My copy of the hotly anticipated The BLDGBLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh, formerly senior editor of Dwell magazine, arrived recently along with an announcement that the official book launch will take place this weekend at The Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Starting at 3:00 pm on Saturday, September 26, the author and many of the book's contributors will discuss the future of the built environment. From underground exploration to the novels of J.G. Ballard, from artificial glaciers in the mountains of Pakistan to weather control in Olympic Beijing, The BLDGBLOG Book is "part conceptual travelogue, part manifesto, part sci-fi novel," according to Joseph Grima of Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Left: Roller Coaster, from the Museum of Nature by Ilkka Halso. Right: The Northern Lights in Iceland by Orvar Atli Porgeirsson. From The BLDGBLOG Book, courtesy Chronicle Books.

I caught up with Alan Rapp, the book's editor, to find out how this incredibly popular blog, which Manaugh started in 2004, became a book. Alan, who took leave from Chronicle last year to enroll in the MFA Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts, also serves as Associate Director of the Hey, Hot Shot! Program at Jen Bekman Gallery.

Peggy Roalf: Architecture has in recent years become a glamour subject in the art and publishing world. Can you identify the impulse for the growing interest, by non architects, in a practice that has become more and more theoretical in an environment where it's increasingly difficult to get buildings built?

Alan Rapp: One part of the answer seems to be in the spread of literacy and interest on every level but the highbrow one. I mean, Cities of the Underground and Build it Bigger aren't really great television, but I think they tap into a broad section of people who like this stuff but would never dream of buying a copy of, say, Abitare (an international design magazine). They think they're into engineering, or archaeology, but this stuff is also totally based in architecture. Geoff has made connections from classical literature to video game design, and I think by example he is showing people who also have interests in areas where those may intersect with architecture. For a lot of people architecture gets more interesting the less connected it is to the way it's been packaged and presented as an elite pursuit for generations.

There's also more infrastructural awareness, whether it's the trendiness of urban exploration or the opening of the High Line. And shooting up in their neighborhood (and now stalled out) was ever a good idea in the first place, as you say, the housing disaster forces people to wonder whether the new "finger" condo shooting up in their neighborhood (and now stalled out) was ever a good idea in the first place.

PR: What was there about BLDGBLOG that you thought would make it translatable into a book?

AR: When I started talking to Geoff Manaugh a few years ago, it was primarily as a fan of the website. It was the kind of thing that I wanted to read on the web, and was still a fairly singular model: literary, topically voracious, often longform, and unashamed to use, say, a new astrophysical discovery or military tech endeavor as a springboard for some visionary riffing. I also appreciated Geoff's broad intake on the visual level, from several photographers we both like to Romantic painting to apparently mad architectural projects new and old.

PR: In planning the book, how did you approach the original material, which ranges from a kind of Jules Verne-like sci-fi tropism to pure ideas about what the late 21st century will be like.

AR: My interest as an editor was not to try to flip this sprawling content into a preformatted insta-book - anyone who knows the site would know that is impossible anyway. The book had to exist unto itself, with its own conventions. Geoff found five broad categories he already blogged about to explore more in depth than he does on the site: Architectural Conjecture; Urban Speculation; The Underground; Redesigning the Sky; Music Sound Noise; Landscape Futures.

PR: How did you approach wrestling this huge array of verbal and visual material from the digital world onto the printed page?

AR: I enlisted two talented designers I had worked with at Chronicle - Brett MacFadden and Scott Thorpe of MacFadden &Thorpe - for the daunting task of organizing several different levels of the text and still accommodate the wonderful images. We all agreed that the physical qualities of the book should feel unslick and somewhat stripped down --handbook sized and printed on uncoated stock--as if it were a travel guide from the near future.

The layout accommodates texts of various lengths, including little sidebars and interstitial texts for the skimmer type of reader. Portions of his smartest interviews appear as well, including an exciting new one from Sir Peter Cook of Archigram. Michael Cook, the Canadian sewer-and-drain spelunker behind The Vanishing Point, is also the subject of an interview in the book. And there are lots of wonderful images as well, from David Maisel, Simon Norfolk, Siologen, Camille Seaman, Ed Burtynsky, and of course NASA.

From there it was primarily a matter of logistical coordination. I did not want to use a heavy hand as an editor on the manuscript level. Geoff has a distinctive voice and perspective; not everyone loves it but it makes no sense to try to overhaul something so crafted and thought through. We edited for length and overall proportion of the sections, and smoothed out some of the more adventurous diction.

In the end i think we made the book we all wanted to hold and read. By extension, it seems to be working for a lot of other people as well, even those who aren't that familiar with the site.

The BLDGBLOG Book (Chronicle Books 2009)  by Geoff Manaugh will be launched at The Storefront for Art and Architecture on Saturday, September 26th, from 3:00 to 8:00 pm. 97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY. Please check the website for information and directions or call 212.431.5795.

092509 bldgblog