NOCAUT Titles

Books & Posters from the NOCAUT catalogue:

Somnath Bhatt with Moad Musbahi Heart beat, Drum beat. IS A GALLERY and ¡guana books, 2024

The book features a new language of mark-making and storytelling through artist Somnath Bhatt's poeticism of form. Created in collaboration with Mexican design studio Iguana, offering audiences an immersive dive into a world of Bhatt’s visual pauses and play. 

Familiars Strangers Architecture of the Indimensionable. Familiars Strangers, 2019

In focusing attention on the measurable aspects of the built environment—studs sixteen inches on center, each room’s square footages precisely calculated, window details specified to the millimeter—architects lose sight of those spatial features that exceed the disciplinary hand of the ruler. There is no precise measure of the anxiety that spikes with our first step down into a dark basement, no notation that captures the supreme unease evoked by entering a house with a ghastly past, no volume to the discomfort we feel when alone in large spaces. Architecture, in other words, has its frightful qualities, and these terrors do not submit to standard units of measure.

Architecture of the Indimensionable explores these boundless horrors by consulting those dark souls who have not been afraid to survey the Hellmouths and musty attics of the world. It gathers together a collection of essays, interviews, and drawings sourced from these experts in the indimensionable: haunted house designers, ghost hunters, horror writers and those rare architectural practitioners who venture to cast their eyes towards terrors they cannot meter.

275 pages
4.625 × 7 inches

Dan M. Talbot An Immemorial Celtic Wind. Familiar Strangers, 2024

In An Immemorial Celtic Wind, Dan M. Talbott tells an ambiguous personal chroncile of half-timbered architecture through a collage of historical and popular texts. Shifting from memories of the author’s childhood home to passages drawn from antique trade journals, lost blog posts, and hyper-nationalist architectural screeds, the slim volume provides an richly opaque narrative of one of the West’s most recognizable (and least understood) architectural idioms. While the Talbott’s thesis remains illusive, we watch on as the four horsemen of history, identity, style, and building technology emerge from the darkened plumes of primeval Europe to spread across the suburbs of America. Eschewing effective authorship, Talbott plies myth and meaninglessness to implicitly position Tudoresque as the Neofolk of domestic architecture in this curiously illustrated offering from Familars Strangers.

40 pages
4.75 x 6.75 inches

Matt Wagstaffe Haunting of the Penthouse. Familar Strangers, 2022.

In 2018, seeking an answer to this question, Familiars Strangers invited a team of paranormal investigators to examine a prototypically haunted space: a locked attic room—or, to be specific, the locked penthouse atop the Paul Rudolph-designed Yale School of Architecture (Rudolph Hall). The Haunting of the Penthouse narrates this night and its frightful discoveries, the most notable of which may be that the figure-ground reversal of paranormal investigators—who listen not to signal but to noise—has much to teach architectural analysts. In this light, Rudolph Hall can be defined as much by its intended program as it can by the ways in which it serves as a framework for counter-programmatic acts: revolutionary student demands, arson, amatory misuses of space, and all the other noise for which Rudolph Hall inadvertently serves as channel.

192 pages
4.75 x 7 inches

Cynthia magazine Monica Zulema / Kompa Pollo poster. Nocaut, 2024 27 x 34 inches (unfolded)

Poster features a double-sided photograph of corridos tumbados musician Kompa Pollo, shot in la Finikera by photographer Monica Zulema.