Book Briefs #23

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



2013 Competitions Annual edited by G. Stanley Collyer with Daniel Madryga | The Competition Project | 2014
This collection of the winners and runners up of fifteen architectural competitions – similar in format to the 2012 Competitions Annual – is framed by two themes, one on the back cover and one in the introduction: the increased role of landscape architects in competitions and large-scale architecture in general, and the need for better-designed affordable housing which eschews the misconceptions that arose from the (sometimes literal) implosion of public housing since the 1970s. Not all of the projects found within the book correspond to these themes, but there is more to be found that relates to landscape architecture than housing. Many of the projects are, not surprisingly, cultural and institutional, but there are a number of large-scale campus and infrastructure projects that are often led by landscape architects. Setting themes among the assembled competitions aside, this book, like the 2012 edition, benefits from editorial commentary, jury comments, and the inclusion of runners up and winners in one place. It is not an exhaustive collection of competitions from the calendar year 2013, but it is a strong collection that students and young architects in particular will benefit greatly from, given the impressive renderings and drawings found throughout.

Out of Scale: AIA Small Projects Awards edited by Marc Manack and Linda Reeder | ORO Editions | 2015 | Amazon
There is much to praise the AIA Small Project Awards Program: it gives young architects and small firms a chance at recognition, what they might not receive in the other awards categories; it recognizes the importance of small buildings, structures and spaces, not just big gestures; it recognizes that innovation often occurs at the small scale; and, to be honest, many of the winning projects are just more interesting than the larger buildings that win those other awards. With this in mind, and with the AIA Small Project Awards Program ten years old, now is a great time to have a book highlighting the winners. Yet this is hardly a straightforward presentation of the winners. The projects are presented chronologically in four chapters – Pavilions & Installations, Adaptive Reuse & Interiors, Houses, Details – yet some of them feature in more than one chapter; a year-by-year index on each project points to where it is in the book. Further, between each chapter are jury comments and loads of statistics that try to find common ground among the projects. The comments are fine, but I could have used without the statistics, instead giving more pages to the projects, which are documented primarily through small photos.

Road Trip: Roadside America, From Custard's Last Stand to the Wigwam Restaurant by Richard Longstreth | Universe | 2015 | Amazon
This isn't the type of book I'd normally review on my blog, but I'm a sucker for guidebooks focused on buildings, capital A architecture or not. As the name indicates this book is about vernacular roadside architecture in the United States, predominantly buildings and structures that were built between 1920 and the late 1960s; after that, the Interstate Highway System changed the landscape of roadside architecture into something more corporate and less idiosyncratic. The chapters illustrate just what was built in those decades: commercial strips, restaurants, gas stations, motels, stores, theaters, and "other places of entertainment." Each of these chapters has an introduction on the respective typology, followed by Longstreth's photographs with captions that indicate the what, where, and when. Most photos were taken in the 1970s, making Roadside America a visual history and remembrance of places under-appreciated in their time.

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Book Briefs #22

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.

This installment compiles six books that surely deserve their own longer reviews, but they have been piled up at work staring at me for a while, so I'm putting them together here.



1: Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk | Verso | 2014 | Amazon
This spring I attended a couple book talks at the Center for Architecture, one on Keller Easterling's Extrastatecraft and the other on Justin McGuirk's Radical Cities; both are published, perhaps coincidentally, by Verso. While widely divergent in topic and tone, both have the common approach of exploring the margins of architecture and urbanism. Easterling looks to free trade zones and other infrastructural constructions, McGuirk heads south and looks at what is being produced in South America. The book is equal parts travelogue, portraits of architects, history, and criticism, each aspect overlapping and intertwining in a remarkably enjoyable manner that was echoed in his talk at the Center. The subjects that McGuirk explores are a mix of the well known (Elemental's houses in Quinta Monroy and Urban-Think Tank's work in Caracas, for example) and the obscure (PREVI and Alto Comedero). His solid writing and firsthand experience binds everything, while his skeptical optimism pervades the book enough to encourage readers that architects are not completely helpless in the face of dramatic economic, social, and political problems.

2: Broadway by Michelle Young | Arcadia Publishing | 2015 | Amazon
I'm a really big fan of the books in the Images of America series, visual histories of particular places. I've read one on St. Louis Union Station and another on "Forgotten Chicago," which recounts places like the Maxwell Street Market, which was razed so UIC could expand and replace it with some bland and questionable neo-traditional buildings. This book by Untapped Cities founder Michelle Young is the third book in the huge series that I have (of more than 7,000!), and it is one of the better ones. As the name makes clear, it tells the story of Manhattan's tip-to-tip thoroughfare. The book works in chronological order, which also means it moves from south to north, just as the island grew. Young veers away from Broadway in some places, but it's never more than a couple blocks and is justifiably done to tell a story – and there are plenty of fascinating stories here to discover.

3: Timber in the City: Design and Construction in Mass Timber edited by Andrew Bernheimer | ORO Editions | 2015 | Amazon
Timber mania is washing over architecture: Canadian architect Michael Green and MetsäWood designed a wooden version of the the Empire State Building, and earlier this summer I interviewed Solid Wood author Joseph Mayo about his research on wood structures. Okay, maybe "mania" is going a bit far, but it's hard to deny that large timber is being seen increasingly as one of the most sustainable means of construction. It helps that a number of techniques – CLT, or cross laminated timber, is one of the most popular – are addressing fire and other concerns that have kept wood from being a structural element for taller buildings in cities. New York City is definitely one place where concrete and steel are favored over wood, not surprising given the historical conflagrations that hit the city and rewrote its building codes. But momentum is shifting toward timber construction, and this book looks at some ways that wood buildings could be reintroduced into the city. It happens in two parts: the winner and runners-up in the Timber in the City student competition, sited in Red Hook, Brooklyn; and international examples of built work. Architects already convinced that wood is the way to go should pick up Mayo's more thorough and technical book, but doubting architects should start with Timber in the City, an appealing look at a trend that's not going away anytime soon.


[Justin McGuirk, with Antanas Mockus over his shoulder, at the Center for Architecture speaking about Radical Cities]

4: Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change by Sharon Zukin | Rutgers University Press | 2014 | Amazon
If I were pressed to name my five favorite authors, Sharon Zukin would be on that list. (Others might be John McPhee, Juhani Pallasmaa, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Michael Sorkin.) Her writings on cities, particularly New York, are thorough yet clear, large in scope yet nuanced to details, theoretical yet full of firsthand observations, and always on topic in terms of what is pressing. In the early 1980s that topic was SoHo (South of Houston in Manhattan), an area full of cast iron warehouses that are now home to luxury brands on the ground floor and rich tenants living upstairs, a far cry from its industrial origins. Loft Living is Zukin's most groundbreaking work, the one that she will be remembered for, the one worthy of this 25th anniversary edition (it is the same as the 1989 version plus a new introduction on how "loft living grows up). What makes the book so impressive, and so lasting, is how Zukin analyzes one place – SoHo – in the context of wider social and economic changes, particularly the commodification of art and the role of the artist in gentrification. These are common views now, thanks to Zukin and this book that is a must-read, even two-and-a-half decades later.

5: The Death of Drawing: Architecture in the Age of Simulation by David Ross Scheer | Routledge | 2014 | Amazon
If any title will prick up the ears of architects over, say, 41 years of age (yes, that's my age), it's The Death of Drawing. No matter the ubiquity of computers in schools and in offices, drawing can't die, right? It can't be completely replaced by BIM, can it? I'd say that drawing can't be replaced flat out by software, but adopting BIM can affect the roles of architects by transforming what they do and how they do it. As Scheer, a professor who has become something of an expert on building simulation technologies, argues in this book, the architect's traditional means of drawing translated into a role as form-giver. But with BIM becoming the favored means of production – and sustainability being the most widespread means of keeping architects relevant – performance gains priority over form. And try as they might, architects surely cannot predict and measure performance (be it in energy or some other metric) through hand drawings; architects need software to create simulations and therefore deal with performance. But as Scheer states in this smart and well-timed book, and which should give an indication to where he goes in it, "There is more to life than performance."

6: Urban Acupunture by Jaime Lerner | Island Press | 2014 | Amazon
Medical analogies applied to cities and planning are nothing new. The problems of cities have often been described as "ailments," and in the middle of last century the "diagnosis" resulted in removing the "tumor" of blight and replacing it with "healthy" buildings and landscapes through urban renewal. Even though this technique, post-Jane Jacobs, is not the preferred route, the way of looking at the city as a body to be cured prevails. Look no further than this book by the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, who proposes small-scale "pinpricks" of action that should have a ripple effect on the larger city. Like anything in cities, the effect of any physical change – big or small – depends on so many more things than just the building, landscape, installation, or whatever the piece may be. Nevertheless, I like the thought of something mildly painful yet more gentle than surgery – acupuncture – being used as the analogy, just as I like the idea that small things have big impacts. Lerner's book similarly is full of short chapters that describe various ways of intervening or just plain thinking about the city. It's a diverse crop of ideas that ultimately is focused on the coming together of people in public space.

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Book Briefs #21: 7 Issues of 5 Journals

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with short, first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my blog. This installment focuses on a few recently published journals, some academic and some independent.



1: New Geographies 06: Grounding Metabolism edited by Daniel Ibanez, Nikos Katsikis | Harvard GSD | 2014 | Amazon
In architecture, the word "metabolism" typically brings to mind the short-lived Japanese Metabolist movement that has seen a resurgence in recent years through a book and exhibition. But the term – both as a natural/scientific process and a metaphorical trope – has more wide-ranging applications, and it's clear from the sixth issue of Harvard GSD's New Geographies that students and faculty in academia are trying to decipher metabolism relative to designing buildings, landscapes and cities. While the editors conducted an interview with Ken Tadashi Ishima that focuses on the Japanese Metabolists, the other contributions depart from this default idea of the term toward investigations of urban systems, the reshaping of geographies by humans, post-petroleum landscapes, temporary cities, and projective design practices, among many other approaches to tackling the issue's theme. Some of the contributions, it should be noted, emanated from a 2014 GSD symposium, "Projective Views on Urban Metabolism," which the editors helped to organize. The essays and interviews are dense, and each deserves the utmost attention and patience to yield the greatest insight into what is clearly a complex topic.



2: Lobby No. 2: Clairvoyance edited by Regner Ramos, et. al. | The Bartlett School of Architecture | Spring 2015 | Amazon
Having worked on a journal in architecture school eons ago, I know first-hand that it can be difficult to get contributors to address, much less stick to a theme. With just about every architecture journal, academic or otherwise, defining a theme for their issues all these years later, the hard part is more likely defining a theme rather than getting content to fit it. With that, I really like the choice of Regner Ramos and company from Bartlett with "Clairvoyance," a theme that is pretty broad but a logical fit for architecture; after all, what architects do consists of a good deal of predictions, whether acknowledged or not. Beyond the big names (Daniel Libeskind, Mecanoo) needed to anchor any publication these days, the issue has numerous obvious and unexpected responses to the theme: Disney's EPCOT, architectural competitions, rioting, rising waters, the "Preppers" of New York City (who knew?), and projects that are widely diverse in scope and form yet seem to share, appropriately, a sense of optimism. Most unique is the "The Seminar Room," one of eight sections in the book, which consists of two texts on architecture and the city (one old, one recent), five short essays on the same subject, and a brief discussion on the texts; it reads like a seminar, one that the editors note, "You're not being marked on."

3: Soiled No. 5: Cloudscrapers edited by Joseph Altshuler, et. al. | CARTOGRAM Architecture | 2014
Soiled calls itself "a periodical of architectural stories that makes a mess of the built environment and the politics of space." Adopting -scraper themes (Windowscrapers, Deathscrapers, etc.) for each issue, the journal invites the unconventional, the fantastical. Cloudscrapers asked contributors to "let go" and float upward into the clouds "as a site for activated atmospheres, a privileged perch, and otherworldly occupation." Unlike the other journals featured here, Soiled presents a small number of contributions, eight in the case of Cloudscrapers. Each one is a project, echoing the journal Fairy Tales, and the highlights include Clark Thenhaus's reappropriation of silos in the American Midwest as sites for stargazing; Jenny Odell's poetic glances and extractions on seeing the earth from satellites; and Luis Callejas's strategy of floating doppelgangers of buildings to protest Heathrow traffic patterns. It's hard not to look up, even higher than the AIA would have us gaze, when absorbing the projects in these pages.



4: MAS Context Issue 22: Surveillance edited by Iker Gil | MAS Context | Summer 2014
5: MAS Context Issue 23: Ordinary edited by Iker Gil | MAS Context | Fall 2014
MAS Context's one-word themes veer from broad, almost anything-goes topics (living, amusement, information, visibility, narrative) to those that are timely and demand a strong position (network, conflict, energy). I'd say that of these two issues, Ordinary falls neatly into the former and Surveillance the latter. For Surveillance, editor Iker Gil starts by discussing the police surveillance of Cabrini Green, the notorious public housing project in Chicago that has been dismantled slowly over the last couple of decades into almost nothing. His editorial statement sets the tone for an issue that delves into security cameras in cities, networked urbanisms, drones of all sort, the history of recording devices, digital fingerprints, and so forth. Those expecting architectural responses to the theme will be disappointed (it should be pointed out that MAS Context "addresses issues that affect the built environment," so it is far from just an architecture journal), but those who want content that makes them think will be quite happy.

There's a bit more architecture in Ordinary, but here the focus is on the commonplace, be it in the vein of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, or even in how right angles tend to predominate over angles and curves. There are photos of ordinary architecture under gray skies and photos of gray, concrete models of generic housing slabs, stairs and other commonplace architectural elements. The city depends on the ordinary, that part of the built environment that our brain can ignore as it focuses on other things. But that doesn't mean it can't be celebrated now and then, as in these pages or in the city, as one is wont to do after flipping through this issue.



6: Boundaries 10: Architecture for Emergencies II edited by Luco Sampo | Boundaries International Architecture Magazine | October-December 2013 | Amazon
7: Boundaries 11: A Focus on Humanitarian Architecture edited by Luco Sampo | Boundaries International Architecture Magazine | January-March 2014 | Amazon
Boundaries is a quarterly architecture magazine that presents the buildings and projects that other magazines aren't always willing to include in their pages. Sure, the occasional project in Africa makes its way into Architectural Record or Architect, but those projects (many designed by US firms for the continent) only scratch the surface on what architects are doing in places without the resources of North America or Europe. Luco Sampo's insatiable appetite for almost single-handedly presenting architecture that is socially responsible, but also beautiful, continues with these recent issues on "Architecture for Emergencies II" (the first installment on that theme is the second issue of Boundaries) and "Humanitarian Architecture." The former presents designs for refugee camps, disaster housing, mobile health clinics, schools, collective housing, and playgrounds. Like other Boundaries issues, the projects are balanced by research, positions, interviews, and books on the topic.

Given the consistent format of the magazine, the same can be said for the latter issue on humanitarian architecture, which could surely encompass architecture for emergencies, but focuses on projects run with NGOs and other organizations and often realized by volunteers. Most of the projects are schools, clinics and community centers, pointing to the importance of these institutions and the need to create places for the people who cannot build at this scale for themselves. Right before writing about these two issues, the newest Boundaries landed in my mailbox, a good sign that Sampo isn't letting up with his ambitious goal to present some of the most commendable architecture being produced today.

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Book Briefs #20

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: Homecoming: Contextualizing, Materializing, and Practicing the Rural in China edited by Joshua Bolchover, Christiane Lange, John Lin | Gestalten | 2013 | Amazon
Based on a symposium of the same name at the University of Hong Kong in April 2012, Homecoming is a refreshing counterpoint to all of the attention given to China's urban building boom, which takes the form of large yet innovative housing projects by the likes of Steven Holl, but more often is symbolized by bland and monotonous, tightly packed towers. The movement of large numbers of Chinese from the country to the city makes the former ripe for some investigation, which the 15 contributors do here in the three sections noted in the book's subtitle; my favorite are the many great projects in the "materializing the rural" section. A debate between the editors and some of the contributors at the end of the book tackles the notions of urban/rural and what can or should be done with the latter.

2: MAS Context 21: Repetition edited by Iker Gil | MAS Context | Spring 2014
Chicago's quarterly journal MAS Context produces yet another XL issue with #21 on the theme "repetition"; their earlier Narrative issue, guest edited by Klaus, also clocks in at about twice as many pages as the norm. The Xerox stamp on the cover points to one interpretation of the theme, but with 18 contributions there is plenty of different approaches. The issue includes an excerpt from Bianca Bosker's book Original Copies, on "architectural mimicry" in China; Patrick Sykes's exploration of digital printing in a grotto-like creation; Livia Corona Benjamin's photographic essay on Mexico's cookie-cutter two-million home program; Camilo José Vergara's "Harlem Time Tracker," on the changes to this section of Manhattan since the 1970s; and Iker Gil speaks with astronaut Claude Nicollier about the simulation and repetition necessary in spaceflight. In addition to the eclectic and visually rich contributions, the most outstanding aspect of the issue is that each contributor was paired with a Chicago-based designer who determined the page layout, font, colors, and other design features. These pairings turn each piece into a bespoke creation belying the monotony normally considered with repetition.

3: L.A. [Ten]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s with Stephen Phillips | Lars Müller Publishers | 2014 | Amazon
Curators, historians and the media like to group architects together as a means of expressing a trend, or perhaps to argue for a particular approach. Most famous is definitely the New York Five (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier), but as even a rudimentary analysis of these architects reveals that Graves jumped to Postmodern historicism and John Hejduk was an architect that couldn't fit easily alongside others. In other words, architectural groups like this often don't work. The so-called L.A. Ten, "a loosely affiliated cadre of architects" in Southern California in the 1980s, is a case in point. Any formal similarities between Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Frank Israel, Neil Denari, and the rest were thin. But the network of architects, educators, and schools was important, as the lengthy interviews in this book make clear. Held by Stephen Phillips and students from Cal Poly, the interviews take a roughly chronological approach in recapping each architect's education, production, and relationships in the decades indicated by the book's subtitle. Fascinating at times, the book suffers from minimal editing; even though the full interviews are necessary for an oral history, shorter versions would have sufficed for a book available to the public.



4: Natural Architecture Now: New Projects from Outside the Boundaries of Design by Francesca Tatarella | Princeton Architectural Press | 2014 | Amazon
The cover of the first Natural Architecture book, published in 2007, features the amazing "stick work" of Patrick Dougherty, who received his own book treatment from the folks at PAPress a few years later. In this second title from Milan's 22 Publishing, the cover is given over to one of the Starn brothers' impressive Big Bambu installations. In both cases the cover indicates that the contents are as much art as architecture, a fact that does not reduce the potential influence of the projects that explore how materials like wood and bamboo are manipulated to create constructions that at the very least appear natural. The architects and artists here are less concerned with creating structures that are integrated into nature in terms of process (a house that is grown from the soil or trees, for example) than they are with form. This means that the selection ends up being fairly consistent regardless of who designed and built the pieces, where they're located, and what they're used for.

5: Team 10 East: Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism edited by Łukasz Stanek | Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw | 2014 | AmazonTeam 10, which supplanted CIAM in 1959, was made up of a core of architects from Great Britan, The Netherlands, France, Italy, and Greece, but nobody from Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, participating architects (outside the core) did come from Czechoslavakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yogoslavia, thereby influencing the Team 10 discourse to a certain degree. Key among these participants was Polish architect Oscar Hansen, who was Stanek's inspiration for a conference and workshop held at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013. "Team 10 East," as in the title of the workshop and companion book, refers to the original Team 10, but it is a fictitious entity; or as Stanek puts it in his introduction with Dirk van den Heuvel: "Rather than being a retroactive manifesto, Team 10 East is a generative conceptual tool that grasps at an understanding of what was shared by these fellow travelers of Team 10." This understanding comes from five long essays interspersed with seven shorter ones in the handsome book whose size reminds me of a Readers Digest – with nicer paper, design and illustrations.

6: Shadow and Light: Tadao Ando and the Clark by Clark Art Institute | Yale University Press | 2014 | Amazon
The year 2014 marks the end of a major masterplan for the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute (aka The Clark) consisting of two new buildings by Tadao Ando, interior renovations by Annabelle Selldorf, and reconfigured landscapes by Reed Hilderbrand. This slim book celebrates the contributions of Japanese architect Ando, who started with the 2008 Stone Hill Center (which has its own book) and saw the completion of a visitor center this year. The latter was completed in July, and given that the book was ready for opening day, the photos by Richard Pare that document the building tend to be at the level of the detail rather than general views; rendering serve the latter, as do they for to express what is going on with the landscapes around the buildings. Given that The Clark is all about looking at art surrounded by nature, the relationship between the architecture and the landscape is of the utmost importance for Ando. While it may not come across so strongly in the photos, Michael Webb's essay does a good job of conveying this idea.

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Book Briefs #19: University of Minnesota Press

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages. In this post are six titles published by the University of Minnesota Press.



1: Architecture since 1400 by Kathleen James-Chakraborty | 2013 | Amazon
Instead of the traditional discussion of style and analysis of space, the author aims "to reconstruct the story of how environments are created that shape experience and communicate identity through the ways in which spaces are formed and surfaces are decorated." The examples in the book, which moves chronologically and geographically from front to back (starting in China in the early 1400s and ending in the same country in present day), are diverse in terms of place (Asia and South America are afforded as much importance as Europe and North America, though Africa is the focus of only one of the thirty chapters) and architect/builder (encompassing more buildings than those designed by well known architects), making it an atypical history of architecture when compared to Sir Banister Fletcher, Trachtenberg and Hyman, and other standard textbook histories. The bite-sized chapters – thirty of them across 488 pages, or an average of 16 illustrated pages per chapter – make the book a handy reference when students and architects want to get a different perspective on buildings in a particular place and time. Further, references at the end of each chapter give the reader good places to go for more depth than what James-Chakraborty's book allows.

2: City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America by Alison Bick Hirsch | 2014 | Amazon
I've never been a fan of the phrase, "You can't judge a book by it's cover." Sure, you can't pass judgment on a book entirely based on its cover, but there are certain telling things that covers convey, particularly some architecture books. This book's cover has two illustrations: a photo of activity in Cascade Fountain in Seattle's Freeway Park designed by Lawrence Halprin, and a score by Halprin for a performance, most likely for his wife Anna. These two images, as the title of the book hints, have a strong relationship, as the design of Halprin's public spaces, like Freeway Park, were informed by a creative process called the RSVP Cyles (Resources, Score, Valuation, Performance) that Halprin developed in the 1960s. Hirsch, in a book based on her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes Halprin's methods for designing public spaces with people's actions in mind, an approach that designers should pay attention to today.

3: The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City by Eric Avila | 2014 | Amazon
"When the interstate highway program connected America's cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities." So says the back-cover description of this book, which brings to mind the way the Dan Ryan Expressway on Chicago's South Side separated the former Robert Taylor Homes from the neighborhood of Bridgeport, the home of Richard J. Daley, the Mayor of Chicago when both the expressway and public housing were constructed in the 1960s. In this case the expressway didn't destroy Bridgeport (as planned it would have, but it was rerouted eight blocks to the east) but it severed the white and black neighborhoods from each other. This particular example is not part of Avila's book, since the associate professor of history, Chicano studies, and urban planning at UCLA focuses on Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, and other cities where people have protested the damage wrought by highways.



4: Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History by Sigfried Giedeon | 2013 | Amazon
Sigfried Giedion wrote one of the most influential books on architecture last century, Space, Time and Architecture, released in 1941 and now in its fifth edition. If one masterpiece in his lifetime was not enough, Giedion also wrote this masterful volume seven years later on the "anonymous history" of mechanization taking hold of just about every aspect of our lives. Having covered architecture in the earlier book, here he tracks the changes in the food we eat, the chairs we sit on, the rooms we bathe in, and even the locks that secure our homes. As much a product of its time as Space, Time and Architecture, Mechanization Takes Command is, as Stanislaus von Moos states in the postscript to the 2013 printing of the 1948 book, equal parts "factographic" historical account and manifesto. I prefer to read it in the former sense, since the balance of textual and visual evidence paints a clear picture of technology's advance, even as the unbiased nature of Giedion's writing comes through from time to time. It does make me wonder if a similar "anonymous history" could be done on the computer age, on the influence of the digital in similar areas of our life. Perhaps somebody's done that and I'm not aware; if not, Giedion's reprinted book is a wake-up call for somebody to dive in.

5: The Modern Architectural Landscape by Caroline Constant | 2012 | Amazon
In the sphere of modernity, there's an inclination to partition work and expression into disciplines. Buildings are the purview of architects, for example, and the land around a building is taken care of by the landscape architect. Such a distinction is prevalent today, but this book's analysis of nine landscapes designed by architects puts a wrinkle in this partitioning by focusing on the totalizing nature of modernism to create cohesive environments, buildings and landscapes combined. Inside are the Barcelona Pavilion and Lafayette Park, both the product of Mies van der Rohe, the Woodland Cemetery of Asplund and Lewerentz, Jože Plečnik's Prague Castle, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh, and OMA's unbuilt Parc de la Villette submission, among others.

6: Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956 by David Smiley | 2013 | Amazon
Southdale Center, designed by Victor Gruen and known as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the United States, opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. Gruen and his influence on the shopping mall and the suburbs after World War II is well documented, but what about the architecture of shopping centers pre-Southdale? Such is the subject of Columbia University professor David Smiley's thorough and thoroughly illustrated book, which tackles the years 1925 to 1956. The history is told in six chapters that are thematic rather than chronological, with "Park and Shop" in chapter three and "The Language of Modern Shopping" in chapter six, for example. The previous ignorance of early 20th-century shopping centers from architectural study is hinted in the title, as "pedestrian" refers not only to shoppers on foot (and the environments architects created for them) but also to the relegation of shopping centers to "secondary, pedestrian status" as the back cover attests. This book shows that the latter is far from the truth, and shopping centers are as much about modern architecture as housing, office buildings, and other traditional building types of interest.

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Book Briefs #18: A Bunch of Journals

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: Kerb 21 edited by Dion Gery, William Kennedy, Harriet Robertson, Bella Leber Smeaton | Melbourne Books | 2013
The first legal-to-drink issue of RMIT's Journal of Landscape Architecture is themed "Uncharted Territories." The editors explain that these "manifest in an uncertain future," and therefore the contributors are those who "have the capacity to charter these territories and operate within them." They even map the 23 contributors within a landscape-like surface (akin to the cover) that moves from "essence of discipline" to "proliferation of knowledge" in the x-direction and from "intentional" to "intuitive" in the y-direction. Most lie on the perimeter, leaving a hole in the center; this middle ground equates perhaps with those not comfortable with an uncertain future. Whatever the case, the essays, projects and interviews are wide-ranging in subject, so landscape architecture is represented, but so is art (most notably with Marina Abramović), fashion, technology, and even publishing. The issue gives landscape architecture students plenty of ammunition for laying out the course of their practices and potentially the future of the profession.

2: Soiled No. 4 - Windowscrapers edited by Joseph Altshuler | CARTOGRAM architecture+urban design | 2013
Windowscrapers is the fourth issue of the 'zine Soiled, following the appropriately titled Groundscrapers, Skinscrapers, and Platescrapers (issue five will be Cloudscrapers). Billed as "an architectural periodical that makes a mess of the built environment and the politics of space" and "a venue for architectural storytelling," Soiled is one of the freshest architectural publications I've come across in recent years. It has the editorial focus of another favorite MAS Context, balanced by the diversity of CLOG. In the case of Windowscrapers, transparency, refractivity and reflectivity are "probed" in essays, illustrations, stories and projects on voyeurism, (intellectual) slapstick comedy, window shopping, (creative) historic preservation, and art, among other things. It makes me curious how writers and architects will respond to "air-space as a site for occupation, manipulation, and activation" in the next issue.

3: (IN)formal LA: The Space of Politics edited by Victor J. Jones | eVolo publications | 2013 | Amazon
Technically a book rather than a journal, this title is the first non-skyscraper-competition book of hopefully many more from eVolo. It is a slim and handsome skinny book that originated from a 2011 workshop at the USC School of Architecture, organized by Stefano de Martino and Victor J. Jones, who edited the volume. A central portion of the book documents the workshop, set off from the other pages in yellow. The rest of the contents are essays, both old and new, all addressing Los Angeles's informality in some manner. Ironically, the book starts with its antithesis, the severe formal and institutional control of the Getty Center in Diane Ghirardo's "Invisible Acropolis," immediately moving to a more appropriate text culled from Roger Sherman's great book L.A. Under the Influence. Reyner Banham's well-known BBC documentary about the city is an inspiration for much of the proceedings, evident in the way the USC students left the studio for the city and the way the contributors prioritize firsthand experience over other accounts.



4: Boundaries n. 7: Free Architecture edited by Luc Sampò | Boundaries International Architectural Magazine | January - March 2013
What is "free architecture"? According to Boundaries editor-in-chief Luc Sampò it recalls "free software," which is the forerunner of the open-source movement, where code is shared amongst programmers rather than horded as proprietary. Most likely you are reading this blog post on a browser, like Firefox, that uses open-source software. Open-source, or free architecture follows the same principle: architects share designs that can be used around the world by whoever chooses to download the plans and build away. This runs counter to the typical semi-copyrighted nature of most architectural works, but the application to third-world and developing countries is obvious, something that comes across in the selection of projects gracing the pages of this issue, most of which are labelled with Creative Commons licenses.

5: Boundaries n. 8: Architecture and Utopia by Author | Publisher | April - June 2013
Where to go after "free architecture"? One logical step is into the realm of Utopia; after all, isn't open-source a Utopian ideal? Doesn't open-source break down political and social boundaries to promote architecture as a means of bettering people's lives? Not surprisingly, this issue is heavier on material outside of projects, unlike its predecessor. There is also research, photography, and manifestos. The latter (as well as a "year that was" paying tribute to Utopias of the 1960s) is a highlight of the issue, featuring responses by architects like Rintala Eggertsson and TYIN. Utopia is hardly the most popular topic in architectural discourse today (an introductory essay by Nathaniel Coleman discusses how architects like Zaha Hadid divorce their ideas of Utopia from political and social concerns, something much in the news recently), but it's not an idea that will go away, no matter how impossible the goal may be. As the gap between rich and poor increases, architects become more socially aware, and Utopia follows close behind.

6: a+u 2014:03: Supermodels by Hisao Suzuki | JA+U | February 2014
In 1982 Hisao Suzuki traveled from Japan to Spain, lured by the architecture of Antonio Gaudi. He stayed in Barcelona and has since been the principal photographer of El Croquis. His photographs involve visits to completed buildings but also to the offices of architects, where he often shoots architectural models. This handsome volume of A+U assembles a smattering of the 1,000 model photos Suzuki sent to the Japanese publication for consideration. Most of the models are by well-known architects, like the cover photo of the Prada Tokyo by Herzog and de Meuron. Likewise, most are lit by natural light, Suzuki's preferred means of lighting models. His stories accompanying the photographs are as rewarding as the consistently beautiful photos of the models themselves.

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Book Briefs #17

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: The Working Drawing: The Architect's Tool edited by Annette Spiro and David Ganzoni | Park Books | 2014 | Amazon
On the way to realization, any building or landscape must be documented with working drawings, the primary means of making the architect's design understandable to others, particularly the contractor. These drawings consist of plans, elevations, sections, details, and sometimes 3-dimensional representations, often with lots of notes explaining what is represented. All too often these drawings aren't as celebrated as the sketches that are a more immediate representation of a particular architect's ideas about a building or landscape. But this big book finds the art in 100 working drawings from the 13th century to present, giving architects something to pore over when drawing stair details and bathroom elevations gets them down – or when 3-d modeling software like Revit has them hankering for something more tangible.

2: Concrete: Photography and Architecture edited by Daniela Janser, Thomas Seelig, and Urs Stahel in collaboration with Eva Kurz, Therese Seeholzer, and Corinna Unterkofler | Scheidegger and Spiess | 2013 | Amazon
At first glance this hefty book with its chip board cover appears to document the building material concrete in architecture. Of course, the glassy building on the cover questions this assumption. The book is actually a catalog to an exhibition at the Fotomuseum Winterthur last year, an exhibition that asked: "To what extent does photography influence not only the way architecture is perceived, but also the way it is designed?" and "How does an image bring architecture to life?" "Concrete" therefore refers to making architecture "real" through the dissemination of images. The gratuitously illustrated book traces architectural photography from St. John's College in Cambridge in 1845 to a small, curated selection of recent images. The city is the means of exploring images of construction and even demolition in chapters on Zurich, Paris, Berlin, New York City, Calcutta, and others. The photographs are accompanied by scholarly texts that ask, for example, "how can the city be shown concretely?"

3: Jørn Utzon: Drawings and Buildings by  Michael Asgaard Andersen | Princeton Architectural Press | 2013 | Amazon
Last year was a big year for Jørn Utzon, as the late Danish architect's Sydney Opera House turned 40 and people celebrated both the architect and his most famous building. It's not surprising that this historical monograph coincides with that anniversary, nor that it features the sails of the famous building on the cover. More surprising is the way professor Michael Asgaard Andersen focuses on Utzon's less celebrated buildings and unbuilt projects. Instead of being arranged chronologically, the projects are discussed thematically: Place, Method, Building Culture, Construction, Materiality, and Ways of Life. This tactic prioritizes both Utzon's intentions and the author's interpretations; the drawings and construction photos that reflect the book's subtitle tie together the chapters to make it a visual delight for architects and historians.



4: Hugh Maaskant: Architect of Progress by Michelle Provoost | nai010 publishers | 2013 | Amazon
It took ten years, but Michelle Provoost's historical monograph on Dutch architect Hugh Maaskant has finally been translated from Dutch to English. That is the same amount of time that the Crimson Architectural Historian devoted to investigating the work of the architect who did not build outside his home country. This extensive research shows in the incredibly thorough account of Maaskant's significant commissions and other projects, moving in a chronological yet overlapping fashion in chapters devoted to building types or individual projects. Provoost's heavily illustrated book is updated from the 2003 Dutch version with a new introductory chapter and a photo essay by Iwan Baan, many of them aerials showing Maaskant's buildings in their contexts all these decades later.

5: Building Together: Chipperfield Dudler, Gigon/Guyer edited by J. Christoph Bürkle, Alexander Bonte | Jovis | 2013 | Amazon
This slim book (just shy of 100 pages) documents a big project that is part of an even larger development. In 2007 architect Max Dudler won a competition to plan three parcels that were part of KCAP's Europaallee masterplan adjacent to main station in Zurich. Picking up on the planned access ways between parcels in KCAP's plan, Dudler broke down Parcel C into four buildings arranged around a courtyard and connected by bridge. He then brought in the architects that were runners up in the competition – David Chipperfield and Annette Gigon/Mike Guyer – to design one building each in a complex for UBS. Gigon/Guyer's mesh-and-glass contribution stands out from Dudler's and Chipperfield's rigid rationalism, but the ensemble works well in the spaces they create and the connections they make with each other, rather then as individual aesthetic or formal components. It goes without saying that it's also refreshing to see architects putting cooperation over ego.

6: Workscape: New Spaces for New Work edited by Sofia Borges, Sven Ehmann, Robert Klanten | Gestalten | 2013 | Amazon
"Business casual" is the name of the introduction to this collection of nearly 50 projects documenting what the editors call the "workplace revolution." More than just a glossy reference of office interiors and architecture projects around the world, the book documents a time when distinctions between work and personal life blur; when the spaces and surfaces of work spaces resemble living rooms; when companies fueled by technology expect long hours and employees expect comfort and perks. This sort of revolution could just as well happen without the input of design, but these projects show how important design is in creating environments that work well for both employer and employee in the 21st-century office.

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