An attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion
of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content. Some may call it the first
manifesto of the twenty-first century for it lays down a new way to think about architecture.
Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise for it provides a discursive
container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to SITELESS is a
new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author a young
French architect practicing in Tokyo admits he didn't do this out of reverence toward
architecture but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline as a sort of compulsive
reaction. What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site
program and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms and as free of
words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published. The 1001 building forms in
SITELESS include structural parasites chain link towers ball bearing floors corrugated
corners exponential balconies radial facades crawling frames forensic housing and other
architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation
to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the
architectural imagination to draw from. The forms drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific
shapes) but from a constant viewing angle are presented twelve to a page with no scale order
or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages
Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a scale test showing what happens when one of
these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The
book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building
proportions.
