States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum navigates the temporal and spatial dimensions of France’s states of emergency across three colonial space-times: the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the Kanak Insurrection (1984–1988), and the French banlieues riots (2005) and their fallout (2015–). In recounting the mechanics of this counter-revolutionary legal framework across multiple geographies—extending and fortifying key anti-colonial solidarities past, present, and future—this book reads the state of emergency not as an exception but as a heightened form of every-day colonial state violence.


Contrasting the architecture of sites like “regroupement’ camps in Algeria, the white settler city of Nouméa, and the police stations of Paris’s suburbs with that of Algiers's Casbah, Kanaky’s tribes, and Paris’s banlieues neighborhoods, States of Emergency narrates the bureaucracies and protocols that continue to enable and underwrite the far reaching violence of this legal measure, as well as the anticolonial and antiracist resistance brought against it. The book thus offers a guide and a method for making the colonial continuum legible across contexts and for spatializing the many actors, agents, immigrants, and revolutionaries working both for and against the shared project of liberation.


Translated from French by Lara Vergnaud, with a preface by Zoé Samudzi.

Raw building materials are inherently variable. This variability shapes global supply chains, labor relations, infrastructure​, and trade networks. And yet, within the context of building design, materials are often treated as static commodities. Material Variance resists this perception, unfolding instead a framework for designing through and with living matter that is uncertain, messy, and dynamic. The book insists on materials not as passive inputs but as unruly agents, shaped by and shaping the political, ecological, and cultural processes around them.

Convening material researchers, building scientists, architects, and artists, Material Variance aims to collectively expand architecture and design’s material lexicon and unsettle its disciplinary boundaries. The book interrogates the assumptions of refinement, standardization, and technocratic control to advance alternative fabrication practices, alchemical processes, and methods for working with indeterminate matter. From poetic field recordings to scientific analyses, the book opens up a space for thinking across theory and practice, across geological particles and living species, and across various scales, forms, and practices.

This edition of Material Variance features three distinct covers, each one printed with a unique matrix, ink, paper stock, and tip-in, extending the notion of variance to production of the object itself.

With contributions from David Benjamin, Ethan Bordeau, Olga Beatrice Carcassi, Caitlin Charlet, Felecia Davis, Andrés Jaque, Leslie Lok, Mae-ling Lokko, Claudia Marais, Adam Marcus, V. Mitch McEwen, Ruth Morrow, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Ronald Rael, Jonsara Ruth, and Laia Mogas-Soldevila.

How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.

This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations—Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance—that is, “urban renewal”—in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis’s cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles—dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest—to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.

Between these three scenes, Erasure by Design takes on the aesthetics of bad design and good design, as innovated within the intellectual domain of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Through a curated cockroach at MoMA—and even the humor, rumors, and gossip about this roach—Erasure by Design reads the role that the museum invents for exhibiting, curating, and re-shaping policy, worldview, and the built environment, as well as how protocols of erasure, demolition, and design conscript the modern built environment into the policing of human and subhuman. In this nuanced reading, the Glass House and its twin, the Brick House, stage a haunting allegory of total violence.

Just as information and media are products of design, they themselves leave indelible marks on the environments in which they circulate and help structure. Architecture has irrevocably been altered by the proliferation and advancement of new media technologies and forms of communication, but architecture, too, is capable of mediating these forms of mediation—their materiality, their transmission, and the motivations they carry. From 2006–2016, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery under the directorship of Mark Wasiuta at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation was the center of a sustained research practice experimenting with these intersections. As the title suggests, The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016 both records the possibilities of the archival exhibition as a mode, method, and problem of architecture, and is itself a record of a decade-long curatorial project that sought to reframe the documents, authors, environments produced by and producing architecture.

This book thus collects thirteen exhibitions that read architecture as a field coordinated by documents with distinct historical, mediatic, and disciplinary registers. The book, and the exhibitions it presents, recognize that architectural documents take shape according to different discursive and institutional exigencies. Yet, in these exhibitions the architectural archive is hardly stable or uniform. Rather, the archive appears as a term, process, mode of organization, underwriting architecture’s media, histories, and effects.

With contributions from Martin Beck, Caitlin Blanchfield, Craig Buckley, Glen Cummings, Keller Easterling, Noam M. Elcott, James Graham, Branden W. Joseph, Adrian Lahoud, Leah Meisterlin, Felicity D. Scott, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wasiuta, Ines Weizman, and Mark Wigley.

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water—and the history of controlling it—is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry—past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.

With texts from Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.