Julie Cirelli of Park Books - Building a Publishing House That Thinks Like Architecture.

In an era where architectural discourse often arrives via Instagram carousels or algorithm-driven manifestos, Julie Cirelli is steering Park Books in the opposite direction: towards the stubborn slowness of print. Under her guidance, the Zurich-based publishing house has become a quiet force in contemporary culture, known for titles that marry scholarly rigor with sensual design. Park Books is not in the business of disposable aesthetics - its catalogue is treated more like a series of carefully considered buildings than a stack of bound paper, each volume designed to outlast the churn of trends.

Cirelli has carved out a reputation for books that read like exhibitions you can shelve, resisting both the bombast of the starchitect era and the flimsy aesthetics of trend-chasing design. In the process, Park Books has become a reference point for architects, academics, and design lovers alike - a publisher that refuses to choose between beauty and brains. The list is bold in its mix: monographs that frame practices with clarity, essays that stretch the boundaries of discourse, and occasional wildcards that remind us publishing is as much about curiosity as authority.

What sets Park Books apart is its openness. Instead of the insular canon that long dominated architectural publishing, the house actively widens the frame - more women, more diverse geographies, more wit - proving that elegance and playfulness can coexist with intellectual weight. It is a publishing stance that is equal parts devotion and provocation, wrapped in covers that ask to be touched as much as read.

In conversation, Cirelli is candid, slyly irreverent, and refreshingly uninterested in gilded clichés - be they foil-stamped manifestos or brooding brutalist tomes. Here, she lets slip what it really means to publish architecture today, why Park Books occasionally plays wildcard with its catalogue, and why print might just be having the last laugh.

1. Let’s begin with the obvious taboo: In an age of scrolls, swipes, and dopamine refreshes, what compels you to keep investing in the slowness, tactility, and permanence of print? Is this defiance or devotion?

Julie Cirelli: It’s devotion, though with a touch of defiance. Architecture is already a slow art. Buildings take years, sometimes decades, and their presence is tactile and lasting. Books share those qualities. A printed book gives ideas coherence and permanence, which are qualities that don’t translate well to the churn of digital feeds.

2. Park Books titles often feel more like curated exhibitions than conventional books. Do you consider yourself more a publisher or a cultural scenographer?

Julie Cirelli: Publishing is curatorial by nature. You’re orchestrating voices and narratives, and working closely with designers to give three-dimensional life to intellectual concepts. But unlike scenography, the “stage” doesn’t disappear at the end of the performance. The book enters libraries, homes, and archives. So we’re very much a publisher, but one who treats books as cultural spaces in their own right.

In Julie Cirelli’s world at Park Books, pages become spaces - curated with precision, but never without wit.

3. You publish books that ask to be touched, displayed, and read - ideally all at once. How do you strike a balance between seductive form and intellectual substance without falling into the “coffee-table trap”?

Julie Cirelli: For me, intellectual clarity comes first. A book needs a strong concept and structure before design enters the room. Form and material should heighten the experience of reading, not distract from it. If a book is seductive enough to live on a table but rigorous enough to pull you in, then we’ve struck the balance.

4. Architecture publishing has traditionally been a boy’s club of brutalism and brooding. How do you - and Park Books - slip some elegance, wit, and diversity into the mix without diluting the discipline?

Julie Cirelli: Architecture discourse has long been dominated by a narrow canon that is often presented in a heavy and austere register. We try to widen the frame: more women, more diverse geographies, more unexpected voices, more experimentation. Elegance and wit are forms of intelligence that open the field to broader audiences without diluting its rigor.

5. Be honest: are there trends in design and architecture publishing you find utterly exhausting? Bonus points if it involves unnecessary foil stamping or another manifesto on ‘the Anthropocene.’

Julie Cirelli: I don’t believe that gilding a weak idea in foil stamping will make it stronger. I love bold design when it serves the content, but not when it compensates for the lack of it.

6. You’ve worked with some of the most compelling architectural thinkers and studios in Europe. How do you diplomatically tell a starchitect that their manuscript needs… more rigour and less ego?

Julie Cirelli: Our role is to advocate for the reader and for the discipline. Instead of “less ego,” the message is: this project deserves clearer framing, and we can get it there together. Architects respect rigor, and if you appeal to that, they listen.

7. The Park Books catalogue feels both meticulous and mischievous. Do you ever throw in a wildcard project just to keep things interesting - or confuse the algorithm?

Julie Cirelli: Yes, occasionally. A wildcard project can test the limits of what an architecture book can be. It also keeps the list surprising, which is healthy for readers and for us (and maybe for the algorithms?).

8. In the battle between digital visibility and printed permanence, who’s winning - and why does it feel like books are quietly having the last laugh?

Julie Cirelli: Digital is attention-hungry and impermanent. Print is considered and productive. A book may not win on eyeballs, but it holds power. We control the legacy.

9. If Park Books were a building, what would it be? (Bonus: Please no minimalist white cube clichés - unless it comes with subversive shelving.)

Julie Cirelli: Perhaps the plaza of the Salk Institute? Somewhere precise and calm, not imposing its own voice but a platform where others can speak and be. Definitely not a white cube. Or austere at first glance, like St. Peter’s by Sigurd Lewerentz or Märkli’s La Congiunta. Someplace you’d think is going to be strict and straight but as you get closer realize is human and open and perhaps a bit strange in an elegant way.

10. Finally, when you’re not deep in layouts and spine widths, what’s a book - from another publisher, no less - that you wish had landed on your desk instead?

Julie Cirelli: Alvaro Siza’s sketchbooks. Caruso St John’s Accumulatio. Every Shinohara monograph ever. The Pezo von Ellrichshausen monograph that came out earlier this year. Conceptually, intellectually… there are so many.

—-

Words and questions by AW

Answers by Julie Cirelli.

Photos courtesy of Park Books