Are We Human? rethinks the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world. Design is what makes the human. It is the very basis of social life. But design also engineers inequalities and new forms of neglect, such as lawlessness, poverty, and the climate at the same time as the human genome and the weather are being actively redesigned. We can no longer reassure ourselves with the idea of "good design." Design itself needs to be redesigned.

Rita McBride is a US-American artist whose installations explore cultural and sociological issues using the language of architecture. At first sight, the sculptures and installations are composed of recognizable daily objects - machines, steps, tubes, even water towers - that transport us to a standardized world, where repetition itself establishes a code that facilitates comprehension. However, the familiarity of form is disturbed by the materials used - a car made of raffia, tubes out of marble or ficus leaves modelled in Murano crystal - producing a sensation of unease and uncertain significance. This exhibition catalog includes a photographic essay by the artist and photographer Anne Pohlmann capturing the way in which the museum's activity changes the architecture of its space over the course of a year.

Two Journeys is the firsat comprehensive monograph on the work of Michael Webb, an artist who is also a trained architect and who operates at the intersection of the two disciplines. He is widely known for creatively exploring the boundaries of drawing techniques, specifically perspectival projection. Webb's aspirations for and re-conceptions of both built and natural environments are revealed between a twenty-year study on perspective projection that utilizes as its subjects the Regatta Course at Henley-on-Thames in England, and early work, some of which was done in conjunction with Archigram, an avant-garde group concerned with theorizing and critiquing architecture which formed during the 1960s at the Architectural Association in London. The publication connects nearly sixty years of the artist's work into a continuously evolving narrative about the relationship between architecture, the automobile, and landscape. Webb's work investigates these relationships using notions of time, space, and speed, and analogue drawing tools such as pencil and collage, which are often rendered later in oil paint. The book features over 150 drawings: artistic works rooted in analytical thinking and structured around architectural elements and notational systems.

In a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Mark Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing--the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design. Wigley follows the trajectory of this key subtext by closely reading the statements and designs of most of the protagonists, demonstrating that it renders modern architecture's relationship with the psychosexual economy of fashion much more ambiguous than the architects' endlessly repeated rejections of fashion would suggest. Indeed, Wigley asserts, the very intensity of these rejections is a symptom of how deeply they are embedded in the world of clothing. By drawing on arguments about the relationship between clothing and architecture first formulated in the middle of the nineteenth century, modern architects in fact presented a sophisticated theory of the surface, modernizing architecture by transforming the status of the surface. "White Walls, Designer Dresses" shows how this seemingly incidental clothing logic actually organizes the detailed design of the modern building, dictating a system of polychromy, understood as a multicolored outfit. The familiar image of modern architecture as white turns out to be the effect of a historiographical tradition that has worked hard to suppress the color of the surfaces of the buildings that it describes. Wigley analyzes this suppression in terms of the sexual logic that invariably accompanies discussions of clothing and color, recovering those sensuously colored surfaces and the extraordinary arguments about clothing that were used to defend them.