Publisher: Uro Publications 2019, Authors: Andrew Benjamin, David A Garcia, Gerard Reinmuth, Slavoj Zizek, ISBN: 9780994396679, Format: Softcover, 178 x 254mm, 196pp
Instruments is an exploration of how architecture can work to connect people with place, both physically (through choreography) and psycho-spatially (through wonder). The book turns its focus away from architecture’s conventional obsession with the material qualities of the object (and type as the underpinning logic of the architectural object), to the many other, equally vital ways in which relationships are formed and reformed between us and the places we occupy.
It is the first in a series of publications on the architectural practice TERROIR, where each book is dedicated to examining the importance of a single design strategy in the work of TERROIR and others.
The book includes essays by Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher and sociologist, as well as David A Garcia, founding director of MAP Architects in Copenhagen. Also included is an interview between the philosopher and architectural writer Andrew Benjamin and TERROIR’s founding director Gerard Reinmuth.
TERROIR was founded in 1999 by three colleagues from Hobart, Gerard Reinmuth, Scott Balmforth and Richard Blythe. The practice now has offices in Sydney, Hobart and Copenhagen. To this day, the landscape of Tasmania and the political tensions of a society divided along environmental lines continue to influence TERROIR’s approach to architecture and place.
See the second book here – Terroir: Third Spaces.
“In the age of Instagram, where object has even been replaced by image, working with ‘instruments’ can be understood as a disciplinary counter measure.
Instruments, like the prompts that precede them in this book, resist immediate presentation within a single image. Instruments refer as much to an experience as they do to means of representation.”
–Gerard Reinmuth p4