Mark Jarzombek

This book 'deconstructs' a single recently constructed house located in Seattle, WA, in an attempt to recover its backstory. The information is presented along four vectors: atoms, labours, sources, and ingredients. Though remarkably detailed, A House Deconstructed contends that a huge proportion of what we 'know' about the house is unknowable, not because our epistemological instruments aren't strong enough or...

This book argues that long-distance trade in luxury items – such as diamonds, gold, cinnamon, scented woods, ivory, and pearls, all of which require little overhead in their acquisition and were relatively easy to transport – played a foundational role in the creation of what we would call "global trade" in the first millennium CE. The book coins the term...