Trajan's Column, which is one of the great monuments of Roman antiquity, has been obsessively documented over the centuries by historians and archaeologists, and admired by tourists and Romans alike. Trajan's Hollow exposes, and renders material, qualities of the Column neglected amidst all this attention. Sparked by Piranesi's renowned engravings of the Column and the perennial tension between classical geometry and picturesque ruin, Stein's research traces--and ultimately reconstructs as architecture--the missing monument, one overlooked by these competing ideals. This book reconstitutes the chiseled, eroding interior of the Column and reclaims its progeny--casts and copies of the original produced over two thousand years. Charting the Column's extraction and its reproduction networks from the marble quarries of Carrara to the plaster diaspora of Paris, Trajan's Hollow proposes a new ethos of scanning and replication, saturating digital technologies with an expansive material awareness to amplify the projective capacity of historical inquiry.
Gissen, David: - David Gissen is the author of books, essays, exhibitions, and experimental writings and projects about environments, landscapes, cities, and buildings from our time and the historical past. Gissen is a professor at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and former visiting professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, History, Theory, Criticism program. He lectures and teaches in the areas of architecture, urban and landscape history-theory, preservation, writing, and design. At CCA, he co-directs the Experimental History Project and the MAAD History, Theory, Experiments degree.
Stein, Joshua G.: - Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft and the co-director of the Data Clay Network (www.data-clay.org), a forum for the exploration of digital techniques applied to ceramic materials. Radical Craft (www.radical-craft.com) is a Los Angeles-based studio that advances design tactics steeped in history--from archaeology to craft--to produce contemporary urban spaces and artifacts while evolving newly grounded approaches to the challenges posed by virtuality, velocity, and globalization. Stein is co-editor of Dingbat 2.0, the first full-length publication on the iconic Los Angeles apartment building type and has received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including multiple grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the AIA Upjohn research award, and the 2010-11 Marion O. and Maximilian E. Hoffman Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture. He is a former member of the LA Forum Board of Directors and has taught at the California College of the Arts, Cornell University, SCI-Arc, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. He is Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University where he also directs The Institute of Material Ecologies (T-IME).
Swaine, Michael: - Michael Swaine is an artist working in a variety of materials, methods, and media with a long-time focus on collaborative work--in particular with Futurefarmers. Swaine has participated in exhibitions at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Guggenheim, New York; among others. His Free Mending Library received notice and a Certificate of Honor from the Mayor of San Francisco. Swaine holds a BFA from Alfred University and an MA from the College of Environmental Design at University of California, Berkeley. He most recently taught at California College of the Arts and Mills College. Swaine began teaching at the University of Washington in 2015.
Waters, Michael J.: - Michael J. Waters is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He earned his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and was previously the Scott Opler Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford. He has also held fellowships at the Villa I Tatti, American Academy in Rome, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and Sir John Soane's Museum. His forthcoming book, Renaissance Architecture in the Making, examines how materials, methods of facture, building technology, and practices of reuse shaped the development of fifteenth-century Italian architecture. He has also published articles on the study of antiquity and early modern architectural prints, drawings, and treatises, and in 2011, he co-curated the exhibit "Variety, Archeology, and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice," at the University of Virginia Art Museum.
