Bodybuilding examines the use of performance as a radical tool to rethink architecture, its agency, goals, and aesthetics. A companion to the Bodybuilding curatorial initiative presented as part of Performa 17, New York's citywide biennial, the publication focuses on works by architects and collectives who use bodies, actions, and staged situations to challenge the discipline's conventional imperatives of stability, permanence, and consistency. Featuring newly commissioned historical analyses, essays, and portfolios, Bodybuilding uses the lens of performance to reframe critical questions about the built environment, including relationships between architecture and labor, security, race, migration, mobility, gentrification, and modes of public assembly.

RoseLee Goldberg, founder and curator of Performa, is an art historian, critic, and curator whose book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, pioneered the study of performance art. In the 1970s, Goldberg's conception of space as an arena for the realization of theory became a milestone in conversations on art and architecture during her time at the AA in London, and when she was director of the Royal College of Art Gallery. In 2004, she founded Performa, a non-profit arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world.

Charles Aubin is associate curator at Performa and Galeries Lafayette Foundation in Paris. Previously, he served as assistant curator in the Performance Department of the Centre Pompidou (Paris). He has also organized exhibitions for the Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse) and the Biennale de Belleville (Paris). Aubin has curated programs with a wide range of artists and choreographers, including Jérôme Bel, Volmir Cordeiro, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Simon Fujiwara, Malcolm Le Grice, Jacolby Satterwhite, Cally Spooner, and Erika Vogt. In 2015, he co-edited Aperture's special issue on photography and performance.

Carlos Mínguez Carrasco is associate curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. He has organized a wide range of exhibitions, events, competitions, and publications with a particular focus on how social, cultural, and urgent political issues influence contemporary architecture, and vice-versa. With After Belonging Agency, he co-curated the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016), addressing architecture's implication in issues of migration, attachment, and identity in a globalized world. Previously, he was assistant curator of the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, for which he edited the upcoming book OfficeUS Manual. Other curatorial projects include: BEING (2013), Storefront's 30th Anniversary exhibition and conference; Letters to the Mayor (2014), and the platform World Wide Storefront (2014). His texts have been published in Domus, Migrant Journal, Código, and LIGA's upcoming publication, Exhibited Architecture.

Founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, Performa is the leading international organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to generating new directions for the twenty-first century by engaging artists and audiences through experimentation, innovation, and collaboration. Performa's unique year-round commissioning, touring, and education programs, involving all disciplines, culminate in the internationally acclaimed Performa biennial, which together forge a new course for contemporary art and culture.