A Wagnerian Music Drama
38: Do You Read Me?
“Do You Read Me?” marks a new direction for Harvard Design Magazine—one that invites “reading” across disciplinary boundaries, and stakes out an expanded arena for architecture and design dialogue.
The question anticipates a response: “Loud and clear!” But it also suggests the possibility for distortion, misinterpretation, or evaporation of the message. This issue is about reading and misreading, and the role of design in streamlining or garbling the exchange between sender and receiver, writer and reader, maker and user. Whether written or rendered, engineered or enacted, both message and messenger are designed, and it is the relation between craft and comprehension that is explored here.
But today, beyond the intentional construction and exchange of messages, we are all constantly “read” as data. While we offer our identities as moldable content and marketing fodder with every click; while our words, wants, and whereabouts are tracked by both “friends” and strangers; we might rethink the appeal of misunderstanding, or inscrutability. “Do You Read Me?” suggests that role of design is not just to construct certitudes, to clarify, but also to enable more nuanced realities to coexist.
Articles
Table of Contents
Editors' Letter
When Walls Are Doors
Jennifer Sigler
Column
Dear Reader
Cynthia Davidson
Evocations
Mohsen Mostafavi
Hand, Mind, Time
Rafael Núñez
Is Listening Reading?
Vijay Iyer
Second Nature
Keith Mitnick
Space as the Thing: Toward a Nonnarrative Architecture
Philippe Rahm
The Right to Narrate
Homi K. Bhabha
The Survey
Cybermohalla Ensemble
Transcript (dog walk)
Eileen Myles
Wild Thoughts of Savage Pansies
Matthew Battles
Essay
Braille, Tuberculosis, and the Fatality of Reading
Edward Eigen
Empire of Signs of Empire: Scale and Statehood in Chinese Culture
Jianfei Zhu
It’s an Empirical Life
Brendan McGetrick
Of Mirrors and Ashes and Beginning Again: A Note on Hejduk’s Instauration of Brunelleschi’s Experiment
K. Michael Hays
Plumbing the Urban Azimuth (at the End of the Age of the Book)
Sanford Kwinter
Talking /)s into Existence
Angie Keefer
Warehouses of Thoughts and Things
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
Interview
Flying, Reading, Landing
Peter Galison, Sonja Dümpelmann
Let’s See What Happens
Jonathan Zittrain, Lian Chikako Chang
Technocratic Visions
Alan Kaye, Olga Touloumi
Photo Essay
Signs in Sand
Denise Scott Brown, Jesús Vassallo
Artifact
A Wagnerian Music Drama
Diébédo Francis Kéré
Black Box
David Pascoe
Libraries of Faith
Gareth Doherty
Railway Reading
Michael Kubo
Reading Rooms
Stephen Bates
Sorting Things Out: The National Library of Israel
Malkit Shoshan
The Tripping Subject
Martti Kalliala
Who Pays for the Picture?
Alexandra Lange
Insert
Architecture Is Tomorrow Morning
Tan Lin
Plus
Façades of Nations: National Libraries as Knowledge Icons
Daniel Rauchwerger, Noam Dvir
Florilegium
Chris Grimley, Enrique Ramirez, Michael Kubo, Mimi Zeiger
Puzzled: Architecture Magazine Firsts
Brendan Quigley, Inés Zalduendo
Range of Motions: Granite Flow from Vinalhaven to New York City
Jane Hutton
Rereading: Jacques Derrida’s “Point de folie – maintenant l’architecture” (1986)
K. Michael Hays, Peggy Kamuf