Skip to main content

· Applications Now Open

· Applications Now Open

· Applications Now Open

· Applications Now Open

· Applications Now Open

· Applications Now Open

· Applications Now Open

· Applications Now Open

'Projects and Their Consequences' Book Launch + Discussion

Book Launch of Projects and Their Consequences by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto of RUR Architecture
Discussion with Jesse Reiser and David Ruy

W.M. Keck Lecture Hall
March 28, 2019 at 6:00pm

Projects and Their Consequences is a necessary volume not only for architects but for all those interested in the intersection of architecture, art, and culture. Autobiographical, technical, prophetic, and meditative, Reiser + Umemoto’s Projects and Their Consequences is a genre-blending monograph presenting thirty years of work by their firm, RUR Architecture.

Projects and Their Consequences balances incisive interviews and essays with more than four hundred strikingly original drawings, collages, and paintings. Multiple, overlapping perspectives describe projects that vary widely in scope and approach: large-scale studies of infrastructure for the East River corridor and Hudson Yards areas in Manhattan and the Alishan Railway in Taiwan as well as schemes for cultural institutions, including the New Museum, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, and University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Also documented are carefully conceived small-scale projects, such as an imaginative water garden and the Sagaponack House, and thought-provoking “textual projects”—narrative works that blur the boundaries of art and architecture, such as a meditation on language in the context of the Globe Theater. Projects and Their Consequences offers a unique view of the intersections of the visionary, the speculative, and the practical work of architecture and its relationship to multiple disciplines.

Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto are the founders and principals of RUR Architecture. Reiser is a professor of architecture at Princeton University, and Umemoto has taught at numerous institutions, including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and Washington. They are the authors of Atlas of Novel Tectonics.

Yellow colored book by Jesse Reiser

RUR Architecture

RUR Architecture, an internationally recognized architectural firm has built projects at a wide range of scales. Founded by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto in 1996, RUR approaches each project as the continuation of an ongoing inquiry and has developed flexible strategies that seek open structures that are now ossified and to integrate historically detached domains. The work of RUR has been published and exhibited widely; the firm received Progressive Architecture Award in 2014, and Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto received USA Booth Fellowship from United States Artists for Architecture & Design in 2012. Among their notable projects, the Taipei Pop Music Center presently under construction in Taiwan is slated for completion in late 2019.

Jesse Reiser is a registered architect in New York and a principal of RUR Architecture. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Cooper Union in New York, and completed his Masters of Architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 1985 and he worked for the offices of John Hejduk and Aldo Rossi prior to forming Reiser + Umemoto with partner, Nanako Umemoto. Jesse is a Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and has previously taught at various schools in the US and Asia, and has lectured widely at various educational and cultural institutions throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Recently, he received an honorary fellow from University of Tokyo, School of Engineering.

Nanako Umemoto is a principal of RUR Architecture. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Cooper Union in New York in 1983, following studies at the School of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at the Osaka University of Art, and formed Reiser + Umemoto with partner, Jesse Reiser in 1986. Nanako has taught at various schools in the US, Europe and Asia, including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland, Hong Kong University, Kyoto University, and the Cooper Union, and she has lectured widely at various educational and cultural institutions throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.