Volume partner Eric Heiman was invited to speak at the California College of the Arts (CCA) as part of its Visual & Critical Studies Forum program. The talk, “Context is Everything,” touched on how he doesn’t see himself as professional writer or critic, but rather how writing is one part of a larger mosaic of his entire role as a designer. Eric then discussed his article on the Federal Building in San Francisco (designed by Morphosis), unpacking its conceits through the writers that have influenced his work and concluding with a plea for a much more egalitarian design and design discourse:
“We will not move design and architecture—and by extension its discourse—forward if we keep talking and pitching our work to each other, with language only we understand, using language that excludes rather than includes. We live in the age of dialogue and reaction (for better or worse). If design is (truly) Everything, as my talk was renamed accidentally. Then design writing every so often should involve everyone, too.”