Perspecta 40 Monster: The Yale Architectural Journal

A monster is in our midst, and its name is Architecture.

Contemporary architecture is in many ways a monstrous thing. It is bigger, more broadly defined, increasingly complicated, more costly, and stylistically and formally heterogeneous—if not downright unhinged. Not only is the scale of the built environment expanding, but so is the territory of the architectural profession itself. A perfect storm of history, technology, economics, politics, and pedagogy has generated a moment in time in which anything seems possible. The results have been at times strange and even frightening.

Long ago, the birth of an abnormal creature was interpreted as a sign of looming trouble. These monstra—from the Latin monere, “to warn” and monstrare, “to show”—were viewed with both fear and fascination. This fortieth issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—examines architecture past and present through the lens of the monster. The contributors—a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and artists—embrace the multitude of meanings this term carries in an attempt to understand how architecture arrived at its present situation and where it may be going. Perspecta 40 represents in itself a kind of monster—a hybrid, jumbled, conflicting amalgamation of work and ideas that looks at the past in new ways and tells of things to come.

Contributors
Philip Bernstein, Mario Carpo, Arindam Dutta, Ed Eigen, Mark Gage, Gensler, Marcelyn Gow and Ulrika Karlsson (servo), Catherine Ingraham, Mark Jarzombek, Terry Kirk, Leon Krier, Greg Lynn, John May, John McMorrough, Colin Montgomery, Guy Nordenson, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Emmanuel Petit, Kevin Roche, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow-Wow) and Ryuji Fujimura, Michael Weinstock, Claire Zimmerman

Marc Guberman is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Management and is a practicing architect.

Jacob Reidel is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and is a practicing architect.

Frida Rosenberg is a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and is a practicing architect, currently teaching at Lund University in Sweden.

Mark Foster Gage is Associate Professor and Assistant Dean at the Yale School of Architecture. A practicing architect, he is the subject of the monograph Mark Foster Gage: Projects and Provocations, editor of Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design and The Space of Social Equity and the author of Designing Social Equality: Architecture, Aesthetics and the Perception of Democracy, and other books. His design work has been exhibited in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Venice Biennale.

Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT. He is coauthor of A Global History of Architecture and Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective.

Edward Eigen is Associate Professor of History of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Associate Editor of Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. His writing has appeared in Cabinet, Pamphlet, Grey Room, and other publications.

Mario Carpo is Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory, the Bartlett, University College London. He is the author of Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory and The Alphabet and the Algorithm (both published by the MIT Press) and other books.

Arindam Dutta is Associate Professor of Architectural History and directs the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) Program in MIT's Department of Architecture. He is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility.

Architect and urbanist Léon Krier has taught at the Architectural Association, the Royal College of Arts, the University of Virginia, and Princeton and Yale Universities and has been an architectural consultant to the Prince of Wales since 1988. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture and Jefferson Memorial Gold Medal. He is the author of the award-winning Architecture: Choice or Fate and other books.