Thomas Waller
Thomas Waller is a postdoctoral researcher working on a book about the Brazilian avant-garde. His writing has appeared in e-flux, Parapraxis, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Inquiry, and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, as well as in academic journals like Textual Practice, Qui Parle, Paragraph, and Rethinking Marxism.
The field of architectural history has remained largely uninterested in the construction site as an object of analysis. The recently translated writings of Brazilian architect Sérgio Ferro enjoin us to view architecture “from below,” demystifying the commodity fetishism of architecture by mounting an immanent critique of capitalist design.
Despite its epochal importance in the trajectory of modern art, the organic line has hitherto been excluded from official histories, which have tended to rely on categories like the grid, the monochrome, and the readymade. This new book asks us to use this missing landmark as a way of torquing received understandings of artistic modernism.
