Book Kultur

Today’s architecture books are smaller, timelier, and nimbler.

- Samuel Medina

Books hold a special place in the hearts of all architects—as do bookmaking and book buying. This affinity to printed matter runs deep, but on the whole, it can be chalked up to intellectual curiosity and aesthetic appreciation rather than scholarly inquiry. “I’m part of the library committee,” says architect and editor Reto Geiser, who teaches at Rice University, “and when I see how people from the engineering department talk about books, they couldn’t care less whether it’s a nice object or not. They call that ‘edutainment.’”

With his partner Noëmi Mollet, Geiser contributed one of the standout works at this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial. The Room for Books was essentially a bookshop, one supplemented with exhibition, installation, and event spaces. During opening weekend, throngs huddled for intimate, soft-spoken powwows in a corner of the space. The chatter, by turns diverting and arid, proved one thing to Geiser: “Book culture is still very much alive.”

The prominence given to the topic at the biennial is revealing. Sharon Johnston, architect and cocurator of the biennial, says the event aimed to amplify “precise conversations and feedback through different mediums, which I think is an important relationship to this question of media, and of bookmaking.” For Mark Lee, Johnston’s partner, the talks—a symposium about book design was also convened during the vernissage—amounted to something of a groupthink of contemporaries. After all, many of the architects who took part came of age at a pivotal intellectual moment for the discipline, began building right before the recession, and managed to hold on, even flourish, despite it.