 Hi guys, thanks for coming. I'm sure you've had a long, busy day, but we really appreciate you showing up. My name is Isabel Kirkham-Lewitt, and I'm the director of the Office of Publications here at GSAP. In our office, we run the imprint Columbia Books and Architecture in the City, or CBAC, which we call it more casually. CBAC is a collective editorial project. It is run by me and my colleague Joanna Joseph, and most recently, Maryam Sultan, and another editor, Isabel Tan, who wasn't able to be here. All right, so this has been CBAC's blurb for some time. It was written by the previous director, James Graham, sometime in the early days of the office. And it's the language we have continued to use when describing the agenda. It's capacious, it insists, sorry, on interdisciplinarity, on urgency, on the implications of architecture. And even as we have begun in recent years to narrow in on a more explicit set of intentions, ambitions, preoccupations, we remain faithful to this original idea of interrogating the urgent questions about what architecture is and what it does. We've been reluctant to touch or tweak these 100 words, or a little bit more than that, which is ironic, given that we as editors are always revising, always questioning, proposing alternative ways of seeing and saying what is right in front of us. We certainly don't need to edit this statement. It remains a beautiful reflection of what it is we do, and a beautiful reflection of our commitment to expanding and de-centering. But in reflecting on what we're all about for this presentation today and in the last year, we found ourselves a bit unsatisfied with it. And we began fixating on what it does not say about our editorial practice. So we're gonna do a sort of show and tell with a new format, so bear with us. And as cliche as this sort of adage is, since becoming director in 2020, this has been the approach of the office. We have spent the past few years modeling the project of the imprint rather than articulating it anew. Rather than putting it into words, we've been making books that more than any blurb can show, reveal what our aspirations are as an architecture press, what is at stake, what is urgent, what needs to be unlearned, rethought, rewritten within architectural discourse. In this way, the books we've published most recently are a bit antagonistic. They aim to unsettle our core assumptions about what architects do and what they can do differently, about who and what constitutes architectural work at all, and about what is and is not considered a text related to the built environment. This struggle extends to sort of our imprint's role and relationship to the school. So we are an imprint in Columbia GSAP, not necessarily an imprint of Columbia GSAP. And this distinction remains incredibly important to us, and that it allows for friction. So we're not interested in simply reflecting the institution's ideas and its discourses, but in creating a platform that challenges it. That brings this, yeah, that creates a platform that challenges it, bringing the school's curriculum into exchange with another set of ideas, voices and perspectives, perhaps, and typically outside of it. So okay, back to the blurb. In the spirit of full disclosure, we did edit a few lines, and these changes still sort of feel inadequate. I think you can sort of read them in bold. But I say inadequate because when we think about the project of the office, we think not only of the kinds of books we publish and hope to publish, that is books that explore architecture's intersections, books that rethink, again, the assumptions of practice, and books that confront the disciplines enduring form, complicity in enduring forms of injustice, but we also think about how we work and where we work. And I think it's this belief about why and how we publish is just as important as what we publish that is really guiding the work of our office. Much like publishing, to design is to communicate, to find and make community, and publishing evolves practice, at least we believe it to, and that practice evokes further thought and further questions. Okay, so for the purposes of today, and again, bear with us, we are most comfortable reading, so we're gonna be sort of reading to you a lot today. But we're gonna share three different ways that we've come to understand who we are in this school. Three things that are, again, not in the blurb, but I think are beginning to define our office in important ways and are reflected in our most recent books, hopefully modeling the questions and considerations that have both generated and been generated by our work. So the first is that CBAC considers editorial practice to be a research practice. So one of our recent books is an edited volume, Paths to Prison on the Architectures of Carcerality, and the book aims to implicate architecture in more long-standing and pervasive legacies of racial coercion in the United States as a way of expanding how we think about architecture's participation and also the figure of the architect's participation in the prison system. So while I personally came to this project in my own terms, outside of work, as someone who believes and has spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and writing about the abolition of prisons, and as someone who was frustrated that the field I was working in and the field I was educated in, also in this building, did not necessarily reflect, teach, take seriously the project of abolition. So Paths to Prison, though, was only possible because of the resources, time, and space afforded by my position at CBAC, and I think it's this tension that is worth sort of spending a bit of time on. Pursuing this project in the office meant occupying a space between editor and author. It meant eventually writing something between introduction and contribution to positions and formats that became quite inseparable for me over the course of this book and that I hope to continue to collapse in future projects that we do. So again, I've sort of alluded to this, but the book started with my own research into the origins of the private prison corporation, Corsivic. Digging into Corsivic led me to a motel, a prison farm, a plantation, a supreme court case, a tax exemption, a landlord, a developer, and the story sort of goes on and on and on the more you follow it. The narrative that unfolded pointed to all the ways that the discipline of architecture was failing to a teach and account for its role in the prison system, helping us articulate a set of questions for thinking more expansively about how architecture coerces, how it might enclose, how it might immobilize. So the book follows the premise that to understand how the prison enacts its violence in the present and to all the ways we might resist this violence, we need to look beyond the institution itself to all the everyday sites and histories and myths considered outside the sphere of architecture. So this is an alternative sort of table of contents in the book. It requires that we look to sort of diversity campaigns, to home ownership, to coal mines, to highways, to archives and critical infrastructure and pipelines, to data colonialism and debt, to charter schools and the American dream. So while the book models the sort of political possibilities and preoccupations of publishing in our office, I think it also models how we understand the role of an architecture press as again, a research platform and the role of editors in it as sort of authors. So the core premise really has become that to be an editor is also to author the terms of engagement. That editing not only supports and amplifies other people's work but also generates and seeds the direction of new work. We're gonna do a little switch now. A little switch. So I'm gonna take us to our sort of three, the third principle, which is that SEABAC aims to challenge the status quo of architecture. So we really feel that writing, research and publications are products of design themselves and that they're in turn capable of designing environments, attitudes, conditions. As with the fabric of the built environment, publications cannot be separated from the conditions that produce them. Their contributors, contents, materials, modes of circulation, they all carry particular motivations and biases. So we're gonna show you another recent project of ours, which is similar to Paths to Prison, which you just saw, is also a collected volume. This time, however, we came on as editors to an already existing project and already existing editorial practice. So the book Deserts Are Not Empty, edited by Samia Honey. We came sort of on to the project with Samia who already to a certain extent had conceived of the book as it grew out of a conference that she organized at Cornell in 2020. Deserts Are Not Empty scrutinizes the narratives, rhetorics and images that have come to represent desert territories to show how they have served to justify material, colonial and extractivist transformations of the land. As described by Samia in her introduction to the volume, the term desert stands in for a complex locus of imageries, imaginaries, climates, landscapes, spaces and histories. And so the aim of the publication really was to locate and challenge the confluences of material and immaterial forces, constructing the so-called empty desert. So this publication was an occasion to enact a particular mode of reorientation, which is kind of a preoccupation of the office. The title itself, Deserts Are Not Empty, is extremely intentional on how it is meant to reorient us. It immediately tells us otherwise. It orients us towards fullness, towards life already lived in with, through and beyond the desert. It announces itself as a project of refusal to refuse in Samia's words, the regime of emptiness. So no matter the site or discourse or practice, whether they be deserts, prisons, liberalism, riots, equity, air and air pollution, our books confront legacies of white supremacy as they materialize in and through the built environment. They confront the belief systems that underwrite the field of design and thus the belief systems we opt into consciously or not as designers and our press aims to identify the conversations and narratives, the sites, the ideas, places in our school and our curriculum in our field that we believe could be reoriented, redirected, reframed, expanded and it's also really important to us that we do this reorientation with others. So our newest book, which is currently being printed, we think is a beautiful reflection of that kind of collective reorientation. It's called Aeropolis, queering air and toxic polluted worlds by Norea Cavillo and it offers a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to redirect common understandings of air and air pollution that we typically think of as matter kind of out there. So it urges designers away from technofixes and solution oriented thinking in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Aeropolis instead insists that we acknowledge the diversity of air and its relation to humans, non-humans and environments both physically and effectively. So while it was written by a single author, as I mentioned Norea Cavillo, who actually teaches an advanced design studio here at GSAP, the book really wants to kind of rethink our own relations as designers and as scholars. It deeply engages and invites the work and voices of others into the book from SDS, critical anthropology, feminist studies, queer political urban ecology and so on. And so accommodating these different voices and perspectives became a really critical part not just of the writing but of the format and the design of the book, which is also a space that we're very privileged to work within so creatively as a design press. And so what we're showing here is actually just a dummy of Aeropolis. It's the book, the book is empty, which it will not be when it's fully printed, but this is just so you guys get an idea of the sort of like production process that we go through. We always get a dummy of the books that we design, which is sort of to spec so that we can test the paper stock, cover materiality, trim size, how the pages feel, how accessible the book is. So that's sort of where we are in our process. That's before the book sort of goes to print. And then, so okay, actually I think I said our third thing, but maybe, is this our third thing? Lose and count, this is our third thing. Our third principle is that CBAC is as much about making books as it is about reading them. And all of our books really aim to guide readers out of one project and into the pages of another if you guys maybe couldn't tell this idea of a sort of collective reading and editorial project is super important. So we really try to push people out of our books through quotes, excerpts, footnotes, citations, shared attitudes in our writing. And the hope is being that these sort of pages we push you in, that we make kind of take you elsewhere and they put you in conversation with other voices and disciplines beyond our own. So with that I'm gonna hand things off too. Here I am. Yeah, and that's where Footnotes On comes in. Footnotes On is an ongoing project of the office. Essentially annotated bibliographies and booklet form, these footnotes are reading lists emerging so far from previously published work in our office. Footnotes On Climate was, for example, born out of seabags, collected volume climates, architecture, and the planetary imaginary. And Footnotes On Housing was compiled out of a range of books we've published exploring questions of housing. We are in the process right now of compiling our third iteration, Footnotes On Carcerality, which we'll start from but also expand on the resources included in Paths to Prison. And in either case, these booklets aren't meant to exist as syllabi or even as reviews of existing literature, but rather they attempt to compile and curate references for understanding how these issues continue to live on and evolve in real time beyond any single publication. They offer another way to understand how and why we got here and where we might in turn go with that perspective in mind. And having said that, Footnotes On is actually probably one of our more political projects, not just conceptually but also logistically as well. The project doesn't fit into our typical distribution networks. They're not for sale. When we complete a reading list, we hand them out at events and on campus. It's for the taking and it holds no commercial value. Though I guess this is another aspect of our work here, trying to push our collective understanding of what exactly is publishable and of value. And also, unlike our larger work, Footnotes On is more of an exercise in reading in mutual reading than it is in writing. It posits that you have to be a better reader, a closer, more radical one, to be a better thinker, writer, designer, person. Okay, I'm gonna just take us through one of our other sort of projects alongside the imprint to close. So we, yeah, we wanna kind of introduce this other project that we think sort of emphasizes the methods for reading and writing that we've talked about. So that's the AVER Review. If you aren't familiar with it, the AVER Review is an online journal which is dedicated to thinking about books, buildings, other architectural media through the genre of the review. And so this idea of the review, we think really speaks to not only the framework of the journal in terms of what it publishes, its content, what its approaches are to who we invite and how we invite people to write, but also the sort of practices that we've developed as a team of editors. And so we think the review is actually something that can be glimpsed both in the pages, but also something that's kind of like structuring the work behind the scenes and the pragmatics of how we work. For a little bit of context, the journal was founded in 2014 and at the risk of oversimplifying, it emerged from what at the time to us felt like a real dearth of open access, medium form, critical writing on architecture. There was plenty of writing we thought buying for architects on their own architectural practices, plenty of image heavy PR type writing. There was also a lot of scholarly historical work in academic journals, but those were sort of all hidden behind paywalls. So what we kind of thought was missing was a middle ground between the review and the essay, a space for writing that was both journalistic and academic, rigorous and timely, contemporary and historical. So the premise of the A-Review we think is fairly simple, but also very profound, we like to think. So the A-Review insists that an author kind of step away from their own scholarly or design work and engage with the work of somebody else. The goal is to publish reviews that test and expand to the author's own intellectual commitments, whether that's theoretical, architectural, political, through someone else's work. So every piece we publish has what we call, and again to summon the word, the object of review at its center. So this object can be anything, a book, a building idea, that's also kind of like a space where we meet authors is negotiating what kind of constitutes an object of review, so long as it kind of helps us see and reframe the broader histories phenomena and arguments at stake in our discipline. So I think it's fair to say that similar to the work of C-Back, the journal itself aims to review the discipline of architecture. We are invested in the collective rewriting of a field that has long kept difference in its margins and de-centering the voices and perspectives that have for too long held the center. It's interested in illuminating architecture's blind spots, opposing its many complicities, resisting its production of norms and its participation in spatial violence. As a journal, very much a part of in dialogue with the discipline of architecture and also a part of GSAP, we also see the AVER review as having a very specific pedagogical potential and function. We very much see the editorial process as a space of learning and mentorship, both for authors and for ourselves. And this is why we created both the annual guest editor role and the annual essay prize composition, which maybe some of you have heard of. Both opportunities are geared towards students and folks early on in their careers who are interested in gaining experience with the editorial world of architecture, who see writing and editing as a fundamental part of design practice and thinking. So within these opportunities, young writers and editors are invited into the editorial process to develop forms of authorship with the support of the AVER review team. And in turn, those experiences also really push us to continue reflecting on and revising the way we work as editors and how we meet our hopefully expanding sites, authors, and audiences. So that's kind of what we brought to share with you all today and sort of the hope of the office is that really our work, while not necessarily connected into the curriculum that you all maybe will be plugged into and learning from, but there were sort of like a running resource and another kind of form of discourse and engagement that is happening here at the school. Thank you guys. Thank you.