ORO Editions has launched Axiomatic Editions, a new publishing imprint guided by founding editorial director Ashley Simone and announced its 2025 titles.
“Axiomatic Editions is a publishing platform that locates its interests at the intersection of art, architecture, and design,” according to its mission statement. “We recognize media as a conduit for culture and elevate the content of books and other forms of publication to ensure their impact on contemporary discourse.”
ORO Editions, led by publisher Gordon Goff, previously created the imprint Applied Research and Design Publishing (AR+D) in 2014 with the goal of publishing and distributing “work that negotiates theory and practice within the fields of architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture, and design.” Axiomatic Editions, or Axio, aims to “expand this scope beyond applied design to art and other creative disciplines.”
Intentions and Experience
Axiomatic means self-evident or unquestionable. “I kept coming across this word when doing research for an essay I wrote for a recently published issue of AD about the early work of Lebbeus Woods, who used the word with some frequency in his notebooks,” Simone told AN. “We chose this name for the new imprint because the books Axio will make are envisioned to operate at a high level of discourse and design, teasing out the reciprocal relationships between the two. The translation of a book’s conceptual premise through design and its materialization in production strengthens a publication. Some readers will see this immediately, others may only feel it.”
Simone continued: “Having worked as a developmental editor for so long, I like to be involved in every stage of a book’s development, from ideation to editorial and also design and production. With the first set of titles, I am cultivating relationships with designers I’ve worked with in the past and seeding new ones. … Some designers I am working with are, like me, trained as architects, which makes for unique approaches to the process of translating a book’s thesis or conceptual orientation to the design of the book object, its rhythms, flows, and materiality.”
Simone earned her MArch from Columbia GSAPP where she worked as a teaching assistant to Kenneth Frampton. She later edited his book A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2015. She has edited other titles for Lars Müller Publishers and previously worked with ORO Editions on its 2022 book Occupation: Boundary: Art, Architecture, and Culture at the Water by Cathy Simon. Additionally, she is an adjunct associate professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. “My career has been built around books, through professional work and teaching,” Simone said. “I’m dedicated to advancing architecture and design culture, and I’m optimistic that we will soon be engaging with the art world as well.”
From a family background in books, art, music, and design—and after earning a degree in music composition from UCLA—Goff created ORO Editions with his brother, Raoul. The publishing house has operated for over 36 years and produced thousands of titles. ORO Editions delivers 80 to 100 publications per year across three imprints: ORO Editions, Applied Research and Design, and Goff Books. Goff commented about the launch of Axio, “We are very excited to launch Axiomatic Editions under the leadership of Ashley Simone and welcome the talent and expertise she brings to our thriving publications platform.”
Axio’s board comprises Kenneth Frampton, Jess Myers, Neil Spiller, Michael Szivos, Natasha Jen, Stephen Zacks, Matthew Worsnick, Carrie Eastman, and Lily Chishan Wong. Frampton, Myers, and Zacks have previously contributed to AN.
Axio’s logo and media was designed by A Lot of Moving Parts.
Upcoming Releases
Six titles are slated for publication in 2025:
Architects in Memories by Toshio Nakamura; translated by Junichi Satoh, with contributions by Kenneth Frampton, Michael Moran, and Ashley Simone; designed by Glen Cummings of MTWTF. A memoir by the former editor-in-chief of a+u magazine, this edition will reproduce, translate, and expand the original 2015 publication, which was published in a small print run in Japanese. Architects in Memories will be the first title to be released by Axiomatic Editions.
Mies van der Rohe: the Centric and the Peripheric by Randall Ott; designed by Seth Thompson of A Lot of Moving Parts. Ott examines formal patterns across Mies’s long and varied career and the architect’s exploration of the tension between centrality and gridded expansiveness.
Drawing Proper/Drawing Improper by Kevin Hirth; designed by Luke Bulman of Office of Luke Bulman. This project is a “meditation on contemporary architectural drawing practices through the lenses of 56 artifacts produced by 28 architectural practices from around the world. The drawings respond to a simple prompt: How is the act of architectural drawing dutiful? How can it be mischievous?”
Photography Book About the Evolution of Representation in Renaissance and Baroque Italian Ceiling Frescoes (working title); photographs by Arthur Becker; text by Dan Sherer and foreword by Martin Kemp; edited by Ashley Simone; designed by Glen Cummings of MTWTF. Becker’s photographs present ceiling frescoes in “a manner that allows one to meditate on the details.”
Landscapes for Adaptation: Evidence from China by Charles Waldheim with Boya Zhang; designed by Siena Scarff of Siena Scarff Design. “Landscapes for Adaptation analyzes the environmental performance of sixty built experiments in climate adaptation currently underway in China. The book assembles a menu of practical strategies and real-world tactics for landscape adaptation around the world.”
Turenscape Landscape Architecture (working title) by Kenneth Frampton and Ashley Simone; photographs by Ty Cole; designed by Siena Scarff of Siena Scarff Design.
More information about the new imprint is available on its website.
