Issue 12 — Chop Chop!

The 12th issue of Room One Thousand mines cutting as a creative and material methodology using them in an expanded capacity to structure visions of the world around and ahead of us. In this issue, the threads connecting seemingly distinct conditions are woven with a sense of urgency and understanding that disparate disciplines such as architecture, gastronomy, and forestry are not isolated but are indeed intrinsically connected. Transitioning to a resilient climate, both socially and ecologically, will require new models of collaboration that disrupt siloed systems. Apart from the procedural and material tenets of architecture and the disciplines we commingle in this issue, the way we consume information has fundamentally changed with the ubiquity of digital mobility, social technologies and artificial intelligence. We encounter streams of content across multiple platforms in bits and pieces; headlines, sound bites and algorithmically curated advertisements compete for our attention. This year we challenged the format and organization of the journal to reflect this shift as we consider the ways our lives are increasingly chopped.

Issue 11 — Sediment

The eleventh issue of Room One Thousand investigates architecture’s relationship to history and society’s terrain using geological terminology. This issue’s title, Sediment, serves as a starting point for authors to consider how their projects relate to historical landscape formation. The metaphor will serve as a tool, not a universality, that provides vocabulary to discuss and explore abstract architectural concepts in new ways. We seek articles that reveal how architecture plays an active role in historical terrains and how humanity plays an active role in architectural terrains via memory, societal narratives, identity, perception of place, and more.

More than plain metaphor, sediment is increasingly the literal substance of politics; we find ourselves entangled in fights over microplastics in our soil, mine tailings clogging our rivers, and clouds of anthropogenic dust settling in our lungs, exacerbating existing geographies of racial inequality. Sediment is not only an archive of the past but also the terrain of present struggle.

Issue 10 — Body + Performance

Architecture performs through bodies. Its conceptualization entails choreographing bodily movements. Drawings are spatial scripts, to which bodies perform in conformity, transgression, re-appropriation, or indifference. Performances can be corporeal or phenomenological, planned or spontaneous, everyday or a singularity. They charge architecture with vibrant energies disrupting the exigencies and politics of built spaces.

The tenth issue of Room One Thousand, “Body + Performance,” seeks for performance to expand and challenge our understanding of architecture and its impact. Performance can be understood as object, phenomenon, commodity, or metaphor. The convergence of architecture and performance captures the corporeality, tactility, and sensuality of a space. How can architecture be read through the lens of performance? Who is the performer, the building or the body? What are the design implications of highlighting the agency and plurality of bodies? What happens when architectural practice shifts from performance to production? How can performance be a methodology in design?

Issue 9 — Breaks

Available in print.

Break(s) mean many things. a coffee break. the shattering of a plate glass window. Breaking convention. A difficult subject broken down into pieces. They are necessary structural failures that precede repair and require care, with activity intensifying at the breaking points. They can be acts of violence. They can be generative, breaking down what no longer serves you. In all, breaks imply lapses and gaps in time, space, and relationships at any scale. Removing and troubleshooting, breaking up, any physical or mental violence that can cause or result from a break. How we choose to fill these breaks is the question.

Issue 8 — Magic

Available in print.

Outside the bounds of the exact sciences and the Cartesian grid, magic denotes that which can’t easily be named or confined. Over the past months in working on this issue, we have come to see the rituals, incantations, illusions and arious acts of magic as legitimate worldbuilding strategies. Deployed intently and politically, these super-natural acts have served as a useful lens for understanding these dizzying and unmooring times.

Existing at the frayed edges and rich margins beyond dominant realities, what is often deemed as ‘magic’ defies logic and offends western enlightened sensibilities. This issue seeks to make visible rippling effects of magic through collaborative research, interviews, and contributions by students & alumni, activists, artists, and architects. These articles span colonial histories, nomadic dwellings, speculative fiction, special effects, floating universities and more.

Contents: C-144: Illusions of Occupancy, Joris Komen. Strangely Specific, Erin Besler, Ian Besler. Underground Dream World, Greg Castillo. Scan Label Apply Manifesto, Jesse Le Cavalier. Of Mountain Fairies & Mating Glaciers, Javairia Shahid. Phantoms in a Pseudo-Garden, Doug Hall. Real Magic, Waters Bathing Collective. FX Space, Juan Elvira. Divinations for a Broken Democracy, Maya Sorabjee. Animated & Bound: Artificial Magic in the Age of Empire, Laura Harris Veit. Climate Care: Curriculums for Urban Practice, SOFT AGENCY. Between Hope & Wait, Mustafa Faruki. Recipes for Difficult Friendships, Adeloa Enigbokan, Carlos Medellin. Birds of Passage
Dominique Moody, Brenda Zhang.

Issue 7 — Material

Available in print.

Issue 7 of Room One Thousand takes a materialist approach to the material of architecture, examining how the stuff architecture determines its wider position and culture. Through stories, essays, games, and design proposals the contributors to Material look closely at the building blocks of architecture analyzing the impact and emergent properties of structure fires, model materials, archi-facts, rubble, rendering softwares, democratic firm structures and beyond...

Contents: Drawing In-Painting, Gabriel Fries-Briggs. Insulation and Ideology: Politicizing the Technical Space of Architecture, Keefer Dunn. A Ramble with Assemble, Joe Halligan with RM1000. Child-ish Architecture, Soo Han & Sun Kwon. Pebble Dash, Ian Erickson & Henry Weikel. Material Flows, Laurence Crouzet. Making Earth Bricks, Tom Devore with RM1000. The Five Abstractions, Andrew Atwood with RM1000. A Working Glossary, Dylan Krueger. Unseen Images of the Farnsworth House, Michelle Deng. Escape Clause, Iman Ansari. A Wiki-Dérive, Nicholas de Monchaux & Geoff Manaugh with RM1000. Factory of Ecology, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro. Abandoned House, Alberto Sanchez. Rubble Archive, Leen Katrib.

Issue 6 — Work

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For the sixth issue of Room One Thousand, we asked authors to explore the many forms of labor present in architecture and to question how architecture, its Workers, and its processes are valued. Who and what determines the value of architectural Work? What sets private rates and public opinion? What are the products of architectural Work?

Contents: In response to this prompt, Kevin Block demystifies inspiration; Jennifer Bonner locates Work outside of the Working; Thomas Murdoch talks to Peggy Deamer about Lobbying for Work; Greg Castillo finds hippies Working after all; Nicholas Harvey-Cheetham shows what happens when Work doesn't conform to norms; Jessica Colangelo delves deep into the process of two well-known architectural Workers; Phillip G. Bernstein imagines a future of simulated Work; Keefer Dunn argues against Working to be employable; UXO shows us how their practice refuses Work; David Ramis does a bunch of Work and for what?; Roxanne Smith tells a story of Working for a folly; David Jaehning unpacks the Work of parametricism; f-architecture takes us through a trip through their many fields and many Works; and we present Work, A Competition, with Matt Turlock and Sam Gebb.

Issue 5 — Timeless

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Contents: In this issue Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander get back together again on this 35th anniversary of their first debate; Eric Peterson reconsiders the rhetoric of Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and its relationship to the architectural manifesto; Robert Crabtree designed a house from the origin and wrote a variety of other abstract thoughts; Andrew Shanken’s Memory Seminar wrote a manifesto to remember; We interview Andrew Holder on the Picturesque, Timeless, and his recent installation “The Kid Gets Out of The Picture”; John Stoughton shows us the timeless future of John Hejduk; Emma Lubbers tells a Timeness story in four parts; Aaron Weller analyses UNESCO’s values for preservation, and discovers the “mystified shed”; Peter Korn confronts fachadismo while reporting from Porto, Portugal; Timothy Wai gathers a hundred architecture sheep in taupe; John Parman interviews Thomas Gordon Smith about The Classical Imagination; Matthew Kernan fragments nostalgia in an economy housing proposal for Aarhus, Denmark; Paul Humphries illuminates the paradox of style; Sigve Knutson translates from drawings to objects; Michelle Rada presents Modernism’s tense as provoked by Sigmund Freud’s understanding of timelessness; Neyran Turan asks “Can Images Implode?” using historical examples and recent work by her rm NEMESTUDIO; Aaron Goldstein plays ball with architectural history and opens up the Eton Fives Court; Andrew Kovacs specifies 20 steps for making beautiful floor plans; Kyle Miller makes new architecture from canonical single-family homes; Adam Nathaniel Furman comes to town and we interview him about his recent work and color (or was it colour?); Bairballiet, Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet, reveal architecture’s Timeless use of three ploys; Ji Shi and Ivy Feng discuss Apple Inc’s use of copy-paste across scales from keyboards, to screens and even to buildings; Marco Gola, Andrea Brambrilla, Stefano Capolongo and the Open Building Research Group of Alta Scuola Politecnica discuss timelessness as resilience versus resistance and describe their work to design a more flexible hospital based on an open source modular patient room; Filip Tejchman motivates the need for a better rock and a better understanding of entropy.... We present a Foam Parti by Cooper Rogers and Cora Lautze, we interview them too; Whitney Moon convinces us that Cedric Price was Timeless; Levon Fox makes a post-virtual death mask; Common Accounts, Igor Bragado and Miles Gertler, propose to bring death back to the city and play it back forever; Lucas Almássy interviews the faculty, staff and students of the College of Environmental Design and reveals varying notions of Timeless.

Issue 4— Architectural Expertise

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Contents: Introduction: President-Architect: On Recent Politics and Architectural Expertise, Kevin Block. Center for the Built Environment: tools & technologies for performance, Gail Brager & Edward Arens. Modeling architecture in the world of expertise, Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Sergio Pineda & Martin Weinel. Father, Child, & Ban - Nine Square Novel, Sean Nakamura Dolan. The Art of Mud Building in Djenné, Mali, Trevor H.J. Marchand. Saturated FAT: replete image in architecture, Adam Miller. First Kill All the Experts, John Parman. Spaces of Complexity. On Not-Kowing, Un-Learning and ‘Panoramas of Possibilities’, Tatjana Schneider. Apparent Folly No. 1, Alex Spatzier. Debating “Democracy”: The International Union of Architects and the Cold War Politics of Expertise, Katherine Zubovich. A Career at the Hinge: Paul Groth and Cultural Landscape Studies, Paul Groth with Sarah Lopez. Researching Architectural Research, Avigail Sachs with Jennifer Gaugler. Peggy Deamer’s: The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics and Design., a book review by Sharóne L. Tomer. Housing the Dead a lens through local densification patterns, Matthew Au. City of the Captive Audience 195 Aether House, Neal Barber & Nick Harvey Cheetham. Aether House, Foster Turcott. Who What When Where How Why, Jessica Chen & Mia Narell. Dynamic Ceramic, Phirak Suon. Overlap / Succesion / Sedimentation, Keenan Gravier & Isabella Warren.

Issue 3: Urban Pilgrimage — A Global Urban Humanities Special Issue

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Routes: Losing My Religion in Oaxaca, Andrew Shanken; Water’s Pilgrimage in Rome, Katherine Rinne with illustrations by Rebecca Sunter; De Vieux-Montréal à Kahnawa:ké, Sara Terreault & Matthew Anderson; From the Fields to the City Gates, Martin Locker; GeoGuessr’s Digital Pilgrimages, Marta Figlerowicz; City of One Thousand Temples, Emma Natalya Stein; Diary of a Failed Pilgrim June 2014, Beverly Crawford.

Temporary Urbanism: Temporary Flows & Ephemeral Cities, Felipe Vera & Rahul Mehrotra; A Fistful of Barley, John Soriano; Sites of Representation, Kimberly Richards; Urban Place Making/Performing Rural Memories, Annie Malcolm with illustrations by Lauren Matthews; Kingship, Buddhism and the Forging of a Region, Jason Hawkes; Blacksmith Caravans on the Move, Sachin Bandukwala and Melissa Smith; Concrete’s Many Fair-Faces, Sarah Briggs Ramsey.

The Traveled Voice: In Demonstration, Lyn Hejinian; The Rhetoric of Return, Ragini Srinivasan; Journey to Juazeiro, Candace Slater; Art, Cinema, and Life Outside the Imperial Ring, Megan Hoetger; Nearing Nanjing, 1938, Evelyn Shih; Ziyaretler, Angela Andersen; Review of Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tiffany Hong; Dense Ecologies / City and Bay, Nicholas de Monchaux et al.

Issue 2— Souvenir Nostalgia

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Contents: Souvenir Nostalgia, Padma Maitland;  Landscapes and Ladles, Marta Figlerowicz; House 103, Kathleen James-Chakraborty; Reading a Drawer, Susan Stewart; Environmental Autobiography, Clare Cooper Marcus; A Reverse History of Modernism, Martina Hrabova; Into the Plan, Through the Door, Katarina Burin; Berlin Derive, Nathan John; Fear and Bernard of Clairvaux’s Living Stones, Jason Crow; A Rainy Day in Late Spring at the Cistercian Monastery of Nový Dvůr, Dobrá Voda, John Flaherty; Sixty Panes of Faith, Duo Dickinson; Petropolises, Neeraj Bhatia and Thomas Murdoch; A World of Play, Robert Vale and Lauren McQuistion; Reflections on a Drawing, Phoebe Crisman; The Macro-Phenomenal, Jason Young; ; The Miniature Monuments of ACE Architects, Kevin Block

Issue 1— Technology and the Box

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Contents: Technology and the Box, Padma Maitland;  Little Boxes: High-Tech and the Silicon Valley, Margaret Crawford;  A Container and Its Contents: Re-Reading Tomás Maldonado’s Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology (1970, trans. 1972), Simon Sadler;  Public, Private, Protected: Encapsulation and the Disempowerment of the Digital Architect; Kyle Steinfeld;  The Seduction of the Glass Box, Katie Ackerly;  Eiffel’s Apartment and the Architecture of Dreams, Gina Greene;  Averaging Mies, Ajay Manthripragada;  Transitional Objects: The Postwar Werkbund and the Design of New, West-German Subjects (1948-1968); Sasha Rossman;  The Fine Art of the Art Crate, Joey Enos;  A New Architecture for Man: The Modular, Prefabricated Buildings of Ernest J. Kump, Jr, Elaine Stiles;  Sun Valley, Brian Knecht;  Photography: IT House and Suberb-A House, Art Gray;  Considering Prefabulous and Almost Off the Grid, Lotus Grenier and Zoe Beba.