We are elevating ourselves from the new flatness, rising to an inner surface that is also the outer. We enter an apartment filled with books through a ladder extending up from the ground. While climbing up, we enter a thinking satellite outside of the city, but still in its center. The ladder is our tool to literally "lead over" from one state—the city and its experience of everyday life—to another: being in the books. The ladder is moveable and often shaky, as thinking sometimes is. It is built to reach something physically higher, which is our way to “conquer” new ideas. The window is left ajar: a sign for a break-in, a hint of a romantic encounter, a trace of a conquest that occurred "live from up there"—we think, dream, and slow down. We'll learn in new ways as well as old, turning the archive into a place that looks out and speaks in.

Sam Chermayeff is an architect who lives and works in Berlin and New York. Together with Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge, he cofounded the office June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, after working for SANAA in Tokyo for five years. He continues to teach at the Dessau institute of Architecture and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

Clara Meister is a curator based in Berlin. She was the 2012 curator-in-residence at MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies at Ludlow 38 in New York, where her exhibition program is accompanied by a publication series from Sternberg Press. The year focuses on different concepts of translation and brings together an exhibition program with interdisciplinary forms. Meister is cofounder and editor of ...ment, a publishing initiative that operates at the intersections between culture, art, and politics. She is also cofounder of Soundfair, an exhibition collective based in Berlin that has set its purpose as the recontextualization of music through the audio-based exhibition of music as artworks. Meister holds a PhD from the HFBK Hamburg.

Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge is an architect from Germany who lives and works in Berlin and New York. Together with Sam Chermayeff, she cofounded the office June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, after working for SANAA in Tokyo for five years. She continues to teach at the Dessau institute of Architecture; the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University; and at Northeastern University in Boston and Berlin.