Unpublished

Publications—both physical and digital—receive a constant stream of press releases, project updates, and photographs from architects yearning for the validation of having their work published. But still, the vast majority of buildings go unexamined by the critical press. How many times have we seen the same signature project reviewed? How many worthy unknown projects must, by extension, never receive an appraisal?
There are any number of factors to account for this. It seems undeniable, for example, that certain building typologies and regions remain underrep- resented in the mainstream architectural press, and it is perhaps too easy to imagine that this stems from a widespread editorial bias. It would be a mistake to discount the impact of logistics, however. The constraints of time, staff sizes, travel costs, image rights, formatting and layout requirements, and access to information simply cannot be ignored by publishers, editors, and writers. Equally important is the imperative to sell, or at least pay heed to the perceived interests of the readership. Sometimes a building falls by the wayside due to mere coincidence—another project was just published with the same exterior material, the press release came in on the day an editor was out sick, the photographer only took landscape-oriented images, the PDF was corrupted.
At a moment when new forms of publication are emerging and disrupting traditional models—and the definition of what it even means for a building to "be published" is an open question—it is time to analyze what is being pub- lished, why it's being published, and to examine what is being left out of the conversation.
Contributors
Michael Kimmelman, Paul Goldberger, Suzanne Stephens, Cathleen McGuigan, Michael Abrahamson, Matthias Altwicker, AJ Artemel, David Basulto, Aleksandr Bierig, Shumi Bose, Can Vu Bui, John Cantwell, Evan Chakroff, Justine Clark, Aran Coakley, Archie Lee Coates IV, Greg Corso, Keith Eggener, Jeffrey Franklin, Sean Gaffney, Matt Hall, Sallie Hambright-Belue and Robert Silance, J. Brantley Hightower, Yat-Sing Ha, Julia van den Hout, Eric J. Jenkins, Jayne Kelley, Yat-Shun Kei, Diana E. E. Kleiner, Stephanie Lee, Thomas Lozada, Kyle May, Craig McCormack, William Menking, Daniel Patrick Morrison, Dietrich Neumann, Andreas Papadantonakis, Trevor Patt, Jacob Reidel, Sam Roche, Nick Safley, Morten Scholz, Rachel Meade Smith, Brent Sturlaugson, Supersterz, Emilia Terragni, Andrew Torres, Tiago Trigo, Danny Wills, Arthur Wortmann, and Alex Yuen.