Roger Conover, Executive Editor, MIT Press

How do you go about assessing the worthiness of a potential book proposal? How do you know when it is worth taking a risk on a book project?

I live with it, challenge it, kick it around, come back to it, and use it as the departure point for conversations with an author. More often than not the book we started talking about becomes something quite different. Once in a while something arrives fully formed in the mail bin, but more often ideas for books come out of personal or written exchanges, or out of reading, or from the traffic of ideas and people I am in contact with. Or they begin to develop when I am not thinking about finding books at all. In some out of the way context, an idea begins to take shape, and gradually takes on a life of its own. This sometimes happens in a day, sometimes over the course of ten years.

Are publishers guiding or following the direction of architectural interests?

It depends on the publishers and the interests.

Do good architects necessarily make good authors? And vice versa?

Mostly I would say not. For reasons similar perhaps to the reasons that most birds do not make good ornithologists. But this takes nothing away from the beauty of their feathers or the sureness of their flight.

Publishers in many ways operate similarly to music labels by establishing a character based on the circles and subjects that they promote. This creates an almost ‘personality' of the publishing house. How would you describe MIT Press personality?

Industrial rock

What role do publishers have in directing arguments and trends within academia and practice?

Drummer.

Do books change the profession as much, less, or more than buildings?

All 3. Books are buildings.

Several books in the later half of the 20th century figured prominently in representing the architecture of that time and in many ways served as manifestos for a generation. Books such as Aldo Rossi's Architecture of the City, Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas, and Koolhaas's Delirious New York have shaped a lot of architectural thought recently. Where have all the manifestos gone?

I would call those books examples of discursive texts with strongly argued intellectual positions, but I would not call them manifestoes. Those texts are intellectual as opposed to ideological statements, neither violent enough in their utterance nor precise enough in their call to action or conversion to qualify as 'classic' manifestoes. The type is also not hot enough and the paper not fragile enough. Sustained narratives with footnotes and credits appearing in clothbound books published through traditional printing and publishing means are a far cry from the immediate and spontaneous announcements appearing as handbills or broadsides. Think of Marinetti's violent diatribes or Tzara's convulsive poetic recipes. Manifestoes for the most part vanished with modernity, and have now become a retro-genre.

Has the monograph evolved since the growing dominance of office websites? And how has the internet changed the dissemination, format, and expectations of print media?

The monograph as we know it had its origins with Vasari and probably experienced its greatest robustness three hundred years later. It was in decline, and for good reasons, long before the rise of the website and the internet. The architectural monograph was never a preferred genre at MIT Press.

Which book(s) in your catalog do think are future classics and why? Or is the idea of a ‘classic' dying, because of the vast quantity of books published each year, and the merging of book and magazine formats?

Future classics can only be predicted in retrospect.

What have been your best-selling books to architects? How many copies?


Steen Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (248,000 copies)
Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (195,000 copies)
John Summerson, Classical Language of Architecture (88,000 copies)
Robert Venturi + Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (73,000 copies)

What is 'on the boards' or has recently come out at MIT Press that you think has potential? And why? What should we expect on the horizon from MIT Press?

One of the titles on my spring list that I have high expectations for is a new book by Simon Sadler, whose first book,The Situationist City , has repaid the confidence I had in this writer when I signed him up in 1997. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture , is the critical volume on Archigram that has long been needed, the first essential reading on the movement since Peter Cook's insider account--which is still in print-- appeared over 30 years ago. Sadler could write another book about what it was like dealing with Archigram's erstwhile members, heirs, and agents in the 21st century, but that is part of a larger story of aging collectives and takes nothing away from what by any definition was one of the most extraordinary series of architectural "conversations" to take place in the 20th century. Most of those exchanges took place between six extremely talented but disillusioned young architects (Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb, David Greene, Warren Chalk, and Ron Herron), who met in various flats in London in the 1960s to polemicize about architecture in a newsletter that was read "under the desk" by architects from Los Angeles to Vienna to Tokyo.


Another book that is about to come out is Mark Linder's Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture After Minimalism . This is an extremely impressive first book. Like Sadler, Linder also takes us back to the 1960s, and makes a case that the minimalist art of that period owes a substantial debt to architecture that has never been fully understood or acknowledged. This is an important argument that is left out of most the literature on minimalism generated by art historians and critics. The argument is so convincing that it seems self-evident after finishing book, but the idea was only a loose speculation prior to the Linder's demonstration.


I want to mention another forthcoming book that examines a more contemporary example of an artistic collective than Archigram. I refer to Alexei Monroe's Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK , which looks at the operations of an avant-garde movement that is still active. This book will introduce to the West one of Eastern Europe's most successful group practices, a multi-media formation made up of designers, philosophers, musicians, dramaturgs, painters, and writers. Far from being just another art group, NSK's work represents a unique and spectacular cultural commentary on the key events of our time --the collapse of nations and political systems, the rise of nationalism and fundamentalism, the spread of capitalism. NSK has had a direct impact on the politics of Eastern Europe, where they are one of the few groups that survived the transition from Communism to post-Communism. During the 25 years that that they have been active, they have produced some of the most audacious and dangerous work of their time. Now surrounded by a vast mythology, the group has many followers, but owing to NSK's cryptic means of communication, most people who encounter NSK do not really know or understand what they have been confronted by--a cult, an experiment, or a corporation. Anyone wanting to understand the role of "Eastern" artists in the West and the relationship of the East to its own history needs to be aware of NSK . This book is also about architecture without architecture, but in this case the un-architecture is about the design of power, beliefs, information, and political systems.


As far as a recent book that is off to a great start, I want to mention Fil Hearn's Ideas that Shaped Buildings . I looked a long time for a book that could become a basic textbook in schools of architecture--a perennial seller like Steen Rasmussen's Experiencing Architecture --but connecting ideas to space. Hearn's book appears to be establishing itself as a standard work for beginning architecture students throughout North America.