Boston’s experimental design exhibition space Pinkcomma Gallery has hosted Publishing Practices, an exploration of architectural publishing throughout the last century. 

In the exhibit statement, Michael Kubo says that “architects and critics have exploited the specific combination of publishing and building practices to perform together as a critical double form of architectural practice, as parallel strands of work that are assumed to support each other, but which in reality often reveal a provocative (and in some cases deliberate) misalignment.” 

Through the case studies, it became clear that some architects who have operated just as much as publishers have understood very well the difference between publishing a book and making a project, and they never wanted those two to reinforce each other in a one-to-one matchup—Le Corbusier is one of them, and Rem (Koolhaas) is another one of them. They both used their books to sort of excavate a space in which they could stake out certain kinds of architectural projects, and in their publishing they used their architectural projects to make certain kinds of theoretical arguments, but they were never completely aligned. For example, Corb does a lot of things in his architectural projects that don’t correspond to his theoretical statements, and that’s quite deliberate. On the other hand, he makes certain kinds of general claims in his books that aren’t backed up by anything he does in new architecture. So he kind of exploits the freedoms in each of those two spaces rather than trying to get them to match up exactly, where the books are 100% explanations for the buildings, and the buildings are kind of 100% literal examples of the things he talks about in the book. Eisenman, for example, is somebody who does want that kind of integration—he wants them to be perfectly aligned.

source: ArchDaily _ AD Interviews: Michael Kubo on Architectural Publishing