On publishing architecture

Michael Mack (left) in conversation with Matthew Blunderfield

On Thursday, POST PRESS hosted a live recording of a forthcoming episode of Scaffold, in which Matthew Blunderfield spoke with publisher Michael Mack. Michael’s publishing house MACK is renowned for its photography and fine art books and has only recently ventured into architecture publishing. Matthew asked Michael what he thought MACK was able to offer that other architecture publishers were not?

Michael Mack: It’s a really good question that was answered for me by Adam Caruso. He came to me as a friend of Thomas Demand, who I started working with in 2004, and said, we would really like to do a book or two about his practice. I said, I’m absolutely not interested in the slightest in doing hagiographic, heavily illustrated books about practices, which show the drawings filled in with great pictures. It’s pointless. It’s a coffee table book. And Adam being Adam went away and came back and said: so what could it be? I said, the interesting thing about architecture is where it comes from. And so we then started talking about the early days of Caruso St John, and about exhibitions like James Lingwood’s show at the Hayward Gallery, The Epic and the Everyday [1994], which was formative for us both. And then Adam and the team at Caruso St John came up with this idea of contextualising the history of the practice. So not just showing the work, but showing texts that had been written about shows contemporaneous with the practice’s formation - things that had influenced them. We wanted to show that the architecture wasn’t something that was landed on the earth through the genius of the singular mind of the architect, but rather to show the growth of the ideas, where they came from and how they fed the practice. That I thought was interesting.

Matthew’s full interview with Michael Mack can be heard here.

Caruso St John’s Collected Works is published by MACK