The Thickening of Time, a new book by senior SCI-Arc faculty Coy Howard, continues the school’s tradition of innovation by challenging the current status of digital architecture. Published by SCI-Arc Press in collaboration with the architect, the 288-page volume features Howard’s exploration of the aesthetic implication of seductive insinuations, mysterious withholdings, liminal indirections, and subtle allusions in the design of three urban rooftop villa projects.

A public reception to celebrate the book’s launch will be hosted on Monday, April 6, 7pm at SCI-Arc Library. The Thickening of Time will be available for purchase at event, or can be ordered online at Hennessey + Ingalls.

“With the images in this book, Coy Howard has elaborated a sublime possibility of what architecture should be—incomplete, enigmatic and mysterious,” says SCI-Arc Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso. “As visual synecdoche of architectural experience, the images, dramatically framed, enlarge our engagement, making us all detectives following clues, conjuring a closure that never comes.”

The book features more than 100 carefully constructed and choreographed digital images embedding the deep cultural terroir of the three cities of Los Angeles, Tokyo and New York. Each of the images is constructed to engender a mood and sense of place rather than depict or illustrate an architectural concept. Fusing the avant-garde and the traditional, the designs of the villas create a poetic sense of serenity, where the desires for the future and the memories of the past are sensed simultaneously.

“Enigmatically beautiful, resisting traditional architectural explanation, Coy Howard’s The Thickening of Time seduces us with his ‘felt-rather-than-thought’ work,” comments Pritzker Prize winning architect, SCI-Arc trustee Thom Mayne. “Filled with strange suggestions and littered with the playfully unexpected, engendering a rich phenomenal presence, the book reflects Coy’s 40 years of research into the essential psychological processes of a deep and resonant architectural experience.”

Critical essays by Dr. George Rand, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Larry Rouch position the work in a broad range of topics, including the current critical discussions on the impact of digital imagery on architecture.

Coy Howard is a designer with a broad range of interests and accomplishments. His furniture is included the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Denver Art Museum. Examples of his graphic designs are held in several international museums, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has won a broad range of awards for his work, and consulted as an advisor to many major institutions, including The Getty Center, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Additionally, he has directed two educational programs, the undergraduate program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and the Department of the Environmental Arts at Otis College of Art and Design. In 2008 he was the Eero Saarinen Distinguished Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. In 2012 Coy was the Bernoudy Architect in Residence at The American Academy in Rome. He is currently a professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.