Blanking

In this first monographic 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 at all stages of figuring and finality, equally important and less documented 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 walk-through. This material is the medium within which projects are formulated.

That pedagogy of the studio informs this book, in which the information and knowledge usually only spoken is written down and made accessible to a reader. Organised into ten chapters led by ten thematic questions, formed by a process that Schaum and Shieh borrow from metal fabrication: Blanking. In the context of their practice, the term describes the collaborative formulation of ideas around a collection of terms and images that make up a conceptual lexicon for practice. In this book, it takes the form of material, projects, and buildings drawn from 15 years of collaboration set within a wide range of textual material, reframing practice away from individual works and toward the navigation of values, questions, and propositions as knowledge formed in the studio.