The first compendium of its kind, Archetypes is a monographic publication featuring Canadian artist David K. Ross' photographs of full-scale mock-ups on construction sites around the globe. Staged at night, with dramatic lighting that isolates the structures from their surroundings, full-scale mock-ups are illuminated as a form of proto-architecture. Being more than an artistic photographic record of building technologies and typologies, the publication’s interpretive role will function as an expansive pedagogical tool and as an effective platform to consider what it means to pre-construct buildings in all their complexity at this moment in time. The photographic portfolio is completed with essays by Sky Goodden, Reto Geiser, Ted Kesik, and Peter Sealy, who anchor the mock-up in its historical, technological, cultural, and civic contexts.

David K. Ross’ projects lie at the intersection of photography, film, and installation, with a particular conceptual focus on the ephemeral and inchoate aspects of civic or cultural infrastructures. His projects have been presented in numerous museums and film festivals, including Sharjah Film Platform, The Swiss Institute, Rencontres Internationale Paris/Berlin, the Rice Media Center, CineMarfa, the Graham Foundation, the Toronto International Film Festival, and at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. His work can be found in the permanent collections of private and public institutions including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and the National Gallery of Canada. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants for his work including support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts, Arts Council England, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Between 2012 and 2015 he was a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he led courses on photography, film making, and the artistic and scientific history of clouds. Currently, Ross is a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He holds an MArch from the University of Toronto (2002).

Reto Geiser is a scholar of modern architecture with a focus on the intersections between architecture, pedagogy, and media. He is associate professor of architecture and director of undergraduate studies at the Rice University School of Architecture, where he teaches history, theory, and design. Geiser is the author of Giedion and America: Repositioning the History of Modern Architecture (2018), the coauthor of Reading Revolutionaries (2014), and the editor of the award-winning House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House (2016) and Explorations in Architecture (2008). He has curated the exhibition Explorations: Teaching, Design, Research, Switzerland’s official contribution to the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, and the installation Rooms for Books at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. A founding partner in the Houston-based design practice MG&Co., he is developing spatial strategies in a range of scales from the book to the house.

Sky Goodden is the founding publisher and editor of Momus, an international online art publication and podcast that stresses a return to art criticism. Momus has been critically recognized, and widely read and shared. It was shortlisted for two International Awards for Art Criticism in 2016, and two of its contributing editors were again shortlisted for the IAAC in 2018. As of its fourth anniversary, Momus has grown an audience of over 850,000 readers. Its first print compendium, Momus: A Return to Art Criticism Vol. 1 (2014–17), was published in 2017, which Goodden toured across Canada, the US, and Mexico. She holds a master’s in criticism and curatorial practice from OCAD University. She has published in Modern Painters, Canadian Art, C Magazine, the National Post, and Art21, and Frieze. Goodden was an artist-in-residence at Concordia University, Montréal for 2018–19.

Ted Kesik is a professor of building science in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. His career focus is the integration of professional practice, research, and teaching. He entered the construction industry in 1974 and has since gained extensive experience in various aspects of building enclosure design, energy modeling, quality assurance, commissioning, performance verification, and building systems integration. Kesik’s research interests include resilience, sustainability, durability, high performance buildings, life cycle assessment, and building performance simulation. His current research involves the development of design guidelines for low-carbon buildings that are resilient, sustainable, and adaptable to climate change.

Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. He holds architecture degrees from the McGill University School of Architecture and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he was a Frank Knox fellow. He recently completed his PhD at Harvard on the emergence of a photographic visual regime in nineteenth-century architectural publications, seen through the lens of truth—in both architecture and its representations.

Standpunkte was founded in 2005 to promote dialogue and critical exchange among emerging voices in architecture and its related fields. While our Swiss organization initially served as a platform for the discussion and exhibition of architecture, we began making books in 2010, reaching a broader international audience in the process. Standpunkte publishes manifestos, critical investigations, and designs that represent current positions or comment on historical subjects from a contemporary perspective, and it engages critically with architectural culture on all scales from the built environment to speculative visions. Our publications aspire to amalgamate design and content, and through their emergence, we encourage a productive collaboration between architects, artists, graphic designers, and writers. Over the past decade, Standpunkte has published over a dozen of books, many of which challenge the commercial limitations of architectural publishing.