Sixteen surrealists photographed with their eyes shut, round a painting of a woman the sentence says they do not see. A table of four pictures and four words, three of them wrong. Magritte built that table three times, and the one true word in it was a wager on a reader.
The caption is up. The picture hasn’t arrived, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
The essay starts from Jonathan Jones’s Guardian review of Gagosian’s “This Is Still Not a Pipe,” which hunts Magritte’s heirs among forty living artists, and puts his four-panel Clef des songes back among the surrealists instead: painted first in Breton’s Paris in 1927 while the movement wrote down its dreams, painted again in 1929 with no true word in it, in the year of the pipe and of the review that printed his axioms on words and images and the page of sixteen closed eyes, and painted last in Brussels in 1935, in English, for New York. In Brussels his friends proposed his titles round a table.
Then it reads the machines beside the first Manifesto. Writing with no author at its centre is what the surrealists asked for, and a captioner writing ninety-five sentences in every hundred of a training set is that wish granted; when the dream spoke at scale it said “actor on the red carpet.” The machines are Breton’s heirs, not Magritte’s, and they have done one thing the surrealists did not: put the caption before the picture, so that an image made from a prompt is an illustration of its title, which Magritte is said to have ruled out. The rival reading, that Magritte’s subject was the folly of decoding, is given at full strength and conceded. What is left is a question, not a verdict: who is reading the sentence under the picture now.
Since our founding in the 1960s, the MIT Press has been considered a premier publisher of architectural scholarship. To celebrate World Architecture Day, this year we are highlighting some of our latest books on architectural theory and practice—including a study of anarchitecture, an investigation of an enigmatic Italian architect-designer, and an abecedarium-style book exploring architect’s intersection with animal life.
An Open Work investigates the celebrated, enigmatic Italian architect-designer Marco Zanuso (1919–2001). Zanuso’s buildings were widely recognized in Italy, and today his object and furniture designs, which won many awards in their time, can be found in prestigious museums worldwide, yet few scholars have addressed the different scales he worked at as parts of a whole. This beautifully written, lavishly illustrated book opens the door to Zanuso’s acclaimed work, specifically his dual focus on architecture and industrial design, a form of practice that many architects in Milan pursued as the Italian economy rebounded in a surge of industrialization after World War II.
Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time. By reading anarchitecture through transness and transness through anarchitecture, Halberstam helps us see the trans body as a space of radical unmaking and as a portal to new lexicons for transformation.
Drawing on his pioneering expertise in the relationship between graphic satire and architecture, Gabriele Neri retraces Alan Dunn’s path from painter to renowned cartoonist, offering an unconventional perspective on architectural and urban transformations—and on their perception within society. Featuring 200 carefully selected images, including Dunn’s correspondence, unpublished cartoons, preliminary sketches, watercolors, and rare photographs, Alan Dunn demonstrates the critical potential of caricature and cartoons for architectural history. Through Neri’s deft analysis, the book also reveals the complex intersections of architecture with media, publishing, commerce, society, art, and politics.
In The Architect and the Animal, 26 different architects look at how 26 different animals, from A to Z, have found their way into modern architectural discourse. The animal was typically approached in this discourse not through its various cultural or symbolic identities but as a body examined under a formalistic scientific lens. In this volume, the authors explore a less operative—and more meaningful—understanding of animal references and representations in twentieth-century architecture. Both playful and serious, there is nothing quite like this book.
Magic Architecture was the architect Frederick Kiesler’s most ambitious book project, an epoch-spanning history of human housing from prehistory to the atomic era, submitted to editors after World War II but left unpublished. In its holistic view of habitation through the lens of anthropology, ecology, and the life sciences, Magic Architecture is one of the most extraordinary texts on architecture written in the twentieth century, now at last published in the twenty-first. Kiesler’s exploration of the effects of modern technology in combination with the alternative epistemology of “magical” practices associated with cave drawings and the first artifacts of human industry reflects his profoundly interdisciplinary perspective on the development of art, architecture, and design.
Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has often been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In Rewriting Alberti, architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books of Architecture. Eisenman’s in-depth analysis of Alberti’s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect’s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space.
Once upon a time, the export crop of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket was whale oil. Nowadays it is money, harpooned by visiting campaigns from deep-pocketed donors at anchor in their summer seaside retreats. In the peak season of July and August, the islands’ social rhythms are dictated by money-harvesting events, wrangled by local hosts jostling for the social éclat that comes from securing a high-profile honoree. By late August this year, the territory had already been worked over by a series of hopeful visitors with hands outstretched, such as the rising Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, Hakeem Jeffries in eager pursuit of the House Speakership that is almost in his grasp, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and others questing the donor dollar.
The world has become strangely numb to terror. Sometimes an atrocity will be sufficiently horrifying – the murder of Charlie Kirk, say – to cause mass shock and anguish. Yet now reports of car rammings or knife rampages or foiled Islamist plots feel almost routine. We have become inured to ideological violence. In the quarter-century since 9/11, the specter of terrorism has almost become a fact of modern life. Last year, America was one of the few western countries to see a rise in terrorism, with 13 recorded attacks and 28 deaths. Today even the most appalling acts generate only a brief sense of widespread outrage. And then the news cycle moves on. No mass killing has come close to the scale of the Twin Towers attacks.
America’s war with Iran is in its eighth month and stuck. On September 26, Donald Trump confirmed that he had rejected Tehran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in return for lifting the American naval blockade and easing sanctions. He has reportedly told his staff that renewed bombing is likely after the midterm elections on November 3. He is reluctant to
Chaos in schools, on the streets and in the markets is rooted in France’s struggles to fund its social welfare state, with a presidential election approaching.
The authorities said that the virus had been diagnosed in a man arriving from the Democratic Republic of Congo and that they were taking measures to prevent any spread.
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