This experimental production combines the potential of digital and print-on-demand publishing for the dissemination of ideas and the provoking of debate, while challenging conventional commercial frameworks of distribution. Looking back at the work of muf architecture/art and their collaborations with artists, writers, and designers in London, America, and Europe, the inner-workings of urban development from a small corner of the UK is explored within a wider global context and from a lateral perspective. muf's working processes are revealed in a constellation of parts including a reflection on twentieth-century muf, a family tree, and explorations of a selection of muf's twenty-first-century built and imagined interventions into the public realm, chosen to identify and explore muf's social ideals and underlying beliefs. These include critical essays, visual catalogues, and hard facts. The project is edited and written by Helen Thomas, senior research fellow at ETH Zurich and former senior editor at Phaidon Press, with muf directors Liza Fior and Katherine Clarke.

Katherine Clarke, artist, and Liza Fior, architect, have developed a body of work through their shared project: muf architecture/art LLP, active since the mid-1990s, in collaboration with the muf studio. Projects include public spaces located mainly, but not exclusively, in east London; five years spent devoted to possible legacies for the site of the London Olympics; various situations of incremental urbanism—from Pittsburgh’s Northside and East London’s Dalston to Sweden’s Gothenburg and Rotterdam’s Hofbogen Viaduct. The theme of close-looking as a response to grand plans has been a constant theme, as was described and presented at the Twelfth Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, when muf architecture/art authored the British Pavilion. More recently, it has been explored in the project Prototyping Uncertainty: Art Camp 2010–2014. Awards received by muf architecture include the European Prize for Public Space (2008), and nominations for both the Swiss Prize for Architecture and the Mies van de Rohe Award.

Helen Thomas is an architect and editor who, having once practiced architecture in London and Seville, has subsequently used the strategic, problem-solving, and imaginative education that an architect has to work across the wider field of the discipline. Interested in how history is made in colonial and postcolonial situations, especially in post-revolutionary Mexico, which was the subject of her PhD, she has lectured on and interpreted architecture at London Metropolitan University, the Architectural Association, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Phaidon Press. Currently a research fellow at ETH Zurich and editorial director at tabletwoproductions, her knowledge of the mechanics of publishing, both in print and online, is put to effect in the this collaborative project.