What Can You Tell Them That They Do Not Know?
Review of Bruno Latour’s Tanner Lectures at Yale, Constructs (New Haven YSOA) — 2014
It was not clear how the audience had received the joke. Bruno Latour had just repeated a crack made at the U.S. border when he announced he was entering the country to give the 2014 Tanner Lectures at Yale. The customs officer had replied, “What is there to say that they don’t know?” In response Yale audience members offered the ready laughter they had cued up for the opening anecdote of any lecture, this time amplified by what appeared to be a compliment from a world-renowned figure. And they were also pretty sure that they had understood the lecture so far.
Yet was part of the joke lost on this audience? Just before the anecdote Latour offered a caution about the reception of his talk by reading a quote from A. N. Whitehead:
“The critical school confines itself to verbal analysis within the limits of a dictionary. The speculative school appeals to direct insight and endeavors to indicate its meaning by further appeals to situations which promote such specific insight.”
There is a chance that Latour left many behind at this initial fork in the road between what he characterized as safe and adventurous thought. The Yale that the customs officer described was presumed to be a community that was certain of what it knows—a reservoir of accumulated and verified knowledge that could be stored like a dictionary entry, or an artifact in a museum. And the Yale community may have regarded itself in that way. But Latour has spent his career questioning this certainty. The institutions, academic and otherwise, that are convinced of not only what they know but, more importantly, how they know are his perennial critical subjects. Over and over in the Tanner lectures, he continued to question how it is that we think we know anything.
November: conversation at Karma with Emmanuel Olunkwa and Ricky Ruihong Li
November — February 21, 2023
Trabar Sin Soluciones/Working Without Solutions, Interview
Federico Ortiz, Ushma Thakrar, Negacion/Refusal, Escuela de Arquitectura Universidad San Sebastian — December 5, 2022
Direct (Dispositional) Action
Martin Beck, Beatrice von Bismarck, and Sabeth Buchmann, Ilse Lafer, eds., Broken Relations: Infastructure, Aesthetics, and Critique (Spector Books). — November 1, 2022
Levittowns: Dialogue with Kenismael Santiago-Pagan
Pairs — June 29, 2022
Non-Growing: Translation Subtraction, Interview Medium Design
Ehituskunst #61/62, Estonia — July 1, 2022
El Ejido
Ida Soulard, Abinadi Meza, and Bassam El Baroni, eds., Manual for a Future Desert (Milan: Mousse Publishing). — 2021
Expansions Venice Biennale
2021
Release 
Esperanto Culture Magazine — April 1, 2021
21st Century City
“Designing Infrastructure,” in Suzanne Hall and Ricky Burdett eds., The Sage Handbook of Urban Sociology: New approaches to the twenty-first century city (London: SAGE/LSE). — 2017
A Man a Tree and and Ax
Lola Sheppard and Maya Przybylski, eds., Bracket: At Extremes (Barcelona: Actar). — November 1, 2016
ARQ 92: Excepiones
April 1, 2016
The Dispositions of Theory
James Graham, ed.,The Urgencies of Architectural Theory (New York, GSAPP Books) — 2015
Documenta 14 Daybook
Documenta 14: Daybook, (Prestel, 2017) — July 1, 2017
Encounters with Climate
“Encounters with Climate” in James D. Graham, ed., Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City/Lars Muller Publishers, 2015). — 2016
Everywhere
Zivot: Transmigrancy, 12/2017.101 — December 1, 2017
The Histories of Things That Don’t Happen and Shouldn’t Always Work
Arjun Appadurai and Arien Mack, eds., Failure: Social Research International Quarterly — September 1, 2016
I Kan Beholde Jeres States_Borgerskab For Jer Selv
Arkitekten 06 — August 1, 2018
Impossible
Pedro Gadanho, Joao Laia and Susana Ventura, eds., Utopia/Dystopia: a Paradigm Shift in Art and Architecture — March 1, 2017
Infra-read: Interview by Jesse Seegers
Pin-Up — May 1, 2016
Foreword
Nicholas De Monchaux, Local Code: 3659 Proposals about Data, Design and the Nature of Cities, (PAP) — 2016
Matrix Space
Mohsen Mostafavi, Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (Harvard GSD, Lars Muller) — 2017
Park in Allan Sekula: Okeanos
Daniela Zyman and Cory Scozzari, Allan Sekula: Okeanos (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Sternberg Press, 2017) — July 1, 2017
On Dispositions and Form Making: A Conversation Keller Easterling and Andrea Phillips
Paul O’Neill, Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson, eds. How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (MIT Press) — 2017
Review: Burdens of Linearity by Catherine Ingraham
Constructs — 2006
Space as a Medium of Innovation, Interview with Berndt Upmeyer
MONU: Magazine on Urbanism, #26, Spring 2017 — May 1, 2017
Split Screen
Ilke and Andreas Ruby, eds., Infrastructure Space, Holcim Foundation (Ruby Press). — 2016
Subtracting the Suburbs
Infinite Suburbia, Alan Berger, Joel Kotkin, eds. (New York, PAP) — 2017
Suburbia in Reverse
Stephanie Hessler, ed. Tidaletics, MIT Press, 2018 — March 1, 2018
Superbug
Log 39 Spring 2017 — March 15, 2017
Terra Incognita
Unthought Environments — 2019
The Switch
Imre Szeman and Jeff Diamanti, eds., Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond (West Virginia University Press). — 2019
Things That Don’t Always Work
Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka and Elvia Wilk, eds., Across and Beyond—A Transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions — 2016
Things That Shouldn’t Always Work
ERA 21 Post Digitalni Architektura — 2019
To Play Space
Perspecta 51: Medium — October 1, 2018
Protocols of Interplay
Volume: The System — April 1, 2016
Interview
Arqa — 2011
World City Doubles
Roldolphe El-Khoury and Edward Robbins, ed., Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design (Routledge). — June 1, 2013
Fresh Fields
Coupling: Pamphlet Architecure 30 Infranet Lab/Lateral Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press) — 2011
Megabuilding
Architektura 4, 163 (Kwiecien) — 2009
In the Briar Patch
Jonathan Solomon ed., Sustain and Develop 306090 Volume 13 (New York: 306090, Inc.) — 2009
Intermediate Points of Interest
Gaby Brainard, Rustam Mehta, and Thom Moran eds., Perspecta 41 Grand Tour — 2008
Rumor
Megan Born and Lily Jencks, eds, Via: Dirt, University of Pennsylvania — 2012
The Agent: Interview with Neeraj Bhatia
The Agent No. 0 — May 1, 2014
The Knowledge
Volume 13: Ambition — 2007
Absolute Submission
Crisis, a collaboration of C-Lab and Urban China — September 15, 2008
Come to Things
Metahaven and Marina Vishmidt, eds., Uncorporate Identity (Zürich: Lars Müller) — 2010
Disposition: In_site
In_Site: A Dynamic Equilibrium, In_Site 05 (Friessen) — 2007
Foreword
Young Architects 7: Situating, catalog of Architectural League's Young Architects competition and exhibition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press) — 2006
Pandas: A Rehearsal
Cornell Journal of Architecture — 2011
Other Aggressions and Maneuvers
The Last Mile, photography catalog Satya Pemmaraju (Gallery SKE) — 2007
Subtraction
Perspecta 34: Temporary Architecture (MIT Press) — 2003
A-Ware
Journal of Architectural Education, special digital issue — January 1, 2002
Wildcards: a Game of Orgman
Metalocus 5 — 2000
Interchange and Container: The New Orgman
Perspecta 30 Settlement Patterns — 1999
A Short Contemplation on Money and Comedy
Thresholds 18 (MIT) — 1999
Distributive Protocols: Residential Formations
Beauty is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design (Routledge) — 1998
American Town Plans excerpt
ANY — 1993
Siting Protocols
Peter Lang, ed., Suburban Discipline (Storefront Books) — 1997
Call it Home
Assemblage 24 — 1994
Perceiving Action
Offramp, SCI-ARC Journal, vol. 1, no. 5 — 1993
Switch
City Speculations (New York: Princeton Architectural Press) — 1996
Non-statecraft
Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa (Barcelona: ACTAR) — 2007
Graduate Sessions No. 9
Syracuse University — 2010
Not Everything
Volume 2: Not Everything — 2005
Without Claims to Purity
aX, vol. 1+2 (Winter) — 2008
Architect-at-Large
Volume 1 — 2005
The Activist Entrepreneur
John Wriedt ed., Architecture: From the Outside In (New York: Princeton Architectural Press) — 2010
With Satellites: Remote Sending in South Asia and the Middle East
Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane eds., AD, Sensing the 21st Century: Close-up and Remote Vol. 75 No. 6 — 2005
Offshore
Anselm Frank and Eyal Weizman, eds., Territories: the Frontiers of Utopia and Other Facts on the Ground (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König) — 2004
Orgman
Stephen Graham, ed., The Cybercities Reader (London: Routledge) — 2003
Unsettling Matter Gaining Ground, Dialogue with Imani Jacqueline Brown
Carnegie Museum of Art — October 5, 2023 – January 7, 2024
