Sightlines, a new book series, features essays on architecture from a particular point of view
MACK, the famed photo book publishers, are launching a new series of short books on architecture.
As a longtime photography enthusiast, I’ve always held up the London-based MACK Books as the standard for quality photo books. Everything from curation to design to production is considered to truly create books that feel like perfect objects. A few years ago, MACK expanded into architecture, bringing their editorial and design expertise to new books from Petra Blaisse (episode 258), Moshen Mastafavi (episode 233), and more.
Now, MACK is launching Sightlines, a new book series featuring essays about architecture, each taking a particular point of view. I was interested in the strategy behind the new series and what they hope to contribute to the architecture discourse so I spoke with series editor Louis Rogers about how he’s thinking about the series and where he hopes to take it next.
What is Sightlines? Tell me how the format developed and how you’re thinking about your editorial purview for the new series?
Sightlines is a series of essays about architecture. Each takes a particular point of view, whether that’s of a group of people such as construction workers or inhabitants, other forms of life like animals and plants, or a certain discipline, history, or approach to writing and research.
We set out to develop a series of distinctive pieces of writing about architecture. We were interested in exploring how writing could engage with the subject, but also in publishing engaging, challenging, enjoyable books – ones you could read on the train as much as in the library. A really good short book has such potential, I think: a sort of inverse of the other pleasures and rewards of living with a long book as you work your way through it. They can quickly and transformatively shake up your thinking or simply broaden it. As models, I had in mind good incisive texts on architecture but also compact, eloquent books on politics and psychoanalysis and literature and art history.
The overarching aim is to publish good pieces of writing that feel ideally formed in their size and scope. They can be good in all sorts of ways.
Who is your ideal audience for these texts? How do you hope these books sit within a larger architectural discourse?
We hope the books will appeal to anyone curious about architecture, space, cities, building, and so on – not just architects. And we hope that architects will gain something from the ways the book address a non-specialist audience while remaining ambitious and thorough. There seems huge scope for this type of writing. So many people are interested in architecture, in fact, are quite opinionated about it. We’d like the series to be inviting to them, even though many of the ideas the books handle are meaty and complex and challenging. Like any discipline, architecture benefits from cross-ventilation. There is a great deal to learn from the way outsiders view it – this is expressed in the perspectives idea that shapes the series. One key inspiration was the architect and theorist Sérgio Ferro’s proposal that we consider architecture ‘from below’, that is, from the point of view of the construction worker and construction site. A whole new field of study is opened up by this. How many others like it are waiting?
Tell me about the first books from Sightlines: Kwan Queenie Li’s textual and visual essay on weeds and Andrea Bagnato’s examination of how disease has shaped urban planning. How’d you select the first writers for the series? And how do you see these first two books as setting the tone for what you want Sightlines to be?
They are intentionally very different books, each the product of a long process of research.
Andrea Bagnato’s Terra Infecta is a compelling history of the ways health and hygiene were wielded in the cause of modern architecture and urban planning in Italy. Its jumping off point is the all too memorable Covid-19 pandemic, which detonated in Europe in northern Italy, uncomfortably jarring with the tenacious idea of northern Italy as clean, prosperous, and proper while southern Italy is dirty, backward, and chaotic. It then delves into the stories of particular diseases and their impacts on cities and landscapes – how research into malaria fuelled the draining of the Venice wetlands, how an outbreak of cholera was invoked, spuriously, to carve up the city of Naples. The writing is pacy and wide-ranging, drawing on Andrea’s own travels, astonishing unseen architectural records, and literature from Natalia Ginzburg to Pier Paolo Pasolini. It’s a seriously substantial work of research and criticism, eye-opening and overturning of many assumptions about modern Italy, shared in a clear and compelling style of writing – one I principally think of as generous.
Kwan Queenie Li’s Weeds is an essay very much in image as well as text. It is based around the simple but revelatory premise of imagining a weed’s experience of the city, and what this can tell us. Queenie, who is Hong Kong-based, has taken photographs wherever she has travelled over the best part of ten years. Her images are sequenced following the logic of the weeds themselves, meaning that conventional geography and typologies are upended: revered monuments sit next to temporary roadworks; Jerusalem is beside Singapore and Mexico City. Between the images sprout pieces of text, offering ideas and reflections; some are brief vignettes from a particular place, others are longer theoretical reflections drawing on thinkers including Nietzsche, Kisho Kurokawa, and Emanuele Coccia. The book is more conceptual than Terra Infecta but is equally inviting and engaging.
In a sense these two books mark out initial coordinates for the range of types of book the series looks to encompass.
There seems to be interest in the short book-length essay (or long essay-length book?) lately. Along with Sightlines, I’m thinking about the Architectural Exchange’s recently launched Memo series, or even Sarah Whiting’s POINT series with Princeton University Press. Why do you think this form works well for architecture writing? What can the book-length essay give us that other forms, perhaps, can’t?
The combination of a single, focussed idea with sustained engagement is a good one. An essay in a magazine can raise a number of avenues around a central theme and throw a whole lot of ideas in the air in a way that is thrilling and stimulating. But working things through – really substantiating the history or background, really articulating an argument – is a different offer to a reader. Again, it strikes me as generous. Of course a book-length essay also remains a jumping off point for more research and thinking to those interested. A lot of people are interested in a lot of things – that seems a sensible thing to respond to in publishing. There is a balance to strike between a sketched-out summary and a 500-page authoritative study. There’s also a balance between elliptical suggestion and academic rigor (getting lost in the weeds, so to speak). Perhaps this middle ground is a particularly rich vein in architecture, which overlaps with so many disciplines and themes.
The essay, of course, is itself a flexible medium. How are you thinking about where you can stretch what fits under the Sightline umbrella? Are there other formats, mediums, genres that would still fit its purview? (I’m thinking, for example: a short story, a novella, a conversation, a photo-only essay?)
I think it could stretch very broadly so long as there is some element of text, which feels important to the premise. The books have been designed this way, as ‘readers’, though Weeds is an immediate example of how that convention can be played with. Upcoming we have a book of oral history, a narrative essay, and a book incorporating detailed guides to walks that you could undertake in the real world or from your armchair. I’d love to publish fiction within this series.
Could you talk to me about the design of the books themselves? I’ve always appreciated the design and materiality of MACK’s photobooks: how does that translate to small productions like these?
The design of the books has been part of the discussion from the very start, long before we had a name for the series. Figuring out the materiality was key to figuring out the editorial premise. We wanted books that felt collectable, which sit together, but that were not overly precious. They needed to be portable – to fit in a jacket pocket – and hardwearing. They needed to have the dimensions and binding to usefully present images of different types. And we wanted them to be appealing to many readers, not present as forbidding inventories of chilly ideas. Morgan Crowcroft-Brown, who is head of design and production at MACK, created the series design, and it is in keeping with our principles and approaches across the MACK programme. Morgan’s philosophy – quite architectural in a sense – is to start with and follow the materials. We looked at many references and examples: contemporary essay books but also a 1950s series of ‘Observer’s Guides’ and the Contemporary Architecture series Leonardo Benevolo edited for Cappelli in the ’60s (the first of which was Manfredo Tafuri’s idiosyncratic study of modern Japanese architecture, which we published in translation).
Tell me about your upcoming releases. Where do you hope Sightlines goes next?
We have a wide range of books in the works: an oral history of the SAAL housing process in Portugal, which is intimate and moving as well as being practically instructive regarding collaborative processes; a great essay on architecture and animals which feels genuinely, quietly paradigm-shifting and likely to spur a lot of conversations; a consideration of the rural sphere of architecture – liberated from being simply non-urban – based around the immersive walks I mentioned earlier and also, wonderfully, drawing on contemporary American poetry as lens onto built and natural environments; also an unexpected polemic on the Western canon and an essay on proportion. These are authored by debut authors, well-known architects, critics, and teachers. I hope the series continues to grow in its range, but is held together by rigour and quality and dependability as a source of good reading.
