part of ON RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: TOOLS AND TACTICS LECTURE SERIES

Publishing as Practice 

While publications are typically thought of as tools for presenting research, they can act as forms of research in themselves. The history of publications by architects—manifestoes, monographs, pamphlets, magazines, articles, interviews—constitutes a parallel form of architectural practice: some of the most prominent architects of the last century have also been prolific publishers, whether as magazine editors, journalists, critics or authors. Editing and publishing have become critical methods for pursuing architectural agendas; publications act as excuses and opportunities to elaborate forms of research, where the production of the book-object and modes of investigation are inseparable in form and content.

The lecture will explore an alternative understanding of publishing as a critical form of  architectural practice. A series of recent research-driven publications illustrate ways of using the book to give shape, structure and context to architectural ideas, independent of and sometimes superior to the constraints of building. While these two strands of practice, the book and the building, are assumed to parallel each other, in reality they often reveal a provocative (and in some cases deliberate) misalignment.

Michael Kubo is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and the editorial director of the New York office of Actar, a leading international publisher of books on architecture and design. He received the M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he was Teaching Associate with Farshid Moussavi from 2005 to 2007; with Moussavi, he is editor of The Function of Ornament (2006). His other publications include Desert America: Territory of Paradox (2006), Seattle Public Library (2004), Phylogenesis: FOA's Ark (2003), The Yokohama Project (2002), and the Verb Boogazine series, published since 2002. He previously worked with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam as Associate Editor for the Harvard Project on the City.