A History of Architects Mistaking Design for Politics

The World as an Architectural Project, recently published by MIT Press, surveys fifty projects, most of them ambitious in a troubling way. Few are realized buildings; the majority are books, paintings, dissertations, maps, urban schemas, or proposals for “global” building typologies. MIT architecture dean Hashim Sarkis, curator of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, was the book’s “principal investigator,” and discusses the projects along with fellow faculty memb