2013
Edited by Garrett Ricciardi and Julian Rose
With contributions by Lucia Allais, Yve-Allain Bois, Hal Foster, formlessfinder, Axel Kilian, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Julie Bargmann, Edward Eigen, Vito Acconci, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample
Design: Pentagram

7.75 x 5.25 x 0.5 inches
184 pages, 107 illustrations
paperback

Formless was the first publication to be born out of Storefront’s Manifesto Series. It includes architects, artists, landscape architects, engineers, historians, critics, theorists, and other relevant and emerging figures from both inside and outside the field of architecture discussing the notion of formlessness. Storefront’s Manifesto Series was an event based encounter that intends to develop and expose fresh and new ideas in a short and precise manner. The purpose of the Manifesto Series was to encourage the formulation of positions in relation to specific topics and instigate spirited discussion and exchange in a dynamic and polemical context. The events aimed to reinvigorate and reinvent the manifesto format as a way of exchanging ideas, compelling participants to denounce a certain past or present condition, proclaim an alternative present, past or future situation, and indicate a strategy or method of action. This publication is a matured version of the manifestos presented at Storefront for Art and Architecture on September 23rd, 2011.

Impulses toward the formless, alternately understood as struggles to escape form as a manifestation of various norms and constraints, are as old as architecture itself. But the formless is also increasingly in the air today, whether explicitly in discussions of the “formless” quality of the city, or implicitly in talk of atmospheric buildings, randomized structures, and the dematerialization (or increased mediation) of architecture. There is no doubt that part of its appeal lies in the fact that the formless is frequently found at intersections between architecture and other fields, at those intriguing moments when architecture unravels and can perhaps be woven into other practices and fields, from art to ecology or engineering. Nevertheless, the formless as a subject has not yet been theorized rigorously in architecture. It underpins a wide range of tendencies that have not yet been connected, or even directly acknowledged or identified. This book represents a first step toward this articulation.