What is the ambition of making a book about a cultural practice like the Pelli studio? There are many possible answers to that question. However, the answers would have one thing in common: the ambition of a book like this is to get to the truth of the life that produces. Our aim is to first understand, and then communicate—to demonstrate, not illustrate—as fully as possible the complexity and richness, the dreams and doubts, the achievements and the struggles of the cultural project at the core of the Pelli studio.
The conventional approach of architectural publishing is achingly inadequate for such an ambition. While it pretends to clarity, it erases exhilaration. In the guise of objectivity it limits diversity and diminishes complexity. It imposes chronology on herky-jerky invention. It offers cleanliness in the place of the sometimes-messy reality of life and truth.
Our scheme instead is to cut through the practice knowing that we can’t possibly know it, knowing that any picture we might paint is a partial image. It is a compositional strategy that owes a debt to cinema and the jump cut, to futurism and the simultaneous image, and to recent developments in the life sciences. Our hope is that, taken together, these sections provide a richer, more vivid and complex understanding of this many-faceted, difficult and complex object we call the Pelli studio.