Jacobus, Frank
Jacobus, Frank
Bio Sketch
Frank Jacobus is an American architect, designer, educator, and academic leader (AIA): principal of SILO AR+D, the architecture, research, and design practice he founded in 2012 with Marc Manack, operating from Fayetteville (AR), Charlotte (NC) and Cleveland (OH). He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union and an MArch II degree; he taught previously at the University of Idaho and at the University of Arkansas's Fay Jones School of Architecture, where he was Associate Professor and held the 21st Century Chair of Building Technologies (2016–2018), leading design-build, fabrication, and advanced-technology initiatives. He subsequently served as Professor, Department Head of Architecture, and Chair of Integrative Design in the Stuckeman School at Penn State University, and is currently Director of the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. His chapter "Toward the immaterial interior" in Marinic's The Interior Architecture Reader (2018) gives the wiki the interior's media-history — the three cultural registers and the dematerialization thesis.
Key Works
- *Toward the immaterial interior* (2018) — Chapter 27 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge): the three cultural registers (interior architecture, book, digital media), the two paradigms of cultural transference, and the dematerialization thesis from mechanization to the digital register.
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- cultural-registers — the chapter's master concept: stone, paper, bits; buildings as humanity's "first primary human registers."
- dematerialization — the register succession's direction: from the neoclassical interior ("More photograph than building") to interactive surfaces, graphic envelopes, and thinned materials.
- mechanization — the roots: Mumford's clock and printing press, Giedion's interior shift from shell-defined to object-defined space.
- transarchitecture — the contemporary case: "the wall as a static, physical artifact begins to deliver a deeper and more complex space than that of the physical interior itself."
- interiority — the register's content: interior architecture as "a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs."
- narrative-space — the conscious paradigm's medium: the Parthenon as "the book of Athens"; Labrouste's library as a building that "takes its new spatial cues directly from books."
- interior-architecture — the discipline as the first cultural register, gaining its twenty-fifth register in the wiki's treatment.
Relevance to the Core Research
Jacobus supplies the media-historical frame for the wiki's interior-architecture cluster: the argument that the built interior was humanity's first cultural register and has been progressively displaced — first by the book (the academy, referential culture, the neoclassical interior as "More photograph than building"), now by digital media ("Digital media is to the book today what the book was to the built environment in the fifteenth century"). This connects the discipline's history to the wiki's media and spectacle clusters (the immaterial as "a new purveyor of reality" is the spectacle question in media-historical dress) and gives the dematerialization debate its deep genealogy — mechanization's clock and printing press as the interior's pre-digital dematerializers. As the co-founder of SILO AR+D, he is also the third practitioner-theorist of the Reader (after Webb and his own partner Manack), and his chapter pairs with Manack's: where Manack's fabricating interior intensifies its material distinctions from architecture, Jacobus traces how the register that made interiors meaningful dematerializes them.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
