PRODUCTION POTENTIAL EXHIBITION BOOK AVAILABLE NOW FOR PRE-ORDER
The Production Potential Exhibition Book offers perspectives on industrial transformation and architectural adaptation from the world’s leading scholars and practitioners. Featuring six essays, building studies, urban analysis, and installation documentation. Available for pre-order now.
A glut of vacant office space is dragging American downtowns into crisis. Over 1 billion square feet of office space sits empty. This is a generational opportunity for reinvention.
Production Potential is a deeply researched and visionary exploration of a new building typology—light, distributed, technically-advanced, and urban-integrated manufacturing. This book articulates a powerful transformation agenda. Through adaptive urbanism, vacant offices find a new purpose, civic heritage resurfaces, and downtowns are vitalized with a future-facing economic driver: the next generation of production.
Deep research, rich historical narrative, and an examination of contemporary development projects reveals challenges and critical success factors for urban-integrated advanced manufacturing. The Production Potential book includes perspectives on industrial transformation, architectural adaptation, product design, and public policy from the world’s leading scholars and practitioners: Mariana Mazzucato, Dan Hill, Matt Shafer, Jennifer Guarino, Dan Breznitz, Elisabeth Beck Reynolds, and James Carnes. It collects data, maps, diagrams, and archival images from the Production Potential installation at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025.
Production Potential is an indispensable text for architects, developers, and policymakers who are ready to shape the next chapter of American urbanism.
CONTRIBUTORS
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Elisabeth Reynolds
Digital, Resilient and Green: Industrial transformation in the 21st century
Former White House policymaker, Special Assistant to the President for Manufacturing and Economic Development
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Mariana Mazzucato
Delivering economic transformation requires new mission-oriented tools and capabilities
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Jennifer Guarino
Revolutionizing the advanced manufacturing workforce
President/CEO Industrial Sewing and Innovation Center
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Dan Breznitz
Innovation and Production: Achieving shared prosperity
University Professor and Munk Chair of Innovation Studies at University of Toronto; Author of Innovation in Real Places
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Matt Shafer
The Means of Microproduction
Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University; Author of Cosmic Revolutions, under contract with Verso Books
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Dan Hill
The Backend of Production
Director, Melbourne School of Design; Professor in Built Environment, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne; author of Dark Matter and Trojan Horses