Atlas of Another America: An Architectural Fiction by Keith Krumwiede
Park Books, 2016
Hardcover, 272 pages

[All images courtesy of Park Books]

Opening this sizable, almost atlas-sized book from Switzerland's Park Books I didn't know what to expect. Actually I wasn't expecting a whole lot, given the subtitle, "an architectural fiction"; while I appreciate the idea of adding narrative to architecture, most of what I've encountered in the realm of "architectural fiction" has left me wanting. Yet I was pleasantly surprised with Keith Krumwiede's creation, which is more a graphical narrative than an architect's attempt to force a fictional story into an architectural wrapper.

His subject, broadly, is the United States and, more specifically, home ownership and the house plans developed by large-scale home builders. These subjects are analyzed and critiqued through a fictional place, Freedomland, whose structure follows from the "grand agrarian democratic tradition of Mr. Thomas Jefferson," but also takes "into consideration the current economic and political order." Like a traditional atlas, the Atlas of Another America moves from the large scale to the small scale, from the country cut up into six-square-mile townships to the house plans grouped onto the smallest (330-foot-square) of the nested squares. A highly rational process ? what Krumwiede calls "Checkerboard Logic" ? underlies the shift from big to ...