Blanking is the first monograph on Schaum/Shieh, the Houston practice founded in 2009 by Troy Schaum and Rosalyne Shieh, and it takes an unusual form: an annotated archive of projects, drawings and the talk that surrounds them.
About This Book
Most architectural thinking happens out loud—in the pinup, the client meeting, the walkthrough—and then evaporates. Schaum and Shieh's premise is that this spoken material is not incidental to the work but the medium in which projects are actually formulated. Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture writes it down.
The title is borrowed from metal fabrication, where a blank is a roughly sized piece of stock held in reserve—not yet cut or formed, but full of latent possibility. In the practice's usage it describes the collaborative formulation of ideas around a collection of terms and images that together make up a conceptual lexicon for practice. The books is organised into six thematic chapters — Geology, Void, Platform, Sets, Arrange, Fine — framed by essays from each principal.
Key Features
- The first monograph on Houston practice Schaum/Shieh, founded in 2009
- Projects and buildings drawn from 15 years of collaboration, with the majority of images published here for the first time
- 198 colour and 89 black-and-white illustrations
- Conversations with Stan Allen, Garnette Cadogan, Flavin Judd and Sarah Whiting
- Organised into 10 chapters, each led by a thematic question
What You'll Discover
- How a practice operates within the city at the scale of the individual building
- The interrelation of materiality, units of form and building products as a tectonic problem
- Ways of collaborating with the existing life of a building in its context, and what preservation can mean in working practice
- How the informal talk of a studio can be treated as a legitimate form of architectural knowledge
About the Author
Troy Schaum and Rosalyne Shieh are architects and educators, and the founding principals of Schaum/Shieh Architects, established in Houston, Texas in 2009. Schaum is an associate professor at Rice University's School of Architecture.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Dimensions: 17 × 24 cm
- Pages: 336
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783038604006
- Publisher: Park Books
- Publication Date: 2025
Perfect For
Architects and students interested in how practices actually think, readers following contemporary American architecture, and anyone drawn to books that treat process, conversation and unfinished material as worth publishing.