Matthew Stadler

Matthew Stadler (born 1959) is an American author who has written six novels and received several awards. Stadler has compiled four anthologies about literature, city life and public life. His essays, which have been published in magazines and museum catalogs, focus on architecture, urban planning and sprawl.

"Sprawl is the disappearance of an idea", Stadler wrote in the annotated reader Where We Live Now. "So how can we go on speaking of the city and the country, yet not remain fixed in the downward spiral of loss?" Stadler's essays and larger projects, such as suddenly.org [1] explore this question by looking for better language and new descriptions. While there is significant overlap, Stadler's work can usefully be broken down into three areas: novels; sprawl and urbanism; publishing and public space.

Between 1990 and 2000, Stadler published four novels that focus on children, sexuality, and art: Landscape: Memory (1990); The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (1993); The Sex Offender (1994); and Allan Stein (1999). These books were widely discussed and lauded as gay fiction, although Stadler, like other gay writers of his time, has commented that his books are not concerned with gay sexuality (though he himself feels a political obligation to identify as a gay man). After co-founding Publication Studio in 2009, Stadler went on to use this platform to publish a so-called "cover novel," Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha (2011), as well as the dystopian novel Minders (2015).

In the early 1990s, while living in Groningen, the Netherlands, to research his novel, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, Stadler was invited to take part in an architectural conference at the Technical University at Delft. Through this conference and subsequent invitations to write about architecture for the Dutch journal Wiederhal, Stadler became involved in that country's discussion of urban planning and design.

At a 1993 conference in Rotterdam, called Bliss, Stadler was asked to respond to Rem Koolhaas's recently published "Manifesto for Bigness." In his talk, subsequently published as "I Think I'm Dumb," Stadler characterized the sprawl of the American West Coast as "the native home for bigness," and endorsed it as a productive, urban landscape. Many of the subsequent themes in Stadler's work on sprawl and urbanism can be found in this initial essay.

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