Recent Publications
Publications
Architecture never goes entirely according to plan. Every project deviates from its designers’ expectations, and wise architects learn to anticipate, mitigate, and sometimes celebrate the errors along the way. Perspecta 46 argues that error is part of architecture’s essence: mistranslations, contradictions, happy accidents, and wicked problems pervade our systems of design and building, almost always yielding surprising aberrations. Today, with increasingly complex projects underpinned by layers of computer code, small errors can proliferate rapidly, and the dream of errorless architecture seems more utopian than ever.
This issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—considers the challenge of defining error, the difficulty of diagnosing and managing it, and the promise (and peril) of following its lead. Essays and projects illuminate error’s ambiguous agency both in reality and in the architectural imagination, covering topics that range from Dante’s cosmos of divine justice and Michelangelo’s architectural “abuses” to Dada urbanism and the warped skyscrapers of Google Earth.
Sean Keller—Ways about error
Anna Neimark & Andrew Atwood—How to domesticate a mountain
Puitt-Igoe from the ground up
Daniel Sherer—Error or invention? Critical receptions of Michelangelo’s architecture from Pirro Ligorio to Teofilo Gallaccini
Pirro Ligorio—Treatise on the nobility of the ancient arts
Rudy Ricciotti—Musée Jean Cocteau
Bryan Boyer & Justin Cook—Clearing the cowshed
Clement Valla—Postcards from Google Earth
Stanley Tigerman—Apophasis, wabi-sabi, and the ethics of errancy
Jason Mena—Lights out for the territory
John Harwood—Corporate abstraction
Angie Waller—Patents for workstations 1990-2002
Aarati Kanekar—Detours through autonomy: mismappings in translating the Divine Comedy
Supermanoeuvre—The clouds of Venice
Elihu Rubin—Hedging your bets: actuarial science, architecture, and urban development
Maison Edouard François—Foquet’s Barrière Hotel
Asli Serbest & Mona Mahall—Theory of the impossibility of a theory of error
Nat Chard—Machines for indeterminate architecture
Susan Wager—'The Dadas Tour Paris’: toward an expanded definition of the Dada diagram
MOS Architects—Already happened tomorrow
