ARCH Professors Collaborate on Book about Architectural Progress

A black hardcover book titled Architecture & Progress: Exploring a Progressively Problematic Built Environment, edited by Mark Alan Blumberg and Matt Hall, on a dark surface.

Two faculty from the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (APLA) have published a new book exploring the obstacles that are often created by progress in the built environment.

Two men wearing jackets and hats stand on a sidewalk near a bus stop, with buildings and a street in the background. The photo is in black and white.
The book was edited by two Auburn architecture faculty with other essays from practitioners and theorists around the world.

Architecture and Progress: Exploring a Progressively Problematic Built Environment challenges the notion that not all progress is positive, positing that inherent productivity in design can create situations that culture must contend with. Edited by APLA Professor Matt Hall and Assistant Professor Mark Alan Blumberg, the book provokes questions about the utility of design and how diverse perspectives on the built environment reveal complications that result from progress.

Hall and Blumberg wrote the introduction and served as the editors for the 14 contributing authors who ranged from practitioners, theorists and architectural thinkers. Each of the contributors investigated the inevitable and inescapable consequences of progress.

“As designers, we are focused on finding solutions. We are trained to see design as the method for solving them, but this book may prompt a conversation about the unintended consequences,” Hall said. “Each solution is a potential obstacle suggesting the design is simultaneously problem solving and problem creating.”

Hall and Blumberg also contributed an essay to the manuscript. Hall’s essay, “Newer Babylons,” reexamines Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon concept of a utopian world of automation. Instead, he challenges not only utopian ideas but the supposed solutions that disguise progress with promise.

Open book showing a page titled INTRODUCTION: Obstacles in Progress by Matt Hall and Mark Alan Blumberg, with printed text in black on a white background.
The authors question if progress for the sake of progress in the built environment creates more challenges than solutions.
Open book showing chapter 11 titled Never Babylons by Matt Hall, with a portion of text visible on a black surface.
Hall’s essay “Newer Babylons” questions whether utopian design solutions confuse aesthetic progress with actual progress.

Blumberg’s essay, “Unresolution: Fiction in the Space Between Inquiry and Invention,” argues that the relationships between obstacles and progress, givens and possibilities, inquiry and invention are structurally analogous and mediated through acts of fiction. He further examines how fictional positions can generate new architectural typologies through imaginative projection.

See more in:
Creative Work, Faculty Collaboration, Faculty Recognition, Faculty Work, Research

Related people:
Matt Hall, Mark Alan Blumberg