Kind of Boring: Canonical Work and Other Visible Things Meant to Be Viewed as Architecture: Canonica

Kind Of is a book presenting the work of Paul Preissner in a form of manifesto looking at the loose and varied origins of ideas that make room for intuition, blandness and confusion resulting in work which takes on a different type of politics: a class politics.

Being boring (or boringness) has been one of the qualities of architecture an architect desperately tries to avoid. Not to provoke (or at least try to provoke) some reaction from one's audience is to admit to a lack of ideas or an absence of creativity. In Kind of Boring, Paul Preissner rejects the idea that architecture should demand anything from its audience. The "boring and dumb" architecture documented in this book leaves us alone. In this way, the work of Paul Preissner Architects produces a conceptual space, a meaning independent of our relationship to the work; we can only understand (or misunderstand) it. Through a lot of drawings, some essays, and many pictures, this book documents what happens when architecture stops begging for our attention and instead makes space for reflection.

With contributions by Jayne Kelley, Tim Kinsella, Alex Lehnerer, Walter Benn Michaels, and Li Tavor. Edited by Courtney Co!man. Graphic design by Joe Gilmore.