Mongrel Rapture: The Architecture of Ashton Raggatt McDougall (book design)

BACKGROUND Contemporary art and design publishing is concerned, on the one hand, with the efficacy and poetics of the codex form (De Bondt and Muggeridge, 2009; Kinross and Hochuli, 1996). On the other hand it is concerned with making tacit practice knowledge explicit (Schön, 1983; Carter, 2004). And finally it is navigating the new context of post-digital print (Ludovico, 2012). In the cross section of these concerns, and in this specific antipodean context, this research asks: what new possibilities are there for architectural book publishing? CONTRIBUTION Mongrel Rapture addresses this question through hybridity and multiplicity. It proposes a new hybrid book through the combination of many kinds of book-monograph, journal, illuminated manuscript, comic, photo book, index. In doing this it becomes a research project and object-lesson in the form of the book and also in the possibilities of the architectural monograph. This involved collaborative and speculative practice-based research as well as archival research (into both the form of the book as well as the relationship between the book and architecture practice). SIGNIFICANCE Mongrel Rapture was published in an edition of 2000 and distributed internationally through Oro Editions (San Francisco). In 2015 Mongrel Rapture won the Victorian award for architecture in the media (AIA), and a pinnacle award (AGDA)-the highest honour awarded by that organisation (it was also the Judges Choice of the awards for two jurors). In 2016, it won two awards in the Australian Book Designers Association awards including Designers' Choice Book of the Year (voted by the ABDA membership), and was named as one of the 50 books of the year in Design Observer's 50 Books | 50 covers competition (an international survey award). It was also the subject of features in The Age and Australian Design Review, and formed a substantial part of a Reputations Profile on the researcher published by Eye Magazine in 2016.