Available for just $12 on Amazon, Smaller Architecture is a pocket-sized book by architect Michael Meredith. It marks the first in a new series called Memo, published by the Architecture Exchange, edited by Joseph Bedford and Matthew Allen.
Bedford, associate professor at Virginia Tech, and Allen, visiting assistant professor at Washington University, told AN the Memo series aims to provide “small, cheap, and elegant little books” that carry polemical ideas into the hands of students and practitioners.
“The series endeavors to get young architects in the United States to develop theoretical arguments about architecture and to put them into circulation,” said Bedford.
Meredith, professor at Princeton University and cofounder of New York–based MOS Architects, frames Smaller Architecture as a manifesto against what Rem Koolhaas once celebrated as “Bigness.”
In contrast to the financialized, globalized, and corporate scale of contemporary practice, Meredith imagines smaller, local, and more inclusive modes of architectural production. Drawing on thinkers such as E. F. Schumacher, Jane Jacobs, Emanuele Coccia, and Cornel West, he outlines an ethos that connects architectural aesthetics with ethics through attention to “smaller things.”
Flipping through Smaller Architecture, the design is striking. The text is large and punctuated with David Foster Wallace–length footnotes that provide context and elaboration for Meredith’s essay. Designed by Twelve, each book is printed to order, with stylized black-and-white covers gracing every volume.
In its ambitions, Memo follows a lineage established by small-format publishers like Strelka Press, which revived the essay as a popular form through digital-first and print-on-demand titles in 2012.
Forthcoming Memo titles include Andrew Holder’s On Assembly: Construction, Empathy, Pluralism; Karel Klein’s Reading What Was Never Written: Non-sensuous Similarities in Artificial Intelligence; Hilary Sample’s Tending Buildings; Jaffer Kolb’s Value Engineering; Curtis Roth’s On Plans to Frag the Legacy Self; and Michael Young’s Stereotomy, Stereoscopics, Stereophonics, Stereotypes.
“Memo publishes short theoretical texts on architecture with timely agendas,” the editors write. “They are written to the field of architecture in hopes that others will feel their motivational force, as vigorous ideas ripe for elaboration.”
Taken together, the series suggests a renewed appetite for accessible, idea-driven writing in architecture—one that insists theory still matters.
→ Continue reading at The Architect's Newspaper
