Blanking

In this first book on the work and vision of Houston-based architecture firm Schaum/Shieh, founders Troy Schaum and Rosalyne Shieh invite their readers into the studio. It 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 informs this book, in which ideas and knowledge usually only spoken is 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, reframing the studio practice away from individual works and toward the navigation of values, questions, and propositions as knowledge.

Contributions by distinguished authors, including Stanley T. Allen, Ana Miljački, Toshiko Mori, and Sarah M. Whiting, round out this monograph.