The exhibition Rude forms among us focuses on the rude stone monument Dolmen de Vaour through construction and photography. The exhibition depicts a prototype of a house, built with structurally insulated panels (SIPs). It portrays the dolmen’s resolution as low, not high. Its joints as butted, not mitered. Its gaps as shimmed, not sculpted. Its stones as rude, not hewn. Neimark brings our attention to these rather ordinary formations alluding to forgotten narratives, eroded tectonics, and muddled grammar. Also featured in the show are original dolmen portraits by Eugène Trutat, brought for the first time to the United States by Frederique Gaillard, the head and curator of photography at the Museum de Toulouse. Perhaps unexpectedly, their rude forms seem to comfort us now—all of us, children included—as they bridge the gaps in space and time, between the canon and the world.

Anna Neimark is a principal of First Office, a practice cofounded with Andrew Atwood in 2011. Built projects include a collaboration on the Pinterest office headquarters in San Francisco, a temporary screening room at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and some small houses. Their texts have been published widely, in Log, Perspecta, Project, and Future Anterior, and have been compiled in a Graham Foundation book Nine Essays, published in 2015. That same year, First Office received the Architect’s Newspaper’s Best of Young Architects prize and became a finalist in MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program. Neimark is on the faculty at SCI-Arc. Her work focuses on prehistoric stone formations, called dolmens, and other rude stone monuments.