Mary Voorhees Meehan

The Real Perspecta 42

  • The 2010 annual journal edited by two Yale School of Architecture masters candidates—Matt Roman and Tal Schori—took "the real" as it's editorial theme. Roman and Schori solicited contributions focused on the political, economic, material, and even metaphysical realities of architecture. The wide variety of responses—make-believe conversations; scholarly historical case studies; contemporary projects negotiating politically charged sites; and other-worldly photo essays—read like sets of academic papers, surrealist novels, and action movies spliced together.

    To make a book of it, we made the academic bits look like papers and the journalistic bits look like journalism, and so on. Then we stirred the table of contents, mixing the editors' categories, so that the reader dips in and out of these different realities. A very realistic seeming news piece follows a make-believe dialogue. Unreal photos are strewn throughout.

    We played on the workaday realness of "the real" and set everything in different versions of the most banal of typefaces—Times. Oh, and under the book jacket, there are three different covers. Which one is the real one?

    In collaboration with Vance Wellenstein.