Assembly: Matter, Lineament, and Aggregated Systems in Architectural Production

Part-to-part relationships and the approach to governing their sensibilities is at the root of all architecture. The need for engaging in a dialogue around these systems is essential to contemporary architectural discourse and practice. Assembly builds on and extends the investigations of materials and representation techniques in the editors’ previous books, Matter and Lineament. This book uses a collection of detailed case studies, explained by first-person authors, about experimental and innovative takes on assembling architecture. Bridging theory and practice, 17 projects and their principled approaches each demonstrate an important vein of inquiry within the topic. Essays probe issues such as latent and overt geometry, fabrication and technology, part-to-part elements, joinery and representation, material vernacular geometries, labor and place-based contextual assemblies, detailing, and pedagogical examinations.

This text articulates the traditions and trends of material as the defining premise in the contemporary making of architecture. Its outcomes are applicable to beginning students of architecture and advanced practitioners alike.

Gail Peter Borden is the Director of Graduate Programs in addition to holding a tenured position as a professor at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston. As a principal of Borden Partnership since 2002, his design work has won numerous recognitions, including the Architectural League Prize; the AIA Young Architect Award; Building Design and Construction magazine’s "40 Under 40" award; and numerous AIA, ACSA, and RADA awards. Borden received artist-in-residence awards from the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; the Atlantic Center for the Arts; the Borchard Fellowship; and the MacDowell Colony. He was named the youngest fellow of the AIA in the history of California. As an architect designer, artist, theoretician, and practitioner, Professor Borden’s research and practice focus on the role of materiality and architecture in contemporary culture.

Michael Meredith is an architect, cofounder of MOS, and professor of architecture at Princeton University School of Architecture. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Log, Perspecta, Praxis, Domus, and Harvard Design Magazine. Together with his partner Hilary Sample, Meredith is the recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize Fellows in Architecture (2023); the United States Artists Award in Architecture (2020); the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum National Design Award in Architecture (2015); the Global Holcim Award in Sustainable Architecture (2015); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award; and the New York Architectural League Emerging Voices (2010).