City Made of Words

City Made of Words is a response to Le Corbusier’s The Radiant City, a meditation on the distance between rhetoric and action, an exploration of how architectural theory and federal legislation gave birth to urban renewal, and the ways that the present housing crisis in NYC layers on top of previous waves of displacement.

This book is one of a series of publications that I made over the course of a year of research into the history of affordable housing and tenant movements in NYC. I began working on it after taking a copy of The Radiant City out of the library at the New School, where I teach. I pretty quickly recognized this bonkers work of modernist architectural theory to be an artist book, and wanted to make a response to it. Cities of Words was printed using letterpress, pressure printing, monoprinting, and riso in messy, improvisational layers, in an edition of 30 in the fall of 2025 and the early winter of 2026 at the Center for Book Arts.