David Sundburg, ESTO. David Sundburg, ESTO

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1 OFFICEUS OfficeUS, the competition winning proposal for an installation at the US Pavilion at la Biennale di Architettura 2014, presented a global history of the architecture office while mapping aspirations for its future. A live, working office surrounded by a library of one thousand projects realized by US offices abroad between 1914 and 2014, OfficeUS situates and re-imagines the operations of US architectural firms and their global impact. The reconsideration of these projects unfolding on the premises of the US Pavilion over the course of the Venice Biennale demands that the knowledge contained in the archive be evaluated in the context of contemporary wisdom on the successes and failures of the projects in question. Revisiting one hundred years of US architecture s global production in conditions that are decidedly different from those in which the projects were initially conceived opens it to engagement and ownership by a vast and heterogeneous audience. As much as this archaeology demands historical self-consciousness from contemporary production highlighting the extent to which our present is the inevitable outcome of the histories examined by OfficeUS the six months of the live reactivation of the archive will project alternative futures out of its material.

2 David Sundburg, ESTO David Sundburg, ESTO

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4 Agenda slices through the OfficeUS exhibition at the Venice Biennale with a series of section cuts, flattening information in one dimension in order to reveal otherwise concealed adjacencies and alignments, structures and infrastructures. Reconfiguring what we think we know about the US architectural office and its export and revealing an entirely new dimension of structure, these cuts are intentionally and explicitly partial. Projective rather than simply descriptive, Agenda transforms the normative catalogue into a tool that both complements and complexifies the material in the exhibition. This publication articulates and consolidates various accounts (often overlapping) of the professionalization of practice, the international transfer and translation of standards and ideologies, and the dissemination and uptake of US design and design practices globally. Agenda s three sections Expertise, Exchange, and Export roughly correspond to these three narratives and serve as conceptual containers through which to interpret the work of US architectural firms abroad. A mix of article formats reflects a working methodology bringing together technology, culture, politics, history, and project documentation in response to the theme of the professionalization of US practice and its export. The book recasts the OfficeUS exhibition and reframes a body of work that, obscured by time and distance, has been largely written out of the last century s fairly narrow architectural cannon. Agenda s sections reveal the operational history and architectural richness of design for export and reactivate the stories of the invisibles women, early solar designers, global standards and codes, corporate firms, oil economies, third-world political dynamics, and others who were nevertheless radically formative in shaping the global contemporary built environment. The OfficeUS Atlas provides a transversal view of architectural practice in a global context from the perspective of US practices. Presenting almost 1000 projects, the book is organized according to individual firm histories, documenting the development of U.S. architectural offices working abroad from 1914 to the present. Offices and their projects are illustrated by over 1200 photographs and architectural drawings. The twenty sections of this volume frame some of the key historical narratives through which to enter this century of US offices and their export. OfficeUS Atlas opens with the professionalization of architectural practice in the US in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the episodes that follow outline the successive transformations of both offices and their products in response to political, economic, and technological forces. The story of international philanthropy, for example, begins in the early twentieth century in China and Japan, only to be recaptured in different forms in post-independence India and Pakistan. Cold War politics and related development track through a series of interrelated narratives in the postwar period, from the international hotel chains enabled by the Marshall Plan to the US Embassy program to national participation in trade fairs and world expositions under the guidance of the United States Information Agency. Oil and other global resource flows, the deregulation of markets, the demand for iconicity, building booms, and various cultural conditions all count among the factors that have drawn US architecture firms into foreign contexts.

5 Office US Manual is a critical, occasionally humorous, and sometimes stupefying guide to the architectural workplace. The third publication of OfficeUS, this book presents office policies and guidelines spanning the last one hundred years alongside commissioned statements by contemporary contributors, original graphic analysis, and images from The Architects by Amie Siegel. The Manual is a resource for understanding and reimagining the nature and design of architectural practice. I contribued an essay published in the catalogue published on the occasion of the 2016 Serpentine Architecture Program. The catalogue features a series of written contributions to each of the commissioned structures: Vladimir Belogolovsky on Yona Friedman, Beatrice Galilee on Bjarke Ingels Group, Joseph Grima on Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ), Brett Steele on Barkow Leibinger and Ashley Schafer on Asif Khan. The publication also includes a dedicated section on the history of The Royal Parks, the Serpentine Galleries and the Pavilion Commission, with texts by Brian Dillon and Vicky Richardson. In addition, this book charts the design process and production of the Pavilion and Summer Houses through models, sketches and photographs.