New Zealand-born, New York-based architect and theorist Mark Wigley has made a career out of flipping the field’s conventions. A professor at Columbia University’s GSAPP since the early 2000s (he also served as dean from 2004 to 2014), and co-founder, with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman, of Volume magazine, he has made a specialty of revisionist architectural histories that find novel ways to bring pop culture into dialogue with the discipline. From his seminal 1988 MoMA show Deconstructivist Architecture, co-curated with Philip Johnson, which interrogated the dilemmas inherent to the profession, to White Walls, Designer Dresses (MIT Press, 1995), which ties together contemporary architecture with fashion design, or his most recent book, Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-architectural Transmissions (Sternberg Press, 2021), on the anti-architect’s embrace of TV, Wigley’s thinking sets out to reexamine our foundations. Indeed, in Are We Human? (Lars Müller, 2016), he and co-author Beatriz Colomina explored the role played by design in the very definition of our species. While the so-called built environment can seem as invisible as air, Wigley examines design’s history by confronting its present, solidifying himself as one of the pioneers of modern architectural theory.