RECENT BOOKS BY MARK FOSTER GAGE
On the Appearance of the World: A Future for Aesthetics in Architecture
by Mark Foster Gage
The University of Minnesota Press, 84 pages
Book description from the publisher:
How can architecture develop better aesthetic directions for the twenty-first-century built environment?
Our world, increasingly defined by efficient but unconsidered architecture and cities, seems to be getting uglier. In On the Appearance of the World, Mark Foster Gage asks why. He imagines a future scenario where architectural design and ideas from aesthetic philosophy align toward the production of a built world that is more humane, habitable, beautiful, and just.
Speaking of Architecture: Interviews about Practice, Discourse, and What Comes Next
Edited by Mark Foster Gage
The MIT Press, 328 pages
Book description from publisher: "What ideas are currently energizing your architectural work and explorations? Why did these ideas become impactful while others did not? What role did mentors and peers play in the development of these ideas? What were your breakthrough insights or aha moments? What is next for you, and for the discipline and discourse of architecture?
For this book, Mark Foster Gage has selected eleven of the most noteworthy and fascinating conversations from his year-long project of documenting the ideas of the next generation of designers who are revolutionizing the nature of architectural practice and theory today. This remarkable collection of casual, informative, and personal interviews engages fifteen architects as they reveal what made them who they are, what propels their architectural work forward, and what they anticipate comes next.
A noted practitioner, tenured Yale professor, CNN design contributor, and respected insider of the international architectural scene, Mark Foster Gage has spent his professional life with many of the most important figures in architectural discourse and practice. With this book he focuses on an emerging generation of practitioners- approaching his subjects with a characteristic mix of insight, wit, and humor in a book that is consistently entertaining and informative as the architects open up in unexpected ways about their beliefs, work, lives and thoughts about where architecture, and they, are headed next."
Mark Foster Gage: Architecture in High Resolution (monograph)
Forward by Graham Harman
Oro Editions, 512 pages
Book description from publisher: In the course of a ten-month invited competition Mark Foster Gage Architects, using tools ranging from artificial intelligence to 3D fractal software, re-invented the design languages of the ancient Nabatean civilization located on the Arabian Peninsula to propose the first Saudi resort in the modern era that would be open for international tourists. Isolated in a vast desert, with little infrastructure and virtually no visitors, lie the ancient ruins of Mada’in Saleh, and the site for the project. With five-hundred pages and over 1,500 images this is a book that documents the design process of this project, complete with all of its ideas, misdirections, failures, restarts, breakthroughs, and everything in-between. Of interest to architects and non-architects alike, this book heralds a new generation of creative techniques and design technologies that promise to redefine how we think of the past, present and future of the built environment in the 21st century and beyond.
Mark Foster Gage: Projects and Provocations (monograph)
Forward by Robert A.M. Stern, Afterword by Peter Eisenman
Rizzoli Publications, 272 pages
Book description from publisher: “Architect to Lady Gaga and Nicola Formichetti, Mark Foster Gage has spent 20 years leading the digital architectural avant-garde, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in architecture and design and exploding expectations. This volume features built and unbuilt work from around the globe, from a penthouse in downtown Manhattan to retail stores in Hong Kong. The work shown goes beyond traditional architecture to the realm of fashion and fine art, and includes Gage’s celebrated Valentine’s Sculpture for Times Square, a 3-D-printed outfit for Lady Gaga, as well as designs for Google Glass, Solar Flowers, and robotic tulips…..Mark Foster Gage, whose work Harper’s Bazaar has called “effortlessly chic” and who has been labeled a “boundary breaker,” is a visionary for today. Filled with surprises and creations of wonder, such as a tower for New York’s 57th Street with mouthlike balconies on giant wings or a retail space bedecked with a hundred-faceted mirror, Gage’s work at once challenges expectations of what architecture might be and, as well, frequently fills one with a sense of excitement. Gage’s work is further elucidated in the book by the critical musings of eminent architects and cultural touchstones Peter Eisenman and Robert A.M. Stern.”
Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture and Philosophy
Edited by Mark Foster Gage
The MIT Press, 328 pages
Book description from publisher: “These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics―one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed….The contributors―philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry―build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; and the productive force of alienation. Contributors include Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Diann Bauer, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Nettrice Gaskins, Roger Rothman and others.”
Designing Social Equality: Architecture, Aesthetics and the Perception of Democracy
Authored by Mark Foster Gage
Routledge Press, 172 pages
Book description from publisher: “In Designing Social Equality: Mark Foster Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality, and the design of our physical world. By reconsidering historic concepts from the deep history of aesthetic philosophy and deftly weaving them with emerging intellectual positions from a variety of disciplines, including those of Xenofeminism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Dark Ecology, and others, the book introduces a ground-breaking intellectual framework. Through what used to be known as the practice, teaching, and discourse of architecture and design, this framework sets out to reconfigure a more encompassing social theory of how humanity perceives its very reality and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment.”
Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design
Edited with critical commentary by Mark Foster Gage
W.W. Norton Press, 336 pages
Book description from publisher: “This collection of writings on beauty includes selections from twenty key philosophers and theoreticians spanning two millennia. With an introduction and critical headnotes explaining the importance of each text, Mark Foster Gage offers a framework for a provocative history of ideas about beauty as they relate to contemporary thinking on architecture and design. In a world increasingly defined by sumptuous visuality, the concepts of beauty and visual sensation are not mere intellectual exercises but standards that define the very nature of design practice across disciplines and that are essential to the emerging worlds of design and architecture in the twenty-first century. Includes works by Plato • Aristotle • Vitruvius • Alberti • Kant • Burke • Fiedler • Nietzsche • Wilde • Bergson • Bell • Scott • Benjamin • Bataille • Sontag • Jameson • Scarry • Nehamas • Zangwill • Freedberg and Gallese
Composites, Surfaces, and Software: High Performance Architecture
Edited by Greg Lynn and Mark Foster Gage
Yale / W.W. Norton Press distribution, 158 pages
Book description from publisher: “By showcasing the intersection between technology, aesthetics, and function, this book offers a multidisciplinary approach to cutting-edge performative technology. In a Yale studio led by Lynn and Gage, students designed a boatbuilding facility using intelligence gleaned from the competitive sailing industry. These projects--along with work and essays by Gage and Lynn, Frank Gehry, Lise Anne Couture, Chris Bangle, and others--demonstrate how shared materials, tools, and techniques strengthen the fields of automotive and aeronautic design, boatbuilding and architecture, ultimately exhibiting the high-tech cross-pollination of form and material across industries."
SELECTED ARTICLES AND ESSAYS BY MARK FOSTER GAGE
{many available for free academic use : click here}
'KILLING SIMPLICITY: Object-Oriented Philosophy in Architecture'
Log 33 2015
'ARCHITECTURE, BRANDING, AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY'
The Routledge Companion for Architecture Design and Practice, 2016
'ROT MUNCHING ARCHITECTS'
Perspecta 47 2014
'SOFTWARE MONOCULTURES'
Composites, Surfaces, and Software 2014
'ARCHITECTURAL FORM AND THE SUBJUGATION OF CONCEPTS'
Pulsation in Architecture 2012
'AESTHETIC THEORY: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design'
Introduction 2011
'PROJECT MAYHEM'
Fulcrum #182011
'ALONG UTOPIAN LINES: American Architecture in the Age of Apollo'
Volume Magazine #25 2010
'IN DEFENSE OF DESIGN'
Log 16 2009
'THE ZERO DEGREE OF IDEOLOGY'
Log 17 2009
ETIOLOGIES OF BEAUTY: Architecture and The New Physics of Appearances'
Perspecta 40 2008
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED ESSAYS
{many available for free academic use : click here}
2019 "MMM: Multiple Resolutions,' A conversation with Michael Young and Michael Meredith" Log, issue 46.
2017 “Speculation vs. Indifference” Ed. Cynthia Davidson. Log, Issue #40, Summer 2017.
2017 “The Naughty Sister,” in Architekt Ist Tot: (The Architect is Dead). A publication by AAgora
2017 "Towards an Inexhaustible Architecture, Interview." A+U June 2017: 134-59. Print.
2017 “The Aesthetics of Politics” In the AD issue Evoking Through Design: Contemporary Moods in Architecture.
2016 "Architecture, Branding, and the Politics of Identity." Ed. M. Kanaani The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Design"
2016 "A Hospice for Parametricism" in Parametricism 2.0: Rethinking Architecture’s Agenda for the 21st Century.
2015 “Killing Simplicity: Object Oriented Philosophy in Architecture.” Ed. Cynthia Davidson. Log, Issue #33, .
2015 "It's the End of the Digital as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." Ed. Jonathan Openshaw. Post-Digital Artisans.
2014 "On New Media in Architecture." Ed. Johanna Jõekalda. 14th International Biennale Di Venezia.
2014 "Rot Munching Architects" Ed. Avi Forman et al. Perspecta 47: Money, MIT Press 2014
2013 "Kawai and the Logistics of Cuteness," in MOLE Magazine, University of Toronto Press
2012 "Architectural Form and the Subjugation of Concepts." in Pulsation in Architecture. Eric Goldenberg, ed.
2011 "Project Mayhem: Architecture in the Age of Dissensus." in Fulcrum: Architectural Association, London.
2011 "Along Utopian Lines: American Architecture in the Age of Apollo..." in Volume, Issue #25 64-69.
2011 “Software Monocultures" In Composites, Surfaces and Software, edited by Greg Lynn, Mark Foster Gage, 2011
2010 “Faster Than Language” in Pulse: Rhythm and Aggregation..., edited by E. Goldemberg
2010 “A Lovely Interview: Discussing the History...” in Aura, edited by A. Rahim
2009 "The Zero..." in Log 17: Observations..., Guest Edited by Mark Foster Gage and F. Pita
2009 "In Defense of Design" in Log 16: Observations..., Cynthia Davidson, Editor
2009 "Automotive and Architectural Design" in A+U, August 2009, p.84-87.
2008 "Gage / Clemenceau Architects" in Resonance Young Architects Forum book.
2008 “Etiologies of Beauty: Architecture and the New Physics of Appearances” in Perspecta 40.
2007 “Deus Ex Machina: From ...” in “Elegance,” AD Press, London. Edited by Ali Rahim.
2007 “Review of “Disappearing Architecture:...” in “The Journal for...” February 2007.