Room for Artifacts
The Architecture of WOJR
–
Based in Cambridge, MA, WOJR have won various prizes, including the Design Biennial Boston Award 2010 and the Architectural League Prize for
Young Architects and Designers 2011. This is their first monograph.
- Out of Print
1st edition
, 2016Hardback
240 pages, 40 color and 111 b/w illustrations
20 x 27 cm
ISBN 978-3-03860-027-5
WOJR: Organization for Architecture is an innovative group of designers based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who are committed to the idea of architecture as a form of cultural production, engaging the intersections of art, architecture, and urbanism. With this idea at its foundation, Room for Artifacts contains a collection of sixteen architectural artifacts designed by WOJR—a mask, a church, a labyrinth, a dwelling, a bust, and a series of totems, among others.
The artifacts are presented three times throughout the book—in conceptual drawings, architectural drawings, and images. Certain characteristics recur, such as symmetry, frontality, figurality, proportionality, and the play between flatness and depth, underscoring WOJR’s preoccupation with the fundamental aspects of architectural form that are rich in historical precedent. Room for Artifacts offers a new way to explore the role of architectural representation in a contemporary context, looking at how architects can invoke aspects of ideologies from architects of the past while establishing a progressive agenda for a forward-looking body of work.