March 2026: Food, Fiction, and Clear Sense of Purpose

Plus stories about an 18th century playwright and architect, a book about signs, and visiting Chicago.

In February, we spoke with Sonja Strummerer and Martin Hablesreiter of Honey & Bunny about the intersection of food and design book jacket designer Oliver Munday about his first book of fiction.

EDITOR’S NOTE

I just got back from Chicago, where I was in town for a few days for the CAA Conference. I presented a a bit on the thinking I’ve been doing around design education but it was also a chance to catch up with some friends. I spent a morning at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech, where I was a fellow in 2022. When we worked together, we produced a book about the work they were doing in their curriculum to celebrate the college’s 85th birthday. The school was founded, famously, by former-Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy as a “New Bauhaus” and went through various incarnations before merging with the Institute of Design. I find visits like this to be fruitful, both in seeing what’s happening in other institutions but also in conversations about where these ideas might go. In many ways, that’s the goal of this show: to bring conversations from different areas — disciplines, institutions, geographies — and try to put them in dialogue.

If you like what we do here and want to support this work, you can upgrade your subscription for just $5/month or $50/year. Paid members get bonus interviews each month — like this month’s conversation with Charles Saumarez Smith about his new biography of the 18th century architect and playwright John Vanbrugh — and help keep the show free for everyone, all the time. Thanks for listening.

See you next month,
Jarrett

SCRATCH

Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.

PAST GUESTS

Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.

🦋 Roof is a new short story from Elvia Wilk. (Conjunctions)

🪐 Michael Kimmelman on the bedazzling, wild designs of Bruce Goff. (NYT)

📸 Edwin Heathcote thinks there may be no finer place to see photography than Rotterdam’s Fotomuseum. (Financial Times)

🔥 Christopher Hawthorne has some thoughts on Reinier de Graaf’s new “manifesto”. (PunchList)

🤝 Michael Cina: What we lost when connection became content. (Tell)

👏 Erik Brandt’s typography of protest in Minneapolis. (ArtForum)

🤔 Jack Cheng asks: what is taste, really? (Every)

🚀 Paul Ford says the A.I. disruption we’ve been waiting for has arrived. (NYT)

📖 Reality Bites: Eric Heiman reviews Silvio Lorusso’s What Design Can’t Do. (Eye)

🎥 Jarrett Earnest review Emerald Fennell’s Wurthering Heights. (4Columns)

🥰 Alexandra Lange on how a Shaker Revival points to something deeper than a trad obsession. (CityLab)

🏡 Karrie Jacobs on Sunnyside Yard and the quest for affordable housing in New York. (RealClear Politics)

READ/WATCHED/HEARD

Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.

🪑The Shakers’ Utopian World Sees a Surge of Modern Interest. (NYT)

🌳 The landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy contemplates his own decay. (The New Yorker)

🤬 Vox takes down Curbed’s archive, losing years of reportage, essays, and reviews. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

BOOK ROUNDUP

Recent books that have arrived in the studio. All links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. If you order through Bookshop, we get some money to help support the show!

A Studious Use: Designing from the Undercommons - Giovanni Marmont

A Studious Use invites readers to reconsider the habitual logics and material priorities at play in practices of both study and use. It examines their potential and actual interplay, unravelling the ways in which these are at once shaped by and reproductive of broader social, political, and cultural currents.

Ka-Me-Ra: Modern Japanese Architecture Through the Photographer’s Lens - Ari Seligmann

Both a photobook, a series of biographies, and an architectural photo history, this book traces developments in one of the most exciting architectural contexts anywhere in the world. Japanese architecture is globally recognized through the circulation of architectural photographs, but the artists behind these photographs have had almost no global recognition

Indie Game Works - Nathan P. Gibson

Indie Game Works is a visually driven survey of fifty games that have defined the movement over the past fifteen years. Focusing on titles with dazzling and innovative art styles, and featuring insightful contributions from the developers and art directors behind each game, the book is a visual showcase of boundary-pushing videogame design.

Lettres Décoratives: A Centry of French Sign Painters’ Alphabets

A kaleidoscopic survey of letterforms from nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, Lettres Décoratives includes more than 150 plates from grand lithographic albums printed at the height of the sign painter’s craft. Originally made to demonstrate styles and inspire artists to decorate cities with increasingly colorful, adventurous, and refined forms, these portfolios preserve a rich visual history of urban alphabets.

JOB WATCH

People getting new jobs in and around the design world.

The Museum of Modern Art appoints Evangelos Kotsioris as director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment, succeeding Carson Chan. (MoMA)

ArtForum’s editor-in-chief, Tina Rivers Ryan, is stepping down after two years on the job. She’s be replaced by two editors. (NYT)

Iker Gil to step down as Executive Director of the SOM Foundation. (SOM)

POSTSCRIPT

In doing some research for an upcoming interview (look for it next month; maybe you can guess!), I came across this post card written by the architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark. I’ve talked about Matta-Clark a few times on the show (perhaps most notably in my conversation about anarchitecture with Aaron Betsky), but he’s an artist you has meant a lot to me over the years. This postcard is from the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s collection and features the words, almost like a mission statement: “Here is what we have to offer you in its most elaborate form—confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose.”

A theme of this show — and my work — has been encouraging amorphous practices but the challenge in that is they are often illegible to larger systems (institutions, cultures, etc). This sentence, to me, feels like the closest I’ve gotten to a a way to describe my own work.