The Brooklyn Rail

How can architecture be published? The first year of Architecture in the Brooklyn Rail has been an effort to draw out the transferences and vocabularies between blueprint and newsprint, which is already a natural drift. More, it is a necessary one to maintain a responsibility in regarding and responding to our shared built and imagined environments. It is special to be doing this work at the Rail, in entering an ongoing conversation and methodology for thinking with practices. The publication understands practice as a perpetual work in being in the world. Knowing this draws us closer to answering: How can we be? With whom can we be? For whom are we? Architecture is a practice of articulation and tectonics. It is drawing, building, construction, a condition where nouns slide into verbs. Working toward untangling, we present a set of drawing reviews: drawing together media, drawing out a responsibility, and continuing to draw architecture with clarity and care.

–Anoushka Mariwala, Assistant Architecture Editor

Architects are not dedicated to writing about architecture, but their best writing is often an attempt to translate material form into an idea. When architects make buildings they have the opposite problem: they have to translate an idea into material form. This translation is the artifact of an architect’s agenda, and drawings are the instrument. When an architect reviews drawings, they are reading and critiquing the established protocol of translation. To review drawings, and to draw, is to render legible the in-between.

–Nile Greenberg, Architecture Editor