Blanking

In this first book on the work and vision of the architecture firm Schaum/Shieh, founders Troy Schaum and Rosalyne Shieh invite their readers into the studio. This is a real and conceptual space where they work on recurring themes: operating within the city at the scale of building (urbanism); the interrelation of materiality, units of form, and building products (tectonics); and ways to collaborate with the life of a building in its context (preservation), among others. In addition to visual material drawn from all stages of the design process, what is equally important to Blanking is what is said and what can be heard in the studio. So much of architectural thinking and knowledge is presented, formulated, and traded in spoken words: the pinup, the meeting, the walkthrough. This material is the medium within which projects are formulated. Those exchanges inform this book, in which ideas and knowledge that are usually only spoken are written down and made accessible to readers.

The book is also informed by a process borrowed from metal fabrication called blanking. In the context of Schaum/Shieh’s practice, the term describes the collaborative formulation of ideas around a collection of terms and images that make up a conceptual lexicon for practice. Projects drawn from 15 years of collaboration are set within a wide range of textual material—including also conversations with Stan Allen, Garnette Cadogan, Flavin Judd, and Sarah Whiting—reframing the studio practice away from individual works and toward the navigation of values, questions, and propositions as knowledge.