Blinds

Blinds is the first of three risograph-printed pamphlets by Philip Tomaru that read the interior of a Mies van der Rohe apartment building through its architecture of privacy.

Photographed at Baltimore's Highfield House between 2001 and 2015, the series works through blinds, walls, and windows in turn (Blinds first, followed by Walls and Windows), each volume printed with a different reproduction method tied to its subject. The book is a bound, staple-stitched pamphlet of sixteen unnumbered leaves, its title taken from the colophon rather than a printed cover.

Tomaru lived in Highfield House, one of Mies van der Rohe's last residential commissions, and the trilogy works through the building's modernist logic of transparency and enclosure as lived experience rather than architectural history. Arts & Sciences Projects published the series alongside public programming, including an event at Printed Matter timed to Mies van der Rohe's 130th birthday.