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

EDUARDO VILLAMOR

“MENNESKE-BIBLIOTEKET”

An homage to the original Human Library in Copenhagen, leaning into the utility of the Library as an agent of progress, a dynamic social device, and a repository of spatial memories. The Library provisions a distinct and irreplaceable space for human interaction and discourse that prefaces productive growth; it acknowledges the depth of human, spatial, spiritual, unexpected, and profound experience. As words are containers of meaning, the human conditions from which books are derived are potent and nuanced repositories of memory and thought. Menneskebiblioteket makes the unsaid necessity of human interaction an essential programmatic element.