OfficeUS Atlas (Repository)

The OfficeUS Atlas provides a transversal view of architectural practice in a global context from the perspective of US practices.

Presenting almost 1000 projects, the book is organized according to individual firm histories, documenting the development of U.S. architectural offices working abroad from 1914 to the present. Offices and their projects are illustrated by over 1200 photographs and architectural drawings. 

The twenty sections of this volume frame some of the key historical narratives through which to enter this century of US offices and their export. OfficeUS Atlas opens with the professionalization of architectural practice in the US in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the episodes that follow outline the successive transformations of both offices and their products in response to political, economic, and technological forces. The story of international philanthropy, for example, begins in the early twentieth century in China and Japan, only to be recaptured in different forms in post-independence India and Pakistan. Cold War politics and related development track through a series of interrelated narratives in the postwar period, from the international hotel chains enabled by the Marshall Plan to the US Embassy program to national participation in trade fairs and world expositions under the guidance of the United States Information Agency. Oil and other global resource flows, the deregulation of markets, the demand for iconicity, building booms, and various cultural conditions all count among the factors that have drawn US architecture firms into foreign contexts. 

Throughout this history, the forms of professionalization and expertise required to run offices and projects at a distance have led to dramatic fluctuations in the size and scope of US offices and fueled the complexity of their entanglements abroad.

For each of these narratives, a brief editorial introduction is accompanied by a dossier of evidentiary artifacts, which is constituted chiefly out of period articles reproduced here with all of the traces of their previous lives in bound library volumes or other archival collections. 

Despite the OfficeUS Atlas encyclopedic dimensions, physical and temporal, its aim is rather the opposite: to open doors for further investigation and to outline the curatorial choices at stake in producing the OfficeUS Repository for the US Pavilion in Venice in 2014. Indeed OfficeUS Atlas presents only a small selection of the immense press archive that was compiled as a critical mirror of US architects' global operations since 1914. Though it is by no means the first of its genre, this compilation is not like any other.

EVA FRANCH i GILABERT is an architect, critic, curator, educator, and lecturerof experimental forms of art and architectural practice. Franch specializes inthe making of alternative architecture histories and futures.
 
ANA MILJAČKI is a critic, curator, and Associate Professor ofArchitecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teacheshistory, theory, and design. 
 
 
Schafer isco-founder and co-editor of the architectural journal PRAXIS. Schafer maintainsan architectural practice in Cambridge and New Orleans. She currently teachesdesign studio at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.