Issue 17: Do You Even Lift?

Bluster, bluff, and brinksmanship are remarkable rhetorical tools, utilized to great effect by the best (and worst) of design practice. The desire to hide behind bravado is acute—fake it till you make it—but it also inoculates us to the problems of illusionism: what do we really mean? What is truly at stake? And why should we care? As one critic remarked in a final student review, “your renderings are incredibly seductive. But I don’t want to be seduced; I want to be convinced.”

And so we set out in this issue to ask for a bit of verification: facts to back up opinions, designs with implications, and debates containing substance over dodges. After hearing all that has been said over the years (even within our own pages), we’ve been led to the inevitable question: do you even lift?

Pidgin 17 includes contributions from:

Sanger Clark, Beatriz Colomina, René Daalder, designtoproduction, Sean Dockray, Ignacio González Galán, Andrés Jaque, Axel Killian, Jffer Kolb, Evangelos Kotsioris, Ang Li, Forrest Meggers, Anna-Maria Meister, Michael Meredith, Nicholas Pajerski, Jonah Rowen, Brendan Shea, Phoebe Springstubb, Ross Wolfe, Claire Wood, and Lily Zhang.

Spring 2014