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103

P R E S E N C E

review / CARL DOUGLAS

Marian Macken
Binding Space: The Book as 
Spatial Practice
Routledge, 2018

Many of us pass our days moving from one illuminated screen to the next, chan-
neling our creative activity through software and Wi-Fi. In this accelerated and 
transient state, a paper book or a pencil drawing can seem luxurious. Marian 
Macken, in Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice (2018), suggests such ana-
log pleasures are more than personal extravagances. Books, she contends, are an 
under-exploited mode of architectural discourse: not simply bearers of writing 
about architecture, but a creative practive offering an alternative to the conven-
tions of drawing sheets, screens, and eye-catching imagery: 

Binding Space demonstrates the possibilities of book making: it considers how 
the book format reveals and facilitates certain aspects of the design process, and 
the repercussions of this for spatial drawing and representation (5-6)

Macken presumes that modes of representation are not innocent or neutral 
transmitters of information, “a uniform space through which meaning may glide 
without modulation” (Evans, 1997: 154); and that digital tools do not obviate the 
production of drawings and models as physical artefacts. Book-making, she ar-
gues, has potential to open new avenues for designers and critics of space:

The seeming conventionality of the book has the capacity to be reinvented 
anew, through creative practice, to take on a role of critical enquiry and to be 
the site of architectural innovation. (130)

Binding Space (which derives from Macken’s PhD thesis; 2012) has an interdis-
ciplinary flavour, marrying a study of book production by artists with theories 
of architectural representation. It provides an extensive practice context for the 
production of architectural art-books; theorises the format as a space-time con-
struction; and demonstrates some of its potential through a series of Macken’s 
own creative works.

The text is organised into five parts, each attending to a different spatial regis-
ter of the book format. Part 1, Field, identifies “bookness” (25): the characteristics 
of books that distinguish them from, for example, screens, models, or individu-
al drawing sheets. Central to bookness is seriality: while a single sheet of paper 
can be imagined as a window to look through, the page of a book is part of a se-
quence. We literally peel a page away from the stack of pages yet to be read, and 



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lay it over the pages passed. This “openable codex format”, writes Macken, “offers 
the element of interiority, and, hence, its opposite, exteriority” (32). 

Parts 2 and 3, Page and Volume, attend to the book as a material artefact. 
Individual pages are a physical substrate that can be manipulated by stitching, 
cutting, creasing and embossing; so that the paper, “rather than receiving the 
drawing, is manipulated to form the drawing” (57). Books that pop up, unfold, or 
contain voids—such as okoshi-ezu from Edo-period Japan, and the Het Nieuwe 
Instituut’s Vedute Collection—overlap with models in their ability to produce or 
describe spatial volumes.

The time of the viewer is implicated in the way books unfold in series, the theme 
of the fourth part. The movement of the reader travelling interactively through 
the book, leads Macken to closely associate the book with exhibition design. This 
leads her to conclude in Part 5, by articulating book time as multiple: “there is a 
multiplicity, a plurality, of ‘times’ that should be included within architecture… 
not just the time of inhabiting, but also the times of making, recollecting and re-
positioning” (135). This suggests a concern with a broad range of spatial agencies 
and narratives, rather than the telling of a single story oriented by a designer’s 
intentions.

At the beginning of each part, Macken describes some of her own books. These 
sections sit outside the main discursive line of the text (not even appearing on 
the contents page), but superbly exemplify her thought. For instance, her book 
$1.45¢: Houses in the Museum Garden: Biography of an Exhibition, which heads 
up Part 3, demonstrates how the spatial seriality of the book can unfurl the plu-
ral times of building. It documents three demonstration houses installed in the 
sculpture garden of New York’s MoMA between 1949 and 1955: one by Marcel 
Breuer, a second by Gregory Ain, and the third a replica of a Japanese guest 
house by Junzō Yoshimura. Macken attends to the houses’ prefabrication, short 
exhibited life, maintenance, disseminating function, relocation, and re-use; 
presenting them through a set of 22 unfolding portfolios containing collapsible 
models and embossed drawings. The portfolios form intersecting time-series 
of the transformations of each individual house, and the changing state of the 
museum courtyard. Using overlays, cut-outs, pop-ups, and embossing, the port-
folios describe the courtyard as a transient space, and invite cross-reading of the 
houses and their various careers. As conceptual probes, Macken’s books are in-
dispensible to her project, moving Binding Space from being a purely abstract 
meditation to being a provocative model of practice. 

Architectural books can be more than normative archives for completed works, 
or polemic texts. Instead, Macken suggests that by experimenting with the 
book-making as a process we might refresh our understanding of the time(s) of 
architecture, and experiment with sequences, narratives, and interiority in new 
ways. The temporal and multiple nature of books exposes the rhythms, syncopa-
tions, and sequences of architecture, making it easier to see their various states 
and shifts. 

Macken assembles an extensive collection of invigorating examples, and makes 
a strong argument that book-making remains valuable in a time of screen-based 
presentations, without resorting to nostalgia at any point. She does not seem to 
feel the urge to defend physical production against the intrusion of digital tech-
niques (her own books integrate digital fabrication, particularly laser-cutting, 



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with traditional techniques of paper-making, folding, and debossing). Rather, 
she affirms book-making as a slow “savoring” process, as equally necessary in de-
sign as rapid and efficient ways of working (Frascari, 2011: 69).

The organisation of the book is perhaps more complex than necessary. Some dis-
crete short essays could have been meaningfully merged into single chapters. 
Macken’s direct accounts of her own practice work are one of the major strengths 
of the work, but sit oddly between chapters (not even appearing on the contents 
page at all). While this reinforces creative practice as having a discrete logic and 
independent existence of its own, I found it a little disjointed. 

For me, Macken’s research triggered thoughts of how architecture’s tem-
poral frames are locked to particular divisions of labour. For example, the 
inception of the drawing set (initially through the pairing of plan and section in 
the Renaissance) encoded the distinction between architect and builder. Where 
the former had ideas and overview, instructing by means of drawing, the latter 
were understood to expertly follow the plans to produce a building. The richer 
temporality that comes into view through book production might provide a way 
to recognise a less stark division. 

Macken extends discussions about architectural representation into an under- 
addressed area. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the theory and 
practice of architectural representation. As a representational form, the book al-
lows us to question default settings for the presentation of architecture, opening 
new spatial possibilities. In particular, those who are interested in the use of craft 
techniques, and slow or tactile media will appreciate the book’s cogent demon-
stration of why such things are not mere luxuries. Because it works with a broad 
range of spatial practices, it has particular relevance for thinking about interiors, 
exhibitions, installation and critical or speculative spatial design. I am grateful to 
Macken for introducing me to many new artists, designers and works. Macken’s 
own book is a constructive provocation for experimental practitioners and teach-
ers of architecture and related areas of spatial design.

REFERENCES

Evans, R. (1997). Translations from 
drawing to building and other 
essays.  London: AA Publications. 

Frascari, M. (2011). Eleven 
exercises in the art of 
architectural drawing: Slow food 
for the architect’s imagination. 
London, UK: Routledge. 

Macken, M. (2012). The book 
as site: Alternative modes of 
representing and documenting 
architecture. (Doctoral thesis, 
University of Sydney, Australia). 
Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.
net/2123/8400

Macken, M. (2018). Binding space: 
The book as spatial practice. 
London, UK: Routledge.