A memo is the organizational equivalent of a love letter—a missive written in hopes of coaxing the company into a state of passionate vitality. The circulation of ideas in architecture would benefit from the reintroduction of this media format. The Memo: Writing to Architecture series quickly and economically publishes short theoretical texts by practitioners with timely agendas. They are written to the field of architecture in hopes that others will feel their motivational force, as vigorous ideas ripe for elaboration. The series is designed by Twelve.

Matthew Allen, coeditor of the Memo series, is a professor at Washington University in St Louis. He is a historian, theorist, and critic who holds a PhD and a master’s of architecture degree from Harvard University, and he is the author of Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture (gta Verlag, 2023). Allen has published essays in Log, Architectural Record, the New York Review of Architecture, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and other venues, and his research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among other institutions. Allen has worked for MOS, Preston Scott Cohen, and other firms charting new directions in architecture. His writing focuses on the cultural consequences of the technological shifts of the past century.

Joseph Bedford, coeditor of the Memo series, is an associate professor of history and theory at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2020) as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as the Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Review Quarterly, AA Files, OASE, Log and the New York Review of Architecture. He is the series editor of a new book series at Bloomsbury Press called Architecture Exchange: Engagements with Contemporary Theory as well as the e-flux Architecture series Theory’s Curriculum. He was educated at Princeton University, The Cooper Union, and Cambridge University where he received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and doctorate and he was the recipient of a one-year Rome Scholarship at The British School in Rome. His scholarship explores the intellectual history of architectural thought in the later third of the twentieth century as it lays at the intersection between philosophy, theory and architectural education.

Memo author Andrew Atwood is a licensed architect in California and an associate professor of architecture at University of California, Berkeley. He is a part of First Office, an architecture firm based in Los Angeles with Anna Neimark. First Office has completed a range of built work, including houses, sheds, garages, offices, galleries, installations, and dolmens. Their work has been widely published in The Architect’s Newspaper, Log, Architect, PRAXIS, and other outlets. Atwood’s work explores the tools of architectural practice and their specific relationship to the production of buildings. He is the author of Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2018), and coauthor, with Neimark, of Nine Essays (Treatise series, Graham Foundation, 2015).

Memo author Andrew Holder is coprincipal of the The LADG and visiting associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. His research and design focus on the idea of “assembly”—using the way architecture is made as a prompt for how it participates in social formations. Holder’s recent work has been published in A+U, Metropolis, the Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Young Architects 16, a+t, Log, Pidgin, Project, and RM 1000. He is a frequent lecturer and guest critic at institutions across the United States and has held teaching appointments at the University of Michigan;, the University of Queensland; University of California, Los Angeles; Southern California Institute of Architecture; Otis College of Art and Design; and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he served as program director for the MArch I degree track. His firm has received several awards, including two Progressive Architecture Awards, the League Prize from The Architectural League of New York, and multiple citations from the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Archtiects.

Memo author Karel Klein is an architect and educator who has been working with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies since 2016. Her ongoing research explores both crossbred image-objects produced using atypically trained GANs and, more recently, material migrations through LoRA models that enable architectural elements to acquire qualities from unrelated photographic sources. Klein’s work investigates the capacity of AI-generated imagery for contemporary myth-making in architecture, and it has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; the FRAC Institute, Orleans, France; Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis; and SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent essays in pursuit of this work include “Verto Pellis” in OffRamp, “Machines are Braver than Art” in Paprika, and “Machines À Rechercher,” in Log. Her most recent essay, “To Think a New Thing, AI, Metaphor and the Fantasies of Knowing,” was published in The Plan. Karel teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), University of Texas at Austin, Washington University in St. Louis, and University of California, Los Angeles.

Memo author Jaffer Kolb is cofounder and principal of the award-winning architecture practice New Affiliates. His work explores how architecture is shaped by, and shapes, local economies and political systems through its practice and its form. He teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and was the 2015 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College. Previously, he worked on the 13th Venice Architecture Biennial under David Chipperfield and before that was the United States editor for the Architectural Review. He holds a master’s of architecture from Princeton University, a master’s of urban planning from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s of arts in film studies from Wesleyan University.

Memo author Michael Meredith is an architect, cofounder of MOS Architects, and professor of architecture at Princeton University School of Architecture. His writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Log, Perspecta, A+U, El Croquis, 2G, AD, Praxis, Abitare, Domus, and Harvard Design Magazine. Meredith previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto. Together with his partner Hilary Sample, Meredith is the recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize; the United States Artists Award; the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum National Design Award; the Global Holcim Award; the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and The Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices. Sample and Meredith’s design work is held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale Art Gallery, and in the special collections of the Harvard University Frances Loeb Library and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

Memo author Anna Neimark is principal of First Office, a practice cofounded with Andrew Atwood. Built projects have primarily focused on residential and office rehabs and gallery installations. Her texts, both independent and in collaboration with Atwood, have been published widely, in Log, Future Anterior, Perspecta, Project, and Think Space Pamphlets, and have been compiled in the book Nine Essays (Treatise series, Graham Foundation, 2015). First Office has received numerous honors in competitions, including The Architectural League Prize, The Architect’s Newspaper Best of Young Architects, and the nomination as a finalist in the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program 2016. Prior to joining the faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Neimark taught at the University of Southern California and worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and New York. She holds a bachelor’s of arts in architecture from Princeton University and a master’s of architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Memo author Curtis Roth is an associate professor of architecture at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. He holds a master’s of architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been a resident fellow at institutions including the Akademie Schloss Solitude and Civitella Ranieri. His research involves drawings, software, and writing that explore new formations of subjectivity within contemporary networks of computation and labor. Roth’s work has appeared in publications such as e-flux, Thresholds, and Perspecta, and has been exhibited internationally, including at ZKM Karlsruhe and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Memo author Hilary Sample is an American architect, educator, and author. She is the cofounder of MOS Architects in New York, and she holds the inaugural IDC Foundation Professorship in Housing Design at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Her research, exhibitions, and built work at MOS is known for its unconventional approach to design across types and media—from housing to public space and from books to buildings.

Memo author Michael Young is an associate professor and coordinator of graduate studies at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. He is the author of The Estranged Object (Treatise series, Graham Foundation. 2015) and Reality Modeled After Images (Routledge, 2021). His practice, Young & Ayata, has received the Progressive Architecture Award, Design Vanguard Award, Young Architects Prize, AIANY Honor Award, and the 2025 Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Young was the recipient of the 2019–20 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

The Architecture Exchange (AE) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity dedicated to the fostering of architectural discourse, debate and education. It seeks to cultivate a dialogue between theory and practice that connects design agendas to larger political, historical, cultural, and social ideas, and which in turn fosters the progress of architecture as an intellectual and cultural enterprise.