Lunch 15: Thick

The latest edition of the University of Virginia School of Architecture’s design journal, LUNCH 15 turns to the concept of Thickness and considers what possibilities lie in poché, thick description, thin assemblies, and in the many layers of the built environment. 

The issue considers Thickness in four sections: “Places” navigates the ways we understand the spaces in which we live and work. “Materials” delaminates the building blocks of our world and how we know them. “Representation” traces the many forms and layers of communication through which we see or that might obscure our vision. Finally, “Relations” follows threads that bind. In a world operating between the thick and thin of it, how will your lines be drawn?

Ben Small is a Lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he teaches in the undergraduate and graduate studio sequence. Ben received his M.Arch from UVA in 2021, graduating with the Alpha Rho Chi Award.

Colleen Brennan is a landscape designer with Surface 678. She received her Master of Landscape Architecture from UVA in 2021, along with the Research Excellence Award for her thesis project In the Margins of Enclosures: Producing Knowledge and Space in the Post-Plantation Landscape.

Leah A. Kahler is a landscape designer at Reed Hilderbrand and adjunct professor at the Boston Architectural College. Leah holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from UVA and Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College. She delights in justice-oriented storytelling in, through, and of, landscape. Her current research explores the possibilities of an abolition ecology through speculative fictions.