Is history still relevant in a media landscape where time passes at an accelerated pace? This issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—proposes that amnesia, often seen as a destructive force, might also be understood as a productive one, that the gaps it creates might also provide spaces for invention. Contributions from a diverse group of scholars, artists, and practitioners explore the paradoxical nature of amnesia: How can forgetfulness be both harmful and generative? What will we borrow or abandon from yesterday to confront tomorrow? What sort of critical genealogies can be repurposed, suppressed, or manufactured to reenergize current practice? How might we construct counter-narratives, rebel histories, and alternative canons that are relevant to our present moment? Perspecta 48 considers the uses and abuses of history and ignites a debate about the role of memory in architecture. Contributors Esra Akcan, Amale Andraos, Iwan Baan, Mario Carpo, David Chipperfield, T.J Demos, Kyle Dugdale, Ed Eigen, Marco Frascari, Maria Giudici, Karsten Harries, Sam Jacob, Andrew Kovacs, Sylvia Lavin, Gary Leggett, Richard Mosse, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stephan Petermann and OMA/AMO, Matt Roman, Saskia Sassen, Russell Thomsen, Anthony Vidler, Stanislaus von Moos

Dana Cuff delves into the architect's everyday world in "Architecture" to uncover an intricate social art of design, resulting in a new portrait of the profession that sheds light on what it means to become an architect.

This book is the definitive guide to all of H.H. Richardson's work, built and unbuilt, extant and demolished - his municipal offices, educational buildings, department stores, libraries, railroad stations, churches, and private residences. It is heavily illustrated with sketches, plans, and interior and exterior photographs; maps and addresses are supplied for buildings which survive. The paperback edition contains new information on several of Richardson's projects as well as eight supplemental entries for projects uncovered' after the hardcover edition was published. Jeffrey Karl Ochsner practices architecture in Houston.

Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection.

"After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists movd to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the paterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world."--BOOK JACKET.

Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space. To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another—architecture and philosophy—can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space—the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities. Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic.

Through the works of cutting-edge computer artists, composers, and designers, DIGITAL MOSAICS explores the possibilities of the digital medium and how it radically transforms the way art is produced and understood by the audience. Digital expert Steven Holtzman lays the groundwork for the digital and art worlds of our future. Index. 86 illustrations.