Author Q&A: The BLDGBLOG Book

To begin, can you tell us what the BLDGBLOG book is? Is this a direct printing of the original blog posts? Could dedicated readers print the posts, bind it in a Trapper Keeper, and sell copies alongside bootleg DVDs of Night at the Museum 2?

The book's not just a print-out of the blog, thankfully, even if long-term readers will definitely recognize some things. What I did was deliberately set up a chapter structure for the book that would allow me to explore some of the most consistent themes on the blog—things like underground exploration, sound, and climate change. However, I also tried to do it in a way that wouldn't really be possible on the blog, either because of reader attention span or simply because of where my own stamina runs out when writing a post. So it's definitely a book; it's not just a blog printed out on paper. And there is a lot of new content—loads of new interviews and so on. There's a ton of new stuff in there, actually, and the old stuff's all been re-linked and edited.

To call BLDGBLOG prolific is an understatement. How did you select the content that would appear in the book?

Selecting what would go into the book just sort of happened organically. I surrounded myself with notes and files and long lists of things that I wanted to include – you know, it's my first book so I had this gigantic list of things I wanted to put in there! And, at first, I ended up choosing way too much. For instance, there were these huge chapters that just didn't make the cut—stuff about J.G. Ballard, smaller bits about William Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, even more stuff about green design and sustainable building. I honestly think I must have cut the length of the book again out of the final manuscript—at one point it was double the length!

Blogs are easy to update, easy to add to, whereas books are naturally a more static medium. So is the BLDGBLOG book going to be Volume I of a larger print corpus? The first book of an Encyclopedia of Sublime Conjecture?

Yeah, I'd absolutely love for there to be future BLDGBLOG Books—volumes 2, 3, etc.—but so much of that depends on factors I can't control: publisher interest, the marketplace, my own interest in a year's time, etc. So, for now, I'd say it makes more sense just to stick with what I can control, such as the blog itself, and to think of the book more like one simple thing that's now finished and that might still lead onward to other projects later. Maybe a novel, maybe an academic book, maybe a screenplay, maybe something I haven't even imagined—a building, a housing project, a new tectonic plate. Who knows. Maybe I'll design a series of new Hawaiis extending halfway south to the equator...Honestly, I have no idea what's next! I'll run for mayor of Los Angeles.

In translating BLDGBLOG from website to a printed book, were there any new opportuniites offered by the change in media? Was there anything you did with the book that you couldn't have done with a website?

I think I'd say, on the most basic level, that the sheer length of chapters was something that wouldn't have worked on the blog. In other words, there really is a limit to reader patience online. However, there's also a limit to how long I want to sit there and write things (because I write at least 99.9% of all my posts in one sitting). Having said that, though, there's also a slightly irritating assumption today that bloggers are editorially challenged and only semi-literate, so it was nice to use longer chapters almost as proof that bloggers can, in fact, sustain thought processes long enough to achieve something more like traditional literature. Additionally, though, the layout of the pages themselves allowed for a nice, changing, hybrid use of images, sidebars, texts, etc., and that also would not have been possible on a website where you've got one layout and one layout only. Maybe we should have blogs that continually change layout – text size, image placement, color. Anyway, most importantly it's a book—and that means you can take this thing out with you to places that don't have electricity or wifi access. That's something that will always be a limit with blogs: when the power goes out or the wifi fades, everything you've written will disappear.

Do you think your content is more appropriate for one format over the other?

What I try to do is put web-appropriate content on the web and book-appropriate content into the book. I know that's lame, but it's just an editorial decision you have to make. And it's as much gut instinct as anything else, I'd say.

Within the first few sentences of The BLDGBLOG book, you mention that at the time you started the blog, you were working on a novel about "surveillance, terrorism, independent film, and the London Underground"—all ideas that are discussed in detail on BLDGBLOG, and now in the book as well. Do you still have plans for that original novel? Or do you think the BLDGBLOG book—with its collection of essays, interviews, fictions, drawings, and photographs—has been a better way to express the concepts that so intrigue you?

That book—it's called Film Night—is actually pretty good, to be honest! I really like it. But, you know, by now, I think it's better just to look at it as my initiation into the world of the fiction writer: producing this massive thing that now just sits there, unread, in a steamer trunk. That's life. You win some things, but you lose almost literally everything else. However, I wouldn't be so quick to differentiate between fiction and BLDGBLOG. I think, in many ways, that what I've been doing all along –or trying to do, and especially with parts of The BLDGBLOG Book—is a kind of literary blur between fiction and architectural criticism. I find it literally impossible not to hear things or read things, from news reports to articles in New Scientist to things my friends tell me, without imagining the possible storylines, plots, or other fictional implications of what I've just heard. Some random article in the New York Times could be the perfect set-up for a videogame, for instance. It's just a question of looking for those sorts of things. But why not combine architectural criticism with fiction? It's unbelievably fun—as well as critically useful.

With BLDGBLOG , you discuss juxtaposing objects and contexts—you mention Christopher Wren in the context of ancient ruins in the Cambodian Rainforest, for example. Did you try to adapt this juxtapositioning for the book? I'm thinking picture and caption, image and story, etc.

Everything comes back to architecture and landscape—and vice versa: architecture and landscape lead to everything. They're doorways. If you're talking about a new building in Los Angeles or Tokyo or San Francisco, then you're talking about seismic safety, and if you're talking about seismic safety then you're talking about earthquakes, which is plate tectonics, which is the structure of continents, which is the way that planets form throughout the universe—and so it's geology and crystallization, and you can even include things like old myths of what causes the earth to shake. And so you're talking about anthropology. Of course, you can also reverse-engineer almost all of this—and so, by way of myth or the planetary sciences, you can work your way back to a single house near the San Andreas Fault in San Francisco. And the one guiding theme throughout all of it is architecture and landscape. You just have to connect things and peel things away.

The book is packed with information. Even the margins and appendixes are good reads. Did you have input into the layout/form of the book—the design, the way information is presented? If so, was there any particular text or texts you looked to for inspiration?

Doing that in the book was relatively easy, but mostly because I had awesome graphic designers. MacFadden & Thorpe, in San Francisco, just really nailed this thing. I can't thank them enough. I even have fantastic memories of these long winter evenings that I would spend after work, down in the Mission with Scott Thorpe, going over the book almost literally millimeter by millimeter to get the text and image combinations right, and to get page efficiency vs. visual density right, and really just to lock this thing up. We worked really hard to figure out how the book should look and where empty spaces could be filled with new content—sometimes even writing new things on a day or two's notice just to get it in there. It was a ton of fun. Making books should always be like that: get authors together with designers, give them some coffee, and go.

You often write and speak about films, websites, and other forms of media. The book's "further reading" appendix even lists such sources. Going forward with BLDGBLOG, is there another media you'd like to explore? Film/video/animation, in particular comes to mind...

Absolutely—I have definite plans to work in other media. Films, buildings, videogames—all of it sounds good. I'll open a museum somewhere. As long as I don't die in a plane crash, or get run over by a gravel truck, hopefully some cool things will come up in the next few years.