First Volume in the New U-SoA Book Series, Call To Order, is Here!

The much-awaited, first volume in the new U-SoA book series, Call To Order is here!
First Volume in the New U-SoA Book Series, Call To Order, is Here!

The book is now widely-distributed and will be officially launched on March 29th with a lecture by Jorge Silvetti.

With the appointment of Dean el-Khoury in 2014, the University of Miami School of Architecture launched the Tecnoglass Lecture Series, a public program that includes lectures, interviews, mini-symposia and exhibitions, all curated around an annual theme that is of particular relevance to the School. The inaugural 2014-15 series, titled CALL TO ORDER and suggesting a re-grouping and a re-grounding upon the foundations of the discipline, celebrates the history of the school while clarifying its renewed purpose in an international arena. It is inspired by “Rappel à l’ordre,” the post WWI European movement that rejected the extreme tenants of the avant-garde and its praise of disruption, machinery, violence and war, in favor of continuity and rational sobriety. 

The series, now chronicled in the newly-released book by the same title, looks at an international group of architects and thinkers who are ostensibly rehearsing the ethos of the 1960s and 1970s when architects and thinkers converged in their resistance to what they saw as an erosion of the discipline by the social sciences and other centrifugal influences, re-grouping around the principal of autonomy. 

CALL TO ORDER (ORO Publishers, 2017), examines similar resistant practices in the contemporary architectural scene that reinvest in restraint, simplicity, and rational order but without holding on to disciplinary autonomy. They build upon enduring foundations but only to project architecture into an expanded and enriched territory.  The book surveys this contemporary condition in the context of a long historical trajectory to tease out and articulate a cultural project that is relevant to the ongoing architectural debate.

The book, edited by Associate Dean Carie Penabad includes contributing essays by Jean Francois Le Jeune, Katherine Wheeler, Steven Fett, Edgar Sarli, Adib Cure, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.  The volume is richly illustrated with a collection of projects showcasing primarily emerging practices, such as the constellation of figures that have coalesced around the San Rocco journal, including Salottobuono and 2A + P/A as well as Pezo Von Ellrichshausen, Productora, Adrian Phiffer, and Cure & Penabad.  This work was displayed alongside more established voices, including Nader Tehrani of NADAAA, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, MOS Architects, and Johnston Marklee.

Stay tuned for more information on the March 29th U-SoA Currents Lecture / book launch with Jorge Silvetti.