A *Pre-* Program for Graphic Design is a video-based companion to A *New* Program for Graphic Design, a DIY textbook that synthesizes the pragmatic with the experimental to convey advanced graphic design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels as well as general readers. Based on courses originally developed for liberal arts students at Princeton University, the book was derived from a three-day lecture series held in Los Angeles, delivered to a live studio audience and video recorded. The result is a broad introduction to graphic design and visual literacy, covering a wide range of topics, from Benjamin ...

Scaling is to move across different dimensions: a firm might be scaling down, nearing bankruptcy—its new dimension is to reach rock bottom; a doll house might be a scale model, where dimensions are kept proportional but decreased compared to a real house; a hand touching a map is, to paraphrase Tom Holert, a scaling device, where the graspable dimension of the map makes available the experience of exploring, traveling and possessing lands. For this publication of Taming the Horror Vacui, which includes content from three different sessions in the program, we put the wind and its manifestations through a process of ...

Dear writer, A Queer Year of Love Letters is a series of fonts that remembers the lives and work of countercultural queers of the past several decades. The series aims to make the act of remembering these overlooked and illegitimate histories accessible to other people, as easy as typing. Better yet: it aims to make the act of typing an act of remembering. That these fonts might be considered typefaces is incidental. They are an attempt to improvise a clandestine lineage, an aspatial and atemporal kind of queer kinship, through the act of writing. I began making these fonts in order to ...

“Reading inquisitively over each others’ shoulders, the poems, meditations, analyses and experiments in this volume respond with audacity and adventure to the challenge of characterizing what reading, this most familiar yet renewedly strange occupation, has been and may yet become.”

Alternative lexicons, sonification of thought, cultural software, hauntologies and political bodies, are some of the possibilities that are offered here as a means to contribute to a renewed set of ideas towards design agency. Presented here as both lecture and prompts, sections may be read aloud as scripts, as action with others; or single pages torn out to become a tactic for experimentation; or an image to evoke a totem of belief that might interact with others. Active Agency is a series of speculative lectures on design as an agentive phenomena encompassing language, matter, ontology and sound. Supported by Research at Camberwell, ...

Writing in 1969, architecture historian Reyner Banham complains about the silence on mechanical services in contemporary architecture discourse, most specifically machines for the making of interior weather. Banham’s book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment is full of little arguments against the superiority of the visual, that is, the exterior aspect of a building rather than, for example, its fabricated interior weather. His work today comes across as an apology for technology before an era of environmental or social concerns stemming from it. The present publication for Taming the Horror Vacui takes a less polemic yet more critical tone to explore ...

Two topics emerge from the third session of Taming the Horror Vacui. One is apparent, the other is fleeting. One is sought, the other is coincidental. Centred around the guided tour given by city planner Emiel Arends in Rotterdam in June 2020, the event firstly deals with the ways in which wind shapes the city and the city shapes the wind. The locations in the tour, explains Arends, are examples of how the city landscape interacts with its aeolian one, and is marked by specific architectural interventions. Rib’s focus on the material language of the city joins Haseeb Ahmed’s ongoing ...

In 2016 the Aerocene Foundation was invited to Exhibition Road for an interdisciplinary artistic project co-produced by members of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group: a partnership of the leading cultural and educational institutions in London, among them Serpentine Galleries, Imperial College London and The Natural History Museum. Between October and December 2016, the Aerocene Foundation activated a collaborative research platform between Exhibition Road members and wider communities by organizing two hackathons and the ‘Aerocene Campus’ in which participants engaged in debates on metabolic, social and environmental dimensions of the Aerocene epoch. During this period, experts as well as developers, designers, artists, ...

This next-to-last issue of Taming the Horror Vacui, titled Air Aggregation, brings together artworks and air. Haseeb Ahmed’s art installation at Rib and the wind tunnel at its center have been used for experiments and workshops throughout the entire long-term artist’s program. Expanding on this approach, this publication collects annotated images of artworks brought to Rib by Piero Bisello to be tested in Ahmed’s wind tunnel in June 2021. If wind and air are the mediums of choice in Ahmed’s art, the aggregation of different practices can be seen as his modus operandi. The outlook of Rib as an institution hosting ...

An ‘object’ is a work of architecture that is expressly cut off from its environment. Objects are not exclusive to any particular architectural style, but objectification has long been central to western architecture. Indeed, it might even be said to be the very strategy by which modernism succeeded in conquering the world. It is all-pervasive because it is consistent with the aim of the prevailing economic system: to transform virtually everything into a commodity. In Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma argues that this mindset prevents us from establishing a healthy relationship with the external world and suggests that an alternative form of architecture ...