In Top Form

Those of us who packed into the subterranean auditorium of the Center for Architecture on the most ultimate of May days seemed to affirm the noble invocation with which Thomas de Monchaux began his dialogue with Eric Höweler: “the power of people and the power of place.” Höweler, who runs a design studio with J. Meejin Yoon out of Boston, was on hand to discuss Verify in Field (University of Chicago Press), a book he argued was about praxis, one that prints construction details, one that advocates for a method: “Measure twice, cut once.” In describing the statics of the Collier Memorial at MIT—a five-way granite vault constructed inversely to an arch (i.e., keystones first)—he spelled out the principle of arches: “the rock tries to fall; it can’t fall because there’s other rocks holding it together.” To this material politics of interdependency, de Monchaux rejoined with an au courant theory about Stonehenge. If it was previously believed that Stonehenge must have in and of itself presented a tenable reason for fetching stones all the way from Wales, the causality is…