The book Buildings and Almost Buildings explores the work of nARCHITECTS as a single project—an anti-monograph with a subtle manifesto about the open-ended, incomplete, and ambiguous in architecture. Rather than a project-by-project organization, it explores the process, through chapters structured around different modes of representation, of how nARCHITECTS addresses contemporary issues of a world in flux. Is architecture inherently complete? Or is it a state of incompletion and seeming inadequacy that incites us to imagine architecture as an armature for an ever-changing daily life? In both their ephemeral and permanent projects for buildings and public spaces, the architects see the formal and social potential of an architecture that remains somehow incomplete and ambiguously perceived—an almost building.

Eric Bunge is co-founding principal of nARCHITECTS and an adjunct assistant professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (GSAPP). Bunge received a master’s of architecture from Harvard University and a bachelor’s of architecture from McGill University. Prior to founding nARCHITECTS, he trained in New York, Boston, Paris, Calcutta, and London. He has also taught at Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and Columbia/Barnard Colleges, and as a visiting professor at Harvard University, Yale University, University of California Berkeley, and University of Toronto.

Mimi Hoang is co-founding principal of nARCHITECTS and also an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP.  Hoang received a master’s of architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BSc in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has held previous adjunct positions at Yale University, Harvard University, and University of California Berkeley. She regularly lectures on the work of nARCHITECTS and the themes of innovative contemporary practices, density, new housing models, and women in architecture.

nARCHITECTS combines innovative concepts, social engagement, and technical experimentation in addressing contemporary issues of a world in flux.  The work of the practice instigates relationships between architecture, public space, landscape, and their dynamically changing contexts. nARCHITECTS has been honored with an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, a national AIA Honor Award, the AIANY's Andrew J. Thomson Award for Pioneering in Housing, several AIA NY Design Honor Awards, the Architectural League's Emerging Voices, and the Canadian Professional Rome Prize.