FS25

Arenella Final Reviews - 27th and 28th of May 2025, 9:00 - 18:00, with Pietro Airoldi, Elena Chiavi & Daniel Ganz

Please join for the launch of Dirty Old River

Wednesday 26 March, 19:00

Never Stop Reading

Spiegelgasse 18 / Untere Zäune

8001 Zürich

Dirty Old River brings together 12 essays by architect Tom Emerson over the past two decades. Written on very different occasions as contributions to books or articles in magazines, they explore a wide range of topics through the lens of architecture. The book’s title is borrowed from the British rock band The Kinks’ cult song Waterloo Sunset to evoke a journey through the interweaving of culture, imagination, and the built environment.

Emerson writes about architecture: how it is experienced, designed, drawn, and built, then also turns his attention to other, wider fields, from the transformation of materials to the nuances of human creativity, the explosive early works of his celebrated fellow architect Frank O. Gehry in LA, the artist Monika Sosnowska, the literary spaces of Georges Perec, photography and landscape.

He’ll be having a conversation with his longtime D-Arch collaborator Boris Gusic.

"... a rare piece of readable and engaging writing from a practising architect... it covers a lot of ground with a refreshing lightness of touch."

Financial Times, Best Art and Architecture Books of 2025

"Emerson is a highly readable, literary-minded writer. The texts display a keen sense of the touch and feel for architecture, its intellectual scaffolding, memory and the passage of time." ArtReview, Summer 2025