Real: Restaging Criticism is a publication emerging from Yale School of Architecture’s Spring 2025 seminar titled Restaging Criticism, taught by critic and writer Christopher Hawthorne. The seminar investigates one of architecture’s most pressing contemporary questions: what it means for something to be real in a moment when digital simulation, mediated imagery, and authentic reproductions increasingly shape the built environment.

Across eleven essays, the book maps architecture’s ongoing struggle with authenticity, illusion, and representation by drawing on historical precedents, contemporary technologies, and shifting public expectations. Hawthorne’s introduction revisits the writing of critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who warned that replicas and scenographic environments risk replacing true historical traces with sanitized fictions. This conversation expands into the present, examining deepfakes, mediated urban space, architectural exhibition practices, digital production tools, and the evolving cultural influence of architecture.

Each essay contributes a different dimension to this exploration. Nicholas Arvanitis contrasts architecture’s material constraints with the freedom of electronic music, arguing that architecture’s continued relevance depends on embracing physicality rather than chasing digital frictionlessness. Aniruddh Sharan interrogates the concept of vernacular materials, revealing the complex global flows of demolition waste and supply chains that destabilize assumptions about locality and authenticity. Other authors analyze questions of identity, authorship, curation, and public perception. Together, the essays position architecture as a practice that must constantly negotiate what is real and what is manufactured.

Studio Loutsis approached the publication with this context in mind. The design centers on a visual system that highlights the instability of the real and the mediated nature of architectural representation. The display text was derived from glitch-based visual distortions, creating graphic interruptions that echo themes of fractured authenticity and digital manipulation present throughout the book. The overall system prioritizes clarity while allowing for intentional ruptures through layering, shifts in typographic rhythm, and a tension between analog and digital sensibilities. A strong underlying grid creates order, yet each essay is given a spatial tempo that reflects its unique critical position. The resulting publication operates as both a scholarly document and a visual argument, asserting that criticism gains meaning when its representations provoke inquiry rather than simply describe architecture.