Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC) aims to expand the ground of architectural discourse. Bringing together designers, scholars, planners, artists, theorists, and curators, often working outside of the expected formats of their fields, we focus on books that ask urgent questions about what architecture is and what it does—and to model different forms of architectural production beyond building. We hope to amplify new voices while reflecting on those who’ve shaped the field in vital ways, and to publish books that explore architecture’s intersections, rethink the assumptions and epistemologies of practice, and confront the discipline’s blind spots and complicity in enduring forms of injustice.
The imprint’s commitment to print is paired with experiments in digital and hybrid publishing methods. Our monthly journal of critical essays on architecture, the Avery Review, can be found at averyreview.com; our experiment in email-based discourse, Avery Shorts, can be found at averyshorts.com; and our online reader can be found at arch.columbia.edu/books/reader. For questions and proposals, please contact cbac(at)columbia.edu.
A Note on Peer Review:
CBAC is committed to publishing rigorously researched books at the highest level of scholarship. CBAC takes seriously the idea that why and how we publish is just as important as what we publish. Our books—which vary in form, narrative style, creative and scholarly motivations—speak with and through diverse disciplines to meet different audiences. We are thus not only interested in contributing new knowledge into the discipline of architecture, but in interrogating the very foundations and practices of how architectural knowledge is made. We are concerned with pushing against the often exclusionary, biased legacies that undergird architectural thought and pedagogy, and with formulating new positions from which and with whom to speak. Toward those efforts, CBAC manuscripts—both single author and collected volumes—are subject to a single-blind peer review process in accordance with Columbia University Press’s guidelines prior to publication.
Amidst these processes, CBAC also promotes publications that actively seek to challenge or resist explicitly Western forms of knowledge production and evaluation; and that invite new ways of engaging with visual, artistic, architectural research and forms of practice through experiments in book-making. In some of these cases, depending on the form and motivations of the project, CBAC may choose to forgo the formal peer review process.
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Meriam Soltan
Office of Publications
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+1 (212) 851-5895
cbac(at)columbia.edu
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Please send book proposals and manuscript submissions to: cbac(at)columbia.edu