Harvard Design Press announces fall 2022 titles

In the fall, Harvard Design Press will publish three books: John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense, Frida Escobedo: Split Subject, and Empty Plinths: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Sculpture in Mexico. This follows the establishment of the press last spring.

John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense (edited by Paul Walker) examines his most important buildings and reveals how the internationalization of architecture during this period was an unexpectedly dispersed geographical phenomenon, following more complex flows and localized progressions than earlier modernist ideas that travelled from center to periphery, metropole to outpost. By fostering the concepts that this new age foregrounded—identity, history, and place—within the formal vocabularies of modernism, Andrews navigated the emergence of postmodernism rather than dismissing it. Andrews had an impact on design culture beyond his own professional portfolio as he took on larger public positions and accepted appointments that allowed him to influence architectural education. This book explores his legacy across national and international contexts, demonstrating late-modern architectural advances while highlighting both generational continuity and discontinuities with what followed. Paul Walker, Mary Lou Lobsinger, Peter Scriver and Antony Moulis, Philip Goad, and Paolo Scrivano contributed essays to John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense, which also includes approximately 100 new images of structures that Andrews already designed in Australia and North America.

Split Subject, an early project by architect Frida Escobedo, deconstructs a fraught allegory of national identity and architectural modernism in Mexico. Unpacking this project and tracing its enduring influence throughout Escobedo’s career, Frida Escobedo: Split Subject reveals a multi-scalar and multi-medium practice whose creative output encompasses permanent buildings, temporary installations, public sculpture, art objects, publications, and exhibitions, and bares at its center a sensitivity to time and weathering, material and pattern, and memory. It includes essays by Julieta Gonzalez, Alejandro Hernández, Erika Naginski, Doris Sommer and José Falconi, and Irene Sunwoo, and a foreword by Wonne Ickx.

Empty Plinths: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Sculpture in Mexico responds to the unfolding political debate around one of the most contentious public monuments in North America, Mexico City’s monument of Christopher Columbus on Avenida Paseo de la Reforma. Editors José Esparza Chong Cuy and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa explore the shaky histories behind a number of monuments, memorials, and public sculptures in Mexico City in order to bring together a diverse collective of voices around the question of the monument’s future. They then propose a new charter that will guide future public art commissions in Mexico and elsewhere. This new collection of articles, interviews, artistic creations, and public policy recommendations unveils and reframes the histories ingrained inside contentious public spaces in Mexico at a time when many such structures have evolved into highly visible sites of protest throughout the world.

Harvard Design Press is a book publishing imprint that is based at Harvard GSD and distributed in partnership with Harvard University Press. It challenges, broadens, and advances the design disciplines and promotes the importance and power of design in creating a more durable, just, and beautiful world. The Press is looking for book proposals from scholars, practitioners, theorists, historians, and critics, among others, on the research and practice of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design. On the Press’s website, you can find further details about submitting a proposal.

Harvard Design Press is organized and edited by Harvard GSD’s Ken Stewart and Marielle Suba, and guided by an Editorial Board composed of Harvard GSD and Harvard University faculty. Alongside Dean Sarah Whiting, the Harvard Design Press Editorial Board includes Harvard GSD’s Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Eve Blau, Ed Eigen, K. Michael Hays, Niall Kirkwood, Mark Lee, John May, Rahul Mehrotra, Erika Naginski, Jacob Reidel, and Sara Zewde, as well as Harvard University’s Lizabeth Cohen, Sarah Lewis, and Patricio del Real.

Visit the Harvard Design Press website to discover more about the organization and the submission requirements. Please visit Harvard GSD’s homepage and join up for its Design News updates to be informed about new publications and general GSD news.