Trace Elements [Paperback]

Aranda\Lasch is a studio based in New York and Tucson established by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch. They are included in the permanent collection of the MoMA and winners of the United States Artists Award and Emerging Architects Award. Their early work is the subject of the book Pamphlet Architecture #27: Tooling."Trace elements" are minerals that exist in minute quantities necessary for the growth and development of cells. Exposure to excessive quantities is toxic, but without them our bodies would atrophy. They are the crystalline structures that support life. Over the past decade, Aranda\Lasch has focused obsessively on these structures as a form of both organization and expression for architecture. Their projects explore the interplay between rule-based systems and human ritual. In scale, this work lies somewhere between furniture and building, so that what is built, drawn, and projected gives human measure to procedural thinking.

Published on the occasion of the studio's exhibition "Meeting the Clouds Halfway" at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Tucson, this book is a collection of recent explorations into modularity, craft, pattern, rhythm, material, and memory. Trace Elements documents a wide-ranging and yet sharply focused body of work from an office dedicated both to intellectual exploration and the honing of a distinct design sensibility.