Lost Tablets is a collective reading of fifty architectural sculptures made from found children's building blocks — a project in which geometry, memory, and the subjective language of building collide across fifty voices from economics, poetry, law, and beyond.
About This Book
Jan van Schaik's Lost Tablets are physical objects: reconfigured Lego blocks assembled into forms that carry strange architectural resonances — Gothic buttresses, Safavid ceilings, Space Age engineering — without being reducible to any single reference. This book extends that project into language. Fifty contributors, drawn from fields as varied as cybernetictics, sex work, comedy, and linguistics, each respond to one tablet in their own voice and form. The result is a sustained inquiry into whether architectural meaning can be shared at all, or whether every reading is ultimately personal. For architects, designers, and anyone interested in how form generates interpretation, this is an unusually honest experiment in collective perception.
Key Features
- 108 pages of commissioned written responses paired with images of fifty sculptural works
- Edited by Jan van Schaik; designed by Yanni Florence
- Contributors include Adam Nathaniel Furman, Nikos Papastergiadis, Perry Kulper, Leon van Schaik, Genevieve Bell, Rory Hyde, Cameron Bruhn, and Esther Anatolitis, among forty-two others
- Published by Uro Publications, 2022
What You'll Discover
- How a single abstract object can generate radically different but equally coherent architectural readings across fifty authors
- The tension between the ideal of a universal architectural language and the irreducibly personal nature of spatial interpretation
- What happens when economists, poets, lawyers, and architects are asked to respond to the same form — and how disciplinary background shapes perception
- The role of found materials and childhood objects in carrying latent architectural symbolism into adult creative practice
About the Author
Jan van Schaik is a Melbourne-based architect at MvS Architects, and a researcher and senior lecturer at RMIT Architecture & Urban Design. He is also the founder and producer of the WRITING & CONCEPTS public lecture and publication series, which examines the role writing plays in the development of contemporary creative practice.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 108
- Dimensions: 210 x 148 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781922601186
- Publisher: Uro Publications
- Publication Date: March 2022
Perfect For: Architects and designers interested in architectural theory and interpretation; educators exploring cross-disciplinary approaches to form and meaning; readers drawn to experimental publishing at the intersection of art, language, and spatial thinking.