Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism is an independent annual print publication edited by Anthony Acciavatti, Justin Fowler, and Dan Handel. Founded as a means to initiate a critical conversation about the state of American architecture, its cities, and its hinterland, Manifest tackles head-on what others have abandoned. While Manifest intends to question the assumptions behind singular notions/constructions of America by tracing its origins and its global influence, the journal also strives to define the uniqueness of American forms of city-building and the distinct set of political parameters through which these forms are shaped.
At a moment when the triumph of liberalism seems both assured and under perpetual threat from those who approach the urban solely in terms of productivity, we see political value in scholarship that treats America as an ongoing project whose tenets are neither sacrosanct nor worthy of being discarded. Following Michael Walzer, we point to the radical unfinishedness of America as one of its distinctive features. Working critically from within, our project is one of analysis and renewal, taking seriously the struggles embodied in urbanism, while not shying away from the need to make political assertions and claims regarding positive ways to move forward. America's transformation into a key knowledge hub of the post-Fordist economy has fueled both immense opportunity and disparity. The 'American Dream' and, by extension, the American middle class, hangs in the balance. The future of industrial cities spread thin across the landscape remains uncertain as the requisite skill set for human capital has advanced beyond the adaptive capacity of so many of those most in need of work. With neo-liberalism having failed to deliver a prosperity within which the good life as a realizable choice trumps everyday necessity as the driver of human creativity and innovation, the dual American imperatives of individualism and pragmatism must now be channeled into a different direction. Built form has the potential both to articulate these tensions and to re-scale the urban environment to adapt to our emerging reality. The pages of Manifest will establish how we arrived at this point and to construct narratives of alternative futures.
Editors:
Anthony Acciavatti is an architect and principal of Somatic-Collaborative, an award winning architecture firm based in New York City. At present he is pursuing a Ph.D. in the History of Science Program in the Department of History at Princeton University. He has taught advanced architecture studios and seminars at RISD and Northeastern University. He earned a Master in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he was awarded the Frederick Sheldon Fellowship to continue his research on architecture and urbanism in the Americas. His research has received funding through a J. William Fulbright Fellowship as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, and Princeton University amongst others. His work has been published in Architectural Design magazine, Bracket, OnSite, SARAI, Topos. He is the author of the book Trojan Horse (2011), as well as the author of the forthcoming books Cosmic Comics: Transects of Ganga-Jamuna doab (2012) and Dynamic Atlas: Changes of State Along the Ganges River Corridor (2012).
Justin Fowler received his Master of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and previously studied Government and the History of Art and Architecture at the College of William and Mary. He is an assistant editor of Invention/Transformation: Strategies for the Qattara/Jimi Oases in Al Ain (Harvard GSD, 2010) and his writing has appeared in Volume, Pidgin, Speciale Z Journal, Thresholds, Scapegoat, PIN-UP, Topos, and Conditions magazine, along with book chapters in Urban Interventions (Slovart, 2011) and Material Design: Informing Architecture by Materiality (Birkhauser, 2010). He has worked as a designer for Dick van Gameren Architecten in the Netherlands, Somatic Collaborative in Cambridge, and currently manages research and editorial projects at the Columbia Lab for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab) in New York. He serves as managing editor for C-Lab issues of Volume magazine and co-directs think tank research for the GSAPP/Audi Experiments in Motion initiative. Beginning in the fall of 2012, he will be a PhD Candidate at the Princeton University School of Architecture.
Dan Handel is an architect, a PhD candidate at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and the 2011 Young Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, for which he develops an exhibition on forestry and design. He earned his Master in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he completed his thesis on the Jeffersonian Grid and the American city, and his Bachelor in Architecture from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. His writing has appeared in Thresholds, Conditions magazine, Bracket and the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JOLA). He is the editor of a forthcoming publication, Aircraft Carrier: American Ideas and Israeli Architecture after 1973 (Hatje Cantz), and of the online magazine Bezalel Papers. Additionally, he served as an assistant editor for Invention/Transformation (Harvard GSD), and as contributor on a forthcoming book, Arizona Report. His work is engaged with the correspondence between political thinking and designed form, with a focus on the North American context.
Contact:
editors [at] manifestproject [dot] org
@manifestjournal
Advisory Board:
Mario Gandelsonas, Professor and Director, Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure, Princeton University School of Architecture
John Stilgoe, Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at the Visual and Environmental Studies Department, Harvard University
Graphic Designer:
Neil Donnelly
neildonnelly.net
Support:
Manifest would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
www.grahamfoundation.org
