PROFESSOR

NEAL ROBINSON

STUDIO

COOK(ED) BOOKS

COOK – to alter the account(ing) of

Time leaves most claims (books) mute. Whether by revelation or reassessment, books of knowledge slowly render their fa(c)t and inevitably, find friends with tawdry romance ideology and the demoralizing "F-word" (fiction).

Notably however, works documenting personal accounting and direct experience (the "auto-s") survive longest and maintain appeal in the circulatory churn. They testify to the real strength of libraries: their ability to organize and distribute empathies and experiences, not information.

Structure matters. Dictionaries are dead. The Thesaurus is where it's at.

Beginning with Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths" and moving through "The Book of Sand" and "The Age of Wire and String," this studio explores the structure of indexing, cataloging, and recording as well as their antithetical counterparts in so much as they actively bias what we think we know.

Sited in the near now building approvals of a densifying Ann Arbor, the studio seeks situational empathies between spaces of the book and the urban read/scape. By "cooking the books" in our favor, projects employ contemporary, diverse organizational strategies to propose maddening form(alities) and incendiary pragmatics for prioritizing the recording and projection of the imagined human condition.

︎︎︎BACK ︎

JULIA MCMORROUGH

Elliot Smithberger

Ruiying Zhang

MATIAS DEL CAMPO

Dowdle, Ibrahim, Zhang Fahmy, Kamhawi, Pandey

IAN DONALDSON

Gort-Cabeza de Vaca
Anahita Mojahed

DAWN GILPIN

Sang Won Kang
Xin Li

PETER HALQUIST

Chung-Han (Joanne)

Chengdai Yang

PERRY KULPER

Ghassan Alserayhi
Eilís Finnegan

ANN LUI

Will Kirsch
Kendra Soler

STEVEN MANKOUCHE

Stephen Corcoran
Aric Reed

NEAL ROBINSON

Connor Tuthill

Eduardo Villamor

JON RULE

Richard Hua
Qianwei Zhang

CHRISTIAN UNVERZAGT

Siyuan (Elaine) Cheng
Vance Smith Jr

KATHY VELIKOV

Emma Powers
Brian Smith

STUDENT WORK

CONNOR TUTHILL

“UNLIKELY ATTACHMENTS”

Inundated with information, predictable forms of organization filter and correlate content for the sake of expediency and ubiquity. Exploration and accident are deemed unprofitable and human potential becomes bound and constrained by its institutions. Segregation of experiences creates unhelpful islands of labels and assumptions.

A contemporary library however, orchestrates happy accidents in order to amplify exploratory frontiers of knowledge and connection. Gone are finite boundaries of topical categories and instead, intellectual drift is embraced. What is unlikely and tangential is celebrated. To mix, to sublimate...