Building Stories
Chris Ware
Pantheon Books 2012
English
Hardcover, 29.7 x 4.9 x 42.2 cm, 260 pages
ISBN 978-0375424335
http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/185702/building-stories/
A thinking building thinks in italics. At least according to Chris Ware. This box set is a collection of what he calls “Building Stories”. It features 14 individual printed works with one thing binding all of them together: the use of architecture as something more akin to a character than a setting. The buildings in the book breathe a kind of omniscience into the mix of internal narrative, memory and dialogue. Ware uses a drawing style which will be familiar to architects: beautifully super-flat and stubbornly plain, with colors that can get downright muddy though not unpleasant. Ware’s work tends toward the melancholic at times: the brown haired protagonist of many of the stories worries about dying alone more often than most of us would admit. The sadness is poignant and often reflective, though at times it can all seem a bit hopeless. Building Stories is best enjoyed in small pieces, giving enough time for its impact to develop: to spend an afternoon immersed in it might prove challenging. Like the best architecture, lived in over time, these stories tell us something vital about ourselves through the characters that dwell in them. (jb)
Junk Jet Issue No. 06: “Here and Where”
Paperback, 144 pages
14.8 x 10.5 x 0.8 cm
(with a sticker and a digital mixtape “Terrorismo Mexicano”)
ISBN-10: 3981474821
www.junkjet.net
It seems like there’s a hidden algorithm at work behind the publication Junk Jet. Since 2007, issues have been appearing at random-seeming intervals, each time with a different size, number of pages, and layout, and editions of, say, 222 or 888 copies. Edited and published by Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall of m-a-u-s-e-r studio, Junk Jet is sporadic but somehow always spot-on.
If you’re one of the 999 people lucky enough to own the most recent issue, “Here and Where,” you’ll find that Junk Jet’s tiniest format so far (14 cm.) manages to carry an extremely dense amount of information – on a topic no less expansive than “local spaces within global culture.” Global/local has no simple breakdown in the internet age, and Junk Jet doesn’t try to break it down for you; it packs a lot of ideas together. With contributors from across the map, including JODI, Jon Rafman, Nicholas O’Brien, Sofia Al-Maria, AIDS3D, Metahaven, Superpool, and Olia Lialina, this pocket-sized magazine is bigger than the sum of its parts. The algorithm is working. (ew)
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