Too Much Information

Abstract

This book begins with a mysterious illness in Florence and ends in the half-light of an American desert night. Notes are gathered, impressions taken, sketches made, and objects found, all leading to and from six buildings, represented in twelve objects. These pieces – mute miniatures of the void inside and outside these six buildings – organize this mix of voices, images, and ideas. In six parts we wander through a baptistery in Florence, an orangerie at the garden of Versailles, a long-gone tower in Coney Island, a palace bath at the Alhambra, the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and the Great Pyramid of Giza.

One way of looking at architecture in the midst of too much – too much to feel, too much to think, too much to know, too much to see – this is a record of how to make do with what is left.