Höweler + Yoon Architecture, founded in 2001 and based in Boston, gained early praise for ephemeral and interactive public projects and today is recognized for striking works that combine conceptual imagination and technological sophistication. The firm’s body of work has expanded the scope of design beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and has won them numerous national and international awards. Verify in Field is Höweler + Yoon’s second book. Its title derives from a notational convention on architectural drawings to indicate that the information is subject to unknown conditions in the field. The book highlights verification as an integral part of the design process and demonstrates it as a productive tool to test ideas and act on the world. For both disciplinary and contractual reasons, the instruments of design—drawings, models, and prototypes—operate on the world at a distance. Techniques of prototyping, measurement, feedback, negotiation, and intervention inform the diverse output of the studio. Verify in Field features recent designs by Höweler + Yoon, including such projects as the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia; a floating outdoor classroom in Philadelphia; the MIT Museum; and a pedestrian bridge in Shanghai’s Expo Park. The book also examines the discipline’s pressing questions, as they relate to verification, uncertainty, and agency, in a series of essays by Eric Höweler and J. Meejin Yoon on topics that include means and methods, the public realm, energy and environments, the construction detail, and social media. These themes are echoed in conversations with collaborators, historians, and theorists: Adam Greenfield, Nader Tehrani, Kate Orff, Daniel Barber, and Ana Miljacki.

Eric Höweler is an architect, educator, and cofounder of  Höweler + Yoon, a multidisciplinary architecture and design studio that has garnered international recognition for a wide range of built work. Currently,  Höweler is an associate professor in architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He has authored Skyscraper, Vertical Now (Rizzoli/Universe 2003), and coauthored Expanded Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), and 1,001 Skyscrapers (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), with Meejin Yoon.

Meejin Yoon is an architect, designer, artist, educator, and cofounding principal of Höweler + Yoon. She is currently the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Previously, she was professor and head of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she began teaching in 2001. Her design work and research investigate the intersections between architecture, technology, and public space. She is the author of Absence (Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter Inc., 2003) and coauthor of Public Works: Unsolicited Small Projects for the Big Dig (Map Book Publishers, 2009).