Introductions by the Office of Publications:
Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Director
Joanna Joseph, Assistant Director
Meriam Soltan, Assistant Editor
Isabelle A. Tan, Assistant Editor

Presentations by:
Laura Coombs, Graphic designer
Nicholas Korody, Writer, editor, designer
Jacob R. Moore, Curator, critic, editor
Grace Sparapani, Writer, editor

This event was presented in a hybrid in-person and virtual format. The workshop consists of two sessions, one in summer and one in fall:

Summer, Session 1—Building an Editorial Practice
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
5:30pm-7:30pm
Ware Lounge, Avery Hall

Session 1 introduced students to a diverse range of possible positions, projects, and methodologies for realizing a publication from start to finish with the aim of collectively building and sharing resources.

Fall, Session 2—Sharing Proposals
Friday, October 14, 2022
12pm-2pm
Room 209, Fayerweather Hall

Session 2 will invite students to present and receive feedback on their publication proposals and to engage others in the structure and ambitions of their publications.

IKL - Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt
JJ - Joanna Joseph

IKL: Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining us. My name is Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, I’m the director of the Office of Publications: ¼ of the office, alongside my colleagues Joanna Joseph, Meriam Soltan, and Isabelle Tan. This is the first time our office is speaking directly to many of you about student publications and we’re thrilled to be able to share the work we do in this context and to be in conversation with you and your ideas down the line. We also have some wonderful people here tonight––some longtime and new collaborators—so a big thank you to Nick, Laura, Grace, and Jacob for taking the time and space to think with us. In fact, more than collaborators, they are our teachers. And I’m so super excited to learn and hear from people we work with everyday in this different capacity. But before jumping in, we want to briefly introduce what it is we’re doing here:

By being here tonight, we think it is safe to assume that everyone is, at least in part, invested in the work of publishing—and if not invested, then in some way aware of the kind of power and possibilities opened up by printed work. And it is because of this common ground, this investment and dedication, that we want to start from a place of ambivalence, to interrogate why it is that one should even publish in the first place, especially in the context of a school of design. To ask “Why Publish?” is not necessarily to deter you—or us for that matter—from pursuing publication projects, rather it is to insist that uncertainty is a productive space to sit in and with at every point in the process. We’re going to be asking ourselves this question over and over again tonight. Why? The hope being not to answer it but to remain endlessly curious about the work we do and have done.

JJ: Thanks for kicking things off Isabelle! My name is Joanna Joseph and I’m the Assistant Director of the Office of Publications. As we’ve stated, this workshop is rooted in the belief that why and how we publish is just as important as what we publish, and we hope with this workshop to provide you with a set of tools and resources to guide thoughtful, intentional editorial practice. Much like publishing, to design is to communicate, to find and make community. Publishing evolves design practice, and practice provokes further thought, further questions. If the university is the place where how we design can be questioned, expanded, refined, experimented with, writing and publishing can be powerful tools in this action.

Rather than formal introductions to our office––Isabelle and I, alongside Meriam and Isabelle Tan, are going to take you through a few of our publishing projects as a way of modeling the questions and considerations that have both generated and have been generated by our work. The aim is not to demonstrate that these methods are by any means the “right” or only way of producing a publication—they are certainly not! But by revisiting each project, we hope to re-meet and reframe the “why’s” and the “how’s” of the work for ourselves too.

IKL: We also want to insist that, by being here, we all start to consider ourselves as editors. Whether that’s helping structure ideas, designing them across the page, reconfiguring them textually, or in the margins, the work of editing always requires us to think both within and beyond whatever it is we’re working on. Writing, research, and publications are products of design themselves, and in turn are capable of designing environments, attitudes, conditions. As with the fabric of the built environment, publications cannot be separated from the conditions that produce them, their contributors, contents, materials, modes of circulation carry particular motivations and biases. But in becoming editors, we also want to reformulate what this position means, to decenter notions of hierarchy or expertise that are often assumed with editorial work (and coincidentally or not, often with architectural work…). So, again, our wonderful collaborators here tonight are testament to the truly collective nature of publishing, and, I think, each in their own way, show us how we can continue to frame editorial practice as an architectural practice and vice versa. (I actually think most if not all are either graduates of GSAPP, or adjacent to the school and to architecture.).

JJ: Today’s session is part one of a two-part workshop. Today we will be modeling guidelines and gathering resources for building an editorial practice. We will explore some of our office’s projects in depth, and we’ve asked the participants to explore a particular methodology through both their own work, and through the work of others.

In October, students will be invited back to workshop their own publication ideas and proposals with us in a more informal, yet hands-on session.

We know that a lot of you are also seeking more logistical information on the actual nuts and bolts of organizing a publication while you are a student at GSAPP. We want to say up front that the Office of Publications does not actually facilitate students’ printed work, rather these initiatives are supported by the Student Council. That being said, we will be providing you, both later today and on the GSAPP website, with a consolidated guide on how to organize a student publication, and what production resources are available to you. We will also hopefully have some time for some student questions after the presentations, so please hang on to your questions as they arise, or feel free to write them in the zoom chat.

So without further ado, I’m going to hand the mic off to Isabelle!

I’m going to kick off today with some thoughts on one of our more recent books: Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality. I’m going to move between speaking as myself and as the office since this project is both personal and, crucially, a model of what we collectively aspire to do at our imprint Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

How you come to know this book today will be different from how you come to know it as a reader. And I think that is the point, in many ways, of this workshop. Asking and attempting to answer “why publish?” lets us consider not just the initial ambitions and motivations of each project but to speculate on how they might evolve to meet the present, as our books take on lives of their own after we’re apparently done.

I’d like to begin where the project began as a way to point where it might continue to go.

This book emerged out of frustration. Frustration can be an incredibly productive and generative space, especially when it is shared by others. My own, personal, frustration started in grad school (here at Columbia GSAPP in the Masters of Architecture program), with the very limited ways I was being trained to think about the prison system (i.e. Bentham and the panopticon); how I was being taught to understand architecture’s role, participation, complicity in the carceral state (i.e. through typology, limited to the actual spaces that make up the criminal justice system); how the field I was planning to enter did not seem to share, at least the curriculum did not seem to reflect, a politics of abolition (i.e. instead let’s build “better” more humane spaces of confinement and reform, reform, reform this so-called “broken system”).

This education is and is not (obviously) specific to GSAPP: There is this pretty enduring idea—in and beyond architecture—that the prison is something that is separate from the world; that it is only a building that one is put into and let out of.

And this kind of thinking has led to very narrow and limited political positions—particularly from architects—which are only concerned with “fixing” the system, like committing to not build solitary cells.

Thinking through what the carceral state is might help us think through what abolition demands of us all. There are many definitions of the carceral state—but at least in this book, it is used to describe the interconnected systems and institutions of white supremacy that impoverish, criminalize, police, punish people, according to race and class, so disproportionately poor people and people of color. And also very crucially, it includes systems and institutions that may not appear to be involved at all… This, to me, is suggestive of why and how conversations come to avoid abolition—because it points to how we might all, in our work, lives, relationships sustain the carceral state.

At least in my own experience, most people (and actually many architects!) still tend to think of buildings when they think of architecture. This book is working against that thinking. It’s trying to account for the logics and the beliefs that structure our world. We, as human beings, live in a society whose consciousness reproduces a systemic and personal politics of domination—and the same could be said about architectural consciousness.

Third, this frustration can take different forms. My own intervention sits somewhere between introduction and contribution—between a specific historical thread that I’ve personally been following for years and the larger questions it poses to the discipline of architecture. I occupy a funny space between editor and contributor—two roles that have become quite inseparable for me over the course of this project and two positions that continue to direct approaches in the office.

And I guess I say this to invite you all to work from both positions; and to insist that to be an editor (of a book in this case) is to also model and author the terms of engagement.

So I’d like to end where the book “apparently” ends. The final pages of Paths to Prison are dedicated to a bibliography, which we like to think will push people out of this project and into the pages of others.

The bibliography is, in and of itself, an acknowledgment of how indebted this particular project is to other people’s work—which shows up in the volume in actual essays, excerpts, footnotes, citations, and attitudes. Writing carries all the ways one is formed in the world and rather than say anything new about this, I’ll wrap up by reading a line or two from the acknowledgments, which (for me) crucially precede the bibliography:

“No one writes alone. I never write alone. As an editor, I mean this quite literally. Most writing I do every day happens in the margins of someone else’s text. It is never done in isolation. It is always in dialogue. It is intimate, inconclusive, and reciprocal…”

And, so in the spirit of being in conversation with others, I’m super happy to be introducing Laura Coombs, who brilliantly designed this book. Laura is a graphic designer and creative director in New York, and a Lecturer at Princeton.

Books allow us to see ideas—through materials, construction, and physical properties, books embody ideas in their sequences, structure, and materiality. Each a unique new world of its own. Each book is a citation, an object that by its very existence, sources the ideas and situations of its author and its author’s ideas.

A book is a window into a world. A book about a cathedral can allow you to see the cathedral.

Speaking about architecture specifically, books are a natural extension of architecture, as architecture is deeply invested in written discourse, speculative projects, and representation of speculative futures and fictions.

Rather than seeing a publication functioning as merely a record of a previous event, we like to consider how a book—and both the possibilities and limitations inherent to its format—can be an opportunity to expand the work, or to reflect on what it means to revisit a project in a particular moment. Maybe it invites other ways of thinking from previous contributors, or new voices that might reread, not only the work, but the implications and impact of the event/topic/argument as a whole. In our case, coming in as editors to an already existing project and already existing editorial practice with Henni was extremely generative. It allowed for a way of working that was open, collective, against a kind of preciousness. It allowed for new ideas to be teased out, tested, and further transformed in exciting and sometimes unpredictable ways.

Deserts Are Not Empty scrutinizes dominant narratives, rhetorics, and ways of illustrating desert territories, to show how they have served to justify material, colonial, and extractivist transformations of the land.

As described by Henni in the introduction to the volume, “The term ‘desert’ stands in for a complex locus of imageries, imaginaries, climates, landscapes, spaces, and histories,” and so the aim of the publication was to locate and challenge the confluence of material and immaterial forces constructing the so-called empty “desert.” The publication thus became an occasion to bring together, not only multiple voices, but a variety of formats, genres, and forms of visualization to enact—in a similar method to Paths to Prison—a particular mode of reorientation. The title itself, Deserts Are Not Empty, is extremely intentional in how it insists on a position, it immediately announces a project of refusal—to refuse, in Henni’s words, “the regime of emptiness.”

As critical investigations of desert narratives, the book welcomes alternative formats that reflect upon, challenge, and move away from dominant modes of writing and communicating that prescribe particular ways of ordering the world. The essays shift between genres: between academic, personal, visual, and narrative forms of writing.

The book gave authors the opportunity to connect with other traditions for seeing and recording the desert, and to expand the kinds of references typically associated with academic thinking. Prompted by Henni, the contributors were each invited to select a poem that somehow engaged the territory or notion of the “desert” to introduce their individual essays. This brought another kind of editorial engagement into the project, now led by the authors. The poems, which range from English to O’odham, Russian to Karelian, Arabic, Nubian, Uyghar, and so on, reflect alternative spatial accounts and imaginaries of desert territories, exploring the multiple forms of life and sociality that exist there. They also situate the writers, their work and their ideas, geographically, culturally, and personally.

Including and translating the poems into the publication as a matter of design also forced us to reckon with how to retain the aspects of accessibility, familiarity, and regional specificity inherent to these poems. We encountered problems and constraints that further evidenced the histories of colonial violence and erasure surfaced in the main texts, alongside glimpses of creativity and newfound agency formed against these histories.

Thank you for inviting me, it’s quite nice to think back on my career—or my practice—and that’s a tension that I’d like to speak to today.

As Joanna mentioned, I work in different fields—sometimes as a teacher, sometimes as a writer, often as an editor, and occasionally as a designer. Whether that’s installation, print materials, or digital really depends often on the context or assignment. And then, of course Joanna and I collaborate together, and we also work across media—often writing but also often not writing.

For a while, I kind of struggled with how to make sense of what I do because sometimes I feel like I have pretty little agency over it. It’s often just a brief of some sort that I then wonder how to mesh with the essays I publish or the other things I do. Recently I’ve been trying to understand what I do as a kind of expanded editorial practice across different media.

And so I’m going to try and talk through that today. I don’t want to talk about my own book or one of the things that Joanna and I might have done because there is often a lot of autonomy there in terms of format, but usually not a lot of compensation. And so I can’t only take those jobs; I have to also take other jobs which I do enjoy and so I don’t want to just disregard them here.

We ended up doing the third issue where we switched from offprint to digital press printing, which is—if you’re a book nerd—kind of a substantial depreciation in quality. It allows you to print cheaper, but even then, it still wasn’t really sustainable.

The other thing I want to quickly say about the format of this before moving on was that it was perhaps one of the reasons why we did involve again the kind of interviews, essays, and eventually short stories alongside more glossy photos and stories of people whose practices we liked.

But again, it was still kind of fairly typical and part of what determined that was the kind of goal, the ambition of its function, which was to legitimize an online platform. So in a way it was kind of a reverse of other narratives you hear, where you have print publications going digital. We were a digital native publication going print and the reason I’m saying all of this is that print signifies something else, compared to an online platform now. And it also comes with a lot of other costs.

The most recent publication, I worked on was launched a month and a half ago and is called Capsule. And for this I have a copy on hand because it’s better to see it to scale.

The format is massive and is quite luxurious. There are several different paper stocks, there’s a comic book, a manga, and various fold outs. Look through it. It’s more of a beautiful object than it is a magazine, I would say. It’s an annual—it’s supposed to be printed once a year.

The downside of having so many different paper stocks and exciting different ways of presenting material is that the thing costs about $55. And so that produces a kind of threshold in regards to who can access it.

I think, to work in print nowadays it’s hard to not be digitally aware. I don’t really know if the distinction matters as much. Although it’s a format you choose based on what you want the product to be, they can never exist completely outside of each other. For example, we have these short essays. This one is actually by Grace Sparapani who will be speaking in a moment. Each of the essays have the constraint of being able to fit on to an Instagram post, whereas all other aspects of the magazine have different forms of content.

I came into the project when it already had a team of designers—a defined aesthetic and approach. I think the format’s quite compelling, but it has, let’s say, a few downsides. It kind of prescribes what it does, how it operates in the world, where it will circuit, and among whom. Which isn’t to say that’s bad, but it fits in a certain place.

As I was mentioning, I’ve done all kinds of other projects, from working for luxury fashion brands to working on my own book of essays about political economics. And so it’s always been about trying to understand where the through line is in all of these works.

He was a quite radical French philosopher, but people weren’t aware that he was involved in the project, including Bataille scholars until the 1990s, because nowhere in the pages will you find his name. Nor will you find the name of Marcel Duchamp, who was its graphic designer.

Before he worked on the encyclopedia, George Bataille, had done several other publishing projects, including Documents, which included a section that he called a critical dictionary. I’ll get to that in a second. There was Documents and there was also Acéphale, which were both magazines, but Acéphale was also a collective—a group or movement perhaps best described as a secret society.

It was symbolized by this emblem. Acéphale comes from a Latin term meaning headless or without a head, and this became a symbol for their approach to knowledge and their politics which was deeply reflective on and in reaction to the rise of fascism across France at the time. Their critique of fascism extended into an understanding of the power of merit of fascism as a narrative, as a dominant and dominating narrative.

And one of their ambitions was to produce mythologies that could counteract those of fascism. This entailed a kind of self-mythologization. They started rumors that they were meeting in forests and going to sacrifice one of their participants. This story goes that they were all willing to be the sacrificial victim, but not a sacrificer.

I guess what I’m getting to is branding, because for a logo it’s pretty effective as well. It’s all so charged with symbolism: the intestines are exposed; the skull is placed where the genitalia may otherwise be.

In Documents, though, which was published around the same time as Acéphale, Bataille created this critical dictionary. It’s something he picks up in the encyclopedia where he takes images and he juxtaposes them with his own definitions. I think the one of architecture is quite interesting. He talks about architecture in two ways, one of which is to describe it through the use of the butcher house—the slaughterhouse. The second one is through the collapse of factories and prisons—which is perhaps an interesting link to what we were talking about earlier in Paths to Prison.

And the ambition was to use language, magazines, and publishing as a way to subvert that. But that didn’t just happen in terms of content. That happened on the page in terms of texts but also in terms of the broader object. And so, to pull out a few quick elements on this, the encyclopedia was designed and sold to appear very much like an encyclopedia.

And the kind of game they were playing was also invested in opposing the French tradition of encyclopedias that aimed to be a total structure of knowledge and a way of organizing that knowledge.

On the front page, for example, in place of where you’d normally have an author’s name, you had this—an image game.

It’s a donkey on a masthead or an ane au nid-mat—a homonym of anonymous.

I was invited to do this project after I graduated from Columbia. Some of you guys might know 032c Magazine. It’s a Berlin magazine that’s operated since 2002 and is now in it’s 22nd year. At the time it was first released, this was the first edition. It was a newsprint famously designed by Mike Meiré, a big German designer.

This is a pantone chip, and the name of the magazine is, hence, the pantone color 032c.

By the time I started working there, they had already evolved into an apparel brand—first in T-shirts and then later in a ready-to-wear line.

Not here to judge today, but we can just say it had kind of escaped its original role as an underground or rebellious or counterculture magazine and had become, I think, part of the dominant culture it was first designed to resist.

I was asked to do a contribution, and we were discussing it over the course of a year and around then, this image came out. I’m sure many of you guys saw it, the first image of a black hole produced using computer processing—it’s not a photograph.

It quickly spiraled across the meme-world on the one hand as a joke about “profile pics vs tagged pics” because of how unimpressive it was as the first image of a black hole. I should mention that this project was done collaboratively with the editor of 032c, Victoria Camblin.

What we thought was interesting while working on this together was how the black hole poses no risk to any of us, but it became almost like a kind of magnet or condensing mechanism for all the kind of anxiety and anger that we live in today, particularly in a moment of ecological collapse. It reminded me a bit of the Whole Earth Catalog which I’m sure anyone who’s passing through GSAPP is probably quite tired of hearing about.

It was a kind of seminal counterculture magazine which featured the first image of the Earth from space. It was also kind of narrativized/historicized as being the progenitor of modern environmentalism on the one hand, but also as a form of knowledge akin to the Internet on the other because it quite literally influenced Silicon Valley overlords.

But also, we were kind of trying to essentially subvert—both through graphics and text—the sense of Promethean or Herculean masculinity that we read in the Whole Earth Catalog and the environmentalism it began.

We wanted instead to look at environmentalism—or at least at an image of environmentalism—that suggested exertion, a sense of not being able to support this way of life anymore.

Against this kind of off the grid ethos we proposed a new interior.

To draw on the readings of Bataille and the encyclopedia, this was also an exercise in classifying things, in putting things in juxtaposition, while still investing a sense of humor into the work.

This exercise extended to the materiality, where there were different paper stocks used: uncoated pages versus the glossy ones for these.

It therefore presented a certain way of reading the knowledge, where, for example there were links that were in blue versus links that were in purple.

There was then also advice that ranged from building a guillotine to buying a butt plug.

By juxtaposing these without much editorial constraint, we wanted to subvert the idea that A) environmentalism could be easily bought or that it was a cohesive product that could be purchased while B) inhabiting the fact that this was a fashion magazine inside of which we’re selling all kinds of ads.

We produced different ways of getting it out there, including a face filter which, because of 032c’s audience, included a lot of shirtless men.

And then later this was a campaign I worked on for Balenciaga where I seeded the same images back into a video game.

The idea was essentially to produce a game that could operate within the different briefs I’m given and address with my different collaborators.

I think I’ll stop here. Thank you, guys!

while averyshorts.com, the website, archives this form of communication. This mode of exchange biases a different set of possible actions and ways of interacting with content and with others. For instance, unlike the general distribution and circulation of printed matter (constrained by and to certain places and people ), Avery Shorts enables forwarding (with or without commentary) and a kind of sending and receiving that feels more intimate and more informal, which, in turn, shapes how and what we communicate.

This mode of communication (email) and this archive or record of communication (the site) ultimately co-constitute the “what” of Avery Shorts, or…

In April 2020 (during the early months of the pandemic and a month or so before the heightened visibility of uprisings in the US and globally), the office shifted from “seasons” (1, 2, 3) to Avery Shorts Live. This was a way to conceptually lean into the possibility of a publication-as-infrastructure: a fundamental armature that supports and sustains thoughts and ideas as they arise and unfold around us—however their unfinishedness or messiness. Avery Shorts Live was something folks could tap into as needed… that tapping into simultaneously produced a way of sending and receiving ideas, a way to access editors, and a way to record a moment in time.

All of this contradicts what is generally thought to be publishable material, encouraging us to make space for what we consider unpublishable material. (but) This fronts many other questions:

What kinds of privileges (e.g, time, education, resources…) do you need to have in order to be published or “publishable?” This presses upon language, value, and use:

What is valued and useful (or of use), and what is not? How and why?
What (or whom) slips below the legibility of publication or is perhaps left behind in the usual rhythms of publishing?

Such questions underwrite what it is that we do, or to put it another way: we are delimited by the networks we exist and circulate in. Ultimately, it takes a lot of consideration and care to reconfigure a more-just editorial and intellectual practice and to make all the processes, transactions, and exchanges behind publications permeable and transparent.

to be clear, unafraid, and forceful in your intentions—to wield them as method and technique. Because the ongoing result may offer and lend, in turn, new concepts for unlearning and processing our worlds.

Okay, so I think that’s a good place for me to end (on this screenshot from the Avery Review)…

Our next guest, and also a brilliant colleague, is Jacob R. Moore. You might know of Jacob, or be familiar with his work, through all the urgent organizing he has been doing at the Buell Center as Associate Director there. Jacob is also a critic, curator, and an editor. Prior to joining the Buell Center, Jacob worked as an editor at Princeton Architectural Press. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has been published in various magazines and journals from Artforum to the Avery Review. As a founding and contributing editor of the Avery Review, Jacob is an integral part of the journal—and crucially, an important part of where it is today. Jacob, we are so happy (and thankful!) that you are able to join us (online) today…

Thank you very much for the invitation and that really nice introduction, and thank you everybody for putting so much on the table to think about and think with. I’m going to try and be relatively quick and pretty informal here since I hope that we can talk about a lot more of this in the Q & A.

As Isabelle (Tan) mentioned, I’m a contributing editor for the Avery Review, and I’ve been part of the journal since its founding in 2014, so I’m just going to really quickly give an overview of what the Avery Review was: how it was a version of our own “why publish?” and how that conversation was for us at the beginning and how it has evolved.

So basically, in 2014—this is a quickly assembled representation of what for us felt like a real dearth of open access online space for medium-form original critical writing on architecture, so this is not meant to be comprehensive and obviously these are from recently—but the point was that there was a lot of PR-type writing, which still very much exists. PR stuff would be put out by people representing their own work, usually; so: not very critical, really image heavy, etc. Alternatively, there were slower burn pieces in academic journals (e.g., Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians) that were behind paywalls, and let’s say the urgency that they carry is a very different kind of urgency that is much slower “cooking.” So as readers, basically a few of us—what became the founding editors of the journal—noticed this, and we noticed this initially as readers: what felt like a kind of missing middle (for lack of a better framing).

We turned that curiosity or desire for a middle ground as readers into something we could work on as editors. I wasn’t really sure how to represent the earliest days of the journal—looking at this, it feels like this Issue 1 of the Avery Review was 17 lifetimes ago, but it still seemed somehow appropriate—so basically we came together and decided to do something to fit in that space that we noticed being open. And what I want to focus on today is the way that we, at the beginning, tried really hard—and have continued to try really hard—to keep our approach really simple: we had a limited set of parameters that we all agreed upon and have stuck with them to the present day. I’ll talk a little bit about what I think that has allowed for, and maybe in the Q & A, we can talk about how that is or isn’t transferable to other kinds of projects.

Building out of the need we had noticed, we wanted to do something that was text forward rather than image forward—something that had a really regular rhythm, so there would be a contemporaneity to it that was going to be about stuff happening “now,” as it were, but that wasn’t going to be knee jerk, press release kind of material. We also really wanted to get authors to step out of their own work—again, working against that sort of PR register that architects often end up writing in, usually about their own work—so we made a rule: the authors always have to engage with the work of somebody else. And so, as in the title, the Avery Review, the review format became the way we have organized that requirement; so there’s always what we call “an object of review” that our authors are required to engage with. And what that object is can be many things, but we are pretty intense about insisting on that. And that’s pretty much it.

We worked really hard to come up with those core tenets and then wanted to leave the rest really open. It’s cliché, but what I want to underline is: that simplicity gave us the ability to be super rigorous, while also having tons of flexibility and freedom to play, and I think authors and other interlocutors have been able to feel the kind of freedom that comes with that. It’s cliché to say that with rules comes some kind of—I’m gonna say freedom again—but some kind of looseness comes with it, once you have just a short list of things you really are going to stick with.

This is Issue 1 and we have 57 issues now, and I could talk through different pieces that really are illustrative of those exact rules, but what I wanted to talk about were the moments that we were sort of able to break out—or not break out of those rules—but do something a little bit unexpected that built upon the sort of structure that we established:

By the time some of these projects came about, we had a kind of identity and a set of readers that sort of would go with us because of the consistency we had by then been working with for some years. These are just a few of what we call “special projects.” So, we’re a primarily digital outfit, but in very key moments, we have chosen to go print. We did a broadsheet for the first Chicago architecture biennial. We felt that because, you know, the biennial was an event in space across the city of Chicago, we knew that a broadsheet would circulate—a printed object would circulate differently there—and we felt we had a real opportunity to sort of intervene in that moment. It was a pretty (I think) meaningful moment in architecture culture, at least here in this country, and doing something printed felt like a unique opportunity and even responsibility in that moment.

Similarly, the book And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency on the left was published after the election of Trump. We felt really strongly, as an editorial collective, that something had to get done; we were having a lot of really intense email conversations and came to the idea that this too was an opportunity to condense work that was happening online, but into a printed object. And similarly, for the Climate’s book Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary: that was something that happened a little bit later and was a longer-term project but it also catalyzed work that exists and was able to exist online but also in print—and then the printed object was the vehicle for various public programs that we did. And as has been discussed here, printed matter circulates a little bit differently than the online essays do—though, they all existed online as well.

The two other special projects that are here, the 2020 Essay Prize and the 2021 Guest Editor—alongside the Avery Review masthead. We have an essay prize that’s a student essay prize that has now been going for (I think) five years. And a guest editor role (that used to be called the editorial fellow) where we bring on a fellow or guest editor for a year, who works on a special project with us.

I could talk about each of these in a little bit more detail, but I wanted to put some of these special projects on the table (and I’d be curious to hear Isabelle [Kirkham-Lewitt] and Joanna talk about this too) that I think were possible precisely because we had set a really solid frame for all of our work with those really simple rules. These special projects follow those rules very directly: every essay in these pieces has an object to review; the authors step outside of their own work and engage with the work of someone else; and they’re usually about between 2000-5000 words.

But they’re really different kinds of projects beyond that: they really speak with and in different tones to different audiences and to different topics.

Footnotes on Climate was born out of CBAC’s collected volume Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, and Footnotes on Housing was compiled out of a range of CBAC books exploring questions of housing, like A House is Not Just a House: Projects on Housing from our Transcripts on Housing series, and Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling.

In either case, these booklets aren’t meant to exist as syllabi, or even as reviews of existing literature, but rather, they together, and through the larger mission of Footnotes On…, attempt to understand how these issues continue to live on and evolve in real-time, post any single publication.

I’m currently working on compiling our next edition, Footnotes on Carcerality, which stems from the publication Isabelle presented earlier, Paths to Prison.

I’ve found through my ongoing collection of documents for this project that prison abolition has everything to do with climate activism and policy, as does it directly pertain to conversations on homefullness and the right to housing. And I should say here that this has been a huge learning process for me. I don’t have the same history of studying and speaking out against the carceral state that Isabelle does, but what we share in common are our backgrounds in architecture.

Tracing how our own field is complicit to a given crisis is, I think, not just one of the key tenets of Footnotes On…, but of this office at large. I’ve learned from the team here that to read the complicity of our field into a given issue and vice-versa is to expand the terrain of what we consider “architectural” in the first place. Footnotes On…, especially for me, is a space to do this by embracing the various media typically ostracized by the academy.

I’m, for example, Lebanese, and come from a family far too familiar with the legal and logistical difficulties of migration. The criminalization of movement, of migration across this planet that we together call home, is an aspect I’m trying to, very explicitly, draw out in this edition of Footnotes on Carcerality.

It’s kind of like adding my own two cents to the pot. We all experience these crises very personally, and chipping in references that can speak to that lived experience will, I hope, better equip us to think through and tackle them together. I’ll end here with my appreciation of Footnotes On… as more of an exercise in reading, mutual reading, than it is in writing. You have to be a better reader, a closer, more radical one, to be a better thinker, writer, person!

Thanks for listening, and I’ll pass the mic over to the wonderful Grace Sparapani, one of our contributing editors at the Avery Review! Grace is a writer, researcher, and editor based in Austin and Berlin. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in trauma, biopolitics, and performance. She couldn’t be with us tonight but has prepared a wonderful recording for us that digs a bit into her citational practice.

Now this next slide is a bit text heavy—as is most of the presentation unfortunately—but I’m not going be reading everything. Think of this as a resource that you can revisit and read at length later. If we simply refer to what is in bold here, we can see that McKittrick associates citational work with a process of unknowing, right? She says, “What if the practice of referencing, sourcing, and crediting is always bursting with intellectual life and takes us outside of ourselves? What if it leaves us to actively unknow ourselves, to unhinge, to thus come to know each other as collaborators of collective and generous and capacious stories?”

And I find this really interesting because I think we, a lot of the time, use citations to prove what we know. McKittrick urges us to consider the opposite: “Well, what if citations are actually to prove what we don’t know, and also to learn what we don’t know and to unknow what we’ve learned?” And because of that, she goes on to say “Citation is not easy. Referencing is hard.” And she means difficult beyond just knowing your typical Chicago style citation rules.

Who are you citing?

Let us consider that question next by returning to Sara Ahmed who, in her book, Living a Feminist Life, cites no white men. And she does this really consciously, right? You will find that, oftentimes, whenever we are writing, whenever we are reading, because of the way that the history of ideas has been developed, the easiest thing to do is to cite white men. But instead of just taking that well-traveled path, Ahmed took paths called desire lines or desire paths. I find this really interesting from an architectural perspective because we know that desire paths are places where the planner should have realized people would want to walk.

This is harder, yes, but as she writes, feminism is not easy, it is homework. It will, however, take you places that you would not have ended up going. If we return to the idea of citation as building a house, Ahmed says, “Maybe instead of bricks, they’re also feminist straw, lighter materials that, when put together, create a shelter, but the shelter leaves you more vulnerable.”

This will also invite you into the unknown in the sense that you send out the straw, it dances around you, you begin to pick up things you had not noticed before. And in doing so, it leaves you with the responsibility to take care of this fragile archive that you’re building, right? Instead of being made of bricks, it is made of straw, it is fragile, it is permeable, it is assembled from shattering.

This takes us to how and why are you citing?

So, for example, if you are citing white men, are you doing it uncritically? Or are you choosing to cite white men so that you can stand on the path of this already established history and critique from the inside? And if you are citing non-white men, if you are citing Black people, are you doing it in a tokenizing way? Are you doing it in an objectifying way? Are you doing it just to find citations as quotable value?

In this next set of footnotes you see here for example, McKittrik states that she is “not interested in citations as quotable value,“ and goes on to reference Audrey Lorde in a letter from Sister Outsider that says, "Did you ever read my words or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea?” In other words, are you building your intellectual scaffolding with the citations? Or are you coming in with an already conceived idea and just looking for quotations to bolster your opinion? And is that bolstering established through marginalized communities in such a way that your political project is, in actuality, an objectifying one?

This then begs the question: Are you treating all citations the same?

And for this, I actually have an anecdote from a lecture that I saw given by a scholar—who will go unnamed—but who was talking about a video through which he was citing almost completely men. People who know the history of video know that it has this really important connection to feminine practice and one of the foundational texts on video is this essay by Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” What I noticed was that he was giving the full name—first and last name—of the male scholars, but when it came to Rosalind Krauss, he cited her as R. Krauss. And so I asked him, you know, “How come you’re androgenizing the only female scholar that you’re citing?” And he didn’t really have an answer for me. So it’s important to treat all citations the same instead of creating this kind of hierarchy or instead of trying to kind of change the content of the citations.

That takes us into the next question: What kinds of sources are you citing? And are you creating a hierarchy between them? With how we know people from marginalized communities are left out of traditional publishing routes, how are you going to find their voices?

Here is a note from McKittrick in which she cites Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she cites Gayl Jones, and then she cites two music videos by Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim before again citing Zora Neale Hurston. So you’ll notice that not only is she including these different media within the same footnote, she’s also not creating a hierarchy where she’s listing maybe the classic literature first and then listing the music videos after. Rather, she is treating all of this media the same even though we might think of some of them as less intellectually rigorous than others.

So again, if you are not reading what is not in the main text, then you are missing out on, you know, things that show us where to go next, that show us what futures are, that show us maybe what fugitive ideas are—which is really important, especially if you are reading Black Studies scholarship, as Katherine McKittrick points out, especially if you’re trying to think about marginalized ideas.

Thank you so much for listening! I look forward to hearing from all of you if you have any questions. All right, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the conversation!