Blanking, an annotated archive of projects and thoughts on architecture by Professor Troy Schaum and architect and educator Rosalyne Shieh has been published by Park Books. The volume marks the first monographic publication on the work and ideas developed through Schaum and Shieh’s fifteen years of collaboration, offering a reflection on architectural practice as both built work and intellectual inquiry.
“At the Rice School of Architecture, we are deeply invested in the education of both professional architects and public intellectuals,” said Dean Igor Marjanović. “This pedagogical approach is enabled by an extraordinary cohort of scholar-practitioners on our faculty, including Troy Schaum. His monograph with Rosalyne Shieh is an exercise in both design and discourse. A combination of intellectual biography, project files, and positioning papers, this book is a reminder of the importance of archives for architects, inviting us to revisit texts, buildings, and drawings that make not only an office but also the discourse at large.”
The book leverages the design studio as both a physical and conceptual space—one where projects emerge through ongoing conversations around urbanism, tectonics, preservation, and the social life of buildings. Drawing on sketches, models, construction documents, photographs, and transcribed studio conversations, the book foregrounds forms of architectural knowledge that are often spoken, exchanged, and refined in practice but rarely documented in print.
Borrowing its title from the process of metal fabrication, Blanking reframes architectural practice with a conceptual lexicon of images, terms, and dialogues. In addition to projects by Schaum/Shieh, the volume includes conversations with Stan Allen, Garnette Cadogan, Flavin Judd, and Sarah Whiting, situating the work within a broader discourse on architecture, pedagogy, and contemporary practice.
Schaum has taught at the Rice School of Architecture since 2008, where his design research explores the relationship between form, politics, and the contemporary city. He currently directs Schaum Architects based in Houston, Texas.