Preview our SPRING 2026 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
PERFORMA
Bodybuilding
Architecture and Performance
Edited with introduction by Charles Aubin, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco. Foreword by RoseLee Goldberg. Text by Victoria Bugge Øye, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Mabel O. Wilson, Bryony Roberts. Interviews with Elizabeth Diller, Andrés Jaque.
The first book to survey the use of performance by architects, Bodybuilding proposes a new counter-canon of building innovation
Looking past the unbuilt utopian projects of the modernists or the postwar avant-garde, the authors of Bodybuilding delve into actually produced works of architecture fortified by performance: Arata Isozaki’s dancing robot-buildings at Osaka Expo ’70, Charles Moore’s live-TV design sessions or Toyo Ito’s staged dioramas for department stores. Since the financial crisis of 2008, which sent construction rates plummeting, young architects have embraced performance more explicitly—and Bodybuilding grounds these new practices within a century of efforts to construct or critique architecture via performers’ movements and actions. Bodybuilding features more than 30 case studies, plus rare archival documentation of actions by Ugo La Pietra, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Lina Bo Bardi and others. The book also includes essays on Ricardo Bofill’s theatrical stagings in unsold apartments; Coop Himmelblau’s development of bio-activated interactive objects; and Mabel O. Wilson and Bryony Roberts’ production of parades to undermine architecture’s racist legacies.
Featured image is "Driftwood City" by Anna and Lawrence Halprin, a workshop from their Experiments in
Environment series, Sea Ranch, CA, 1966.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Frieze
Juliet Jaques
One of the most intriguing exhibitions to have moved into virtual space during the COVID-19 pandemic
Metropolis
Editors
Each of the thirty-five works in Bodybuilding embraces architecture as a backdrop, a blank canvas to color with activation and human inhibition.
FORMAT: Pbk, 9.5 x 14 in. / 160 pgs / 122 color / 9 duotone / 36 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $49 GBP £30.00 ISBN: 9780578594835 PUBLISHER: Performa AVAILABLE: 9/15/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Performa. Edited with introduction by Charles Aubin, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco. Foreword by RoseLee Goldberg. Text by Victoria Bugge Øye, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Mabel O. Wilson, Bryony Roberts. Interviews with Elizabeth Diller, Andrés Jaque.
The first book to survey the use of performance by architects, Bodybuilding proposes a new counter-canon of building innovation
Looking past the unbuilt utopian projects of the modernists or the postwar avant-garde, the authors of Bodybuilding delve into actually produced works of architecture fortified by performance: Arata Isozaki’s dancing robot-buildings at Osaka Expo ’70, Charles Moore’s live-TV design sessions or Toyo Ito’s staged dioramas for department stores. Since the financial crisis of 2008, which sent construction rates plummeting, young architects have embraced performance more explicitly—and Bodybuilding grounds these new practices within a century of efforts to construct or critique architecture via performers’ movements and actions. Bodybuilding features more than 30 case studies, plus rare archival documentation of actions by Ugo La Pietra, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Lina Bo Bardi and others. The book also includes essays on Ricardo Bofill’s theatrical stagings in unsold apartments; Coop Himmelblau’s development of bio-activated interactive objects; and Mabel O. Wilson and Bryony Roberts’ production of parades to undermine architecture’s racist legacies.
