Alexandra Midal
The Murder Factory:
Life and Work of H. H. Holmes, First American Serial Killer
(May 2023)
– book series
H. H. Holmes wasn’t just the United States’ first serial killer—he was its first designer-killer, conceiving of and building the Castle, the multistory complex in Chicago where he would undertake his sordid and bloody affairs. The Murder Factory approaches the history of modernism through a sinister lens, demonstrating how industrialization not only made its way from the factory into the home, but also into the mind, prescribing the systemic, codified, and efficient methodology that seeped into and enabled Holmes’s killings. Through Holmes’s strange story, Alexandra Midal confronts the relationship between morality and progress, reevaluating modernism’s legacy along the way.
Alexandra Midal is a curator and Professor of History and Theory of Design at HEAD–Genève. She is former director of the the Regional Contemporary Art Funds of Haute-Normandie (FRAC) and a former assistant to the artist Dan Graham for public commissions.
Published by: Sternberg Press, London
