The Cornell Journal of Architecture recently released 8: RE, addressing the now, the new and the next in architecture – the understanding of the creative act itself being reiterative. Marking the first publication of the Journal in eight years, 8: RE features some big name contributors, Philip Johnson, Peter Eisenman, and Rem Koolhaas, just to name a few. The Journal was released at a special exhibition in Ithaca, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University, which also included a re-release of the Journal’s official website now featuring archives of the previous seven volumes, along with 8: RE.
A special launch event for the Cornell Journal of Architecture Issue 8: RE will be held tonight in New York City at the Storefront for Art and Architecture at 7pm. Many of the Journal’s contributing authors will be attending and be on hand to discuss their articles.
The Cornell Journal of Architecture issue 8: RE is an essential collection of illustrated texts regarding the reiterative in architecture and design today, with contributions from Michael Ashkin, Ila Berman, Peter Eisenman, Keller Easterling, Mark Jarzombek, Philip Johnson + Sibyl Moholy Nagy, Lydia Kallipoliti, Kent Kleinman, Rem Koolhaas, Hod Lipson, Greg Lynn, Mark Morris, SMAQ: Sabine Muller + Andreas Quednau, Alexandr Mergold + Jason Austin, Spyros Papapetros, David Salomon, Andrea Simitch, R. E. Somol, Yehre Suh, Kazys Varnelis, and John Zissovici.
At the heart of issue 8 is the understanding that the creative act itself is reiterative; that in rethinking, recombining, reshuffling, recycling, and reimagining aspects of the world around us, we produce work that both belongs to the current moment and establishes new future trajectories.
In the spirit of dialogue, the journal includes not only the contributor’s response, but the question, article, or image that provoked it. A close reading will reveal complex threads that weave the articles themselves into an expanded dialogue, or metalogue.
The texts reflect the interconnected strands of technology, history, theory, and intuition that necessarily reinforce each other in architectural education and practice today: issues of reuse and recycling; of feedback loops and regression; of dialogue, criticism, and correspondence; and of the role that changing technologies have in restructuring the way we think, see, and remember.
RE has two major uses: (1) meaning with regard to, as the preposition in contexts such as re: your letter; and (2) as the prefix indicating return to a previous condition, as in review, reiterate, resume, reimagine, react, redo, and so on. Both uses suggest dialogue, criticism, feedback, and testing of an existing condition: a text, a building, a methodology.
