Architecture and Action: Celebrating Two New Books from MIT Architecture

Join us at the MIT Welcome Center (E38-195)on May 17, 2026, at 5:00 PM (Eastern Time) for a fun and informal gathering! Short book talks and discussion followed by food and Happy Hour!

Design Before Disaster : Japan's Culture of Preparedness

Across the globe, few sites have faced as many environmental disasters as the islands of the Japanese archipelago. They have endured typhoons, cyclones, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Residents of Japan have responded to their precarious circumstances by developing a unique culture of disaster preparedness, known as bōsai, one that has become embedded in everyday life.

It has equipped the island nation to plan for future emergencies and to greatly reduce their impact. In this practical, engaging text, Miho Mazereeuw - who has carried out ethnographic fieldwork and space - based analysis for more than two decades- offers a detailed framework to design and prepare for anticipated disasters and describes effective interventions in urban landscape and architecture.

An urgent and timely book, Design Before Disaster represents the cutting edge in disaster mitigation and adaptation to empower communities in the world’s most vulnerable places.

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5509/

Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture

In this book on the work and vision of Schaum/Shieh, the architects invite their readers into the studio. This is a real and conceptual space where they work on recurring themes: operating within the city at the scale of building (urbanism); the interrelation of materiality, units of form, and building products (tectonics); and ways to collaborate with the life of a building in its context (preservation), among others. In addition to visual material drawn from all stages of the design process, what is equally important to Blanking is what is said and what can be heard in the studio. So much of architectural thinking and knowledge is presented, formulated, and traded in spoken words: the pinup, the meeting, the walkthrough. This material is the medium within which projects are formulated. Those exchanges inform this book, in which ideas and knowledge that are usually only spoken are written down and made accessible to readers.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo246016337.html

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