Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. ARCH tracks the provisionality of shelters, bodies, and built American things by writing through one of the first Western attempts to legitimize architecture as a discipline: Vitruvius's Ten Books on Architecture. Inspired by Vitruvius's conflicted addresses to both future architects and state power, ARCH entangles the languages of education, materiality, politics, and empire to understand how construction so often entails histories of violence and displacement. More simply, ARCH sustains play with arch, the prefix for architecture, which is also a word we use to signify cleverness and a shape that, when arrayed into a series, enables us to carry water to cities or form vaults holding open space for life to move. The range of tones on finds in ARCH are as uneven as our buildings, mixing voices both fundamental and projective, public and private, comprehensive and forlorn. These books address themselves to our contemporary constraints, imagining the ways we have and somehow continue to extend ourselves and our forms in a landscape where so many choices seem emptied out yet still worth making.
