Books published by Doctor Watson Architects

This volume of Incomplete Works is about DWA's design for a prototype building called The College of Colour (CoC). The design development was influenced by events of Mies' posthumous career that took place in the 1980s. They were, first, a pair of public inquiries in London and, second, the rebuilding of the Barcelona Pavilion. The CoC design and the influences that caused it, are set out in two parts. First, visually, as sequences of views that show the CoC design in its most evolved form, i.e., as DWA conceived it at the time they were compiling this publication. Second, in the form of an essay, which tries to capture and order the influential events as a historical narrative.

This volume returns to Mies' New National Gallery in Berlin. The first volume included a short, introductory section on the NNG, but it merely skimmed the surface of what was in truth an intense preoccupation with that building. DWA were fascinated by the NNG because it seemed to be Mies' most convincing demonstration of what it might mean to set the grid free. For them, the NNG had the same unique aura as Malevich's painting of the Black Square and they came to regard it as the point zero through which they must pass if they were to escape the presuppositions of professional architecture and the social demands connected with it. For DWA, conceiving and producing AIR Grid structures based on the order of the NNG became a means of escape, freeing them 'from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature'.

This is the first in a series of books documenting the work of Doctor Watson Architects (DWA)

Hatching: Piranesi & Tafuri presents an interpretation and a critical design proposal, it was inspired by Manfredo Tafuri’s essay The Wicked Architect: G.B. Piranesi, Heterotopia and the Voyage. Tafuri’s essay was published as the introductory chapter to his book The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s.The book is organised as a kind of journey that travels between Tafuri’s writing about Piranesi and the design of a one kilometre long housing block, known as Corviale that was built in the 1970s on the southwestern periphery of Rome.Hatching: Piranesi & Tafuri is a re-working of an earlier publication of the same title, published in 2015 by the Big Air World. It is a supplement to Utopian Adventure: The Corviale Void, which was published in 2012 and suported by a scholarship from the British School at Rome, awarded to the author in 2010.

This book is about an architectural design research project based on a study of Mies van der Rohe's self-proclaimed interest in the thought of the British mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead.