RECORD’s holiday roundup highlights books that deal with urbanity in its many guises, from perspectives that embrace skyscrapers to those that see antidotes to density in low-rise planning and landscape design. Our purview takes us from the anti-urban development of the shopping mall to the precedents for civilization established long ago in the Middle East now endangered through political turmoil.
Holiday Gift Guide: Architecture Books
RECORD's annual guide to gifts for colleagues, friends, and supportive clients.
NY Skyscrapers, by Dirk Stichweh, Scott Murphy, and Jörg Machinas. Prestel, August 2016, 193 pages, $39.95.
A large-format (9.6 by 12.8 inches) celebration of the New York skyscraper, this book shows towers in clusters and from aerial and long-range views that provide perspectives that vary from the typical pedestrian’s-eye experience. An expanded update of a 2009 publication, this edition includes images of skyscrapers under way now and planned for the near future.
Never Built New York, by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell. Metropolis Books, October 2016, 488 pages, $55.
Ranging from the outrageous to the sensible, the 200 projects in this glossy and gargantuan (11.5 by 8.5 inches) volume prove that, as outlandish as built New York can sometimes seem, it could have been a lot more so. Among the fanciful and grimly pragmatic schemes are proposals to fill in the East and Hudson rivers and to extend Manhattan to Staten Island. The most sorely missed realization is probably Robert Moses’s very reasonable plan to extend the subway to JFK Airport. Many of the works shown here will be displayed in a September 2017 exhibition at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, New York.
Becoming Jane Jacobs, by Peter L. Laurence. University of Pennsylvania Press, June 2016, 355 pages, $34.95.
This biography of Jane Jacobs, who did more than anyone to save the character of New York from car-oriented modernization, places her work in the context of the urban thinking of the time. Peter Laurence, a Clemson University professor, shows how Jacobs’s ideas related to and departed from modernist proponents and how colleagues such as Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell encouraged her development of original ideas that would become part of the international debate.
Eyes on the Street: the Life of Jane Jacobs, by Robert Kanigel. Alfred A. Knopf, September 2016, 490 pages, $35.
Robert Kanigel, a former science professor at MIT, concentrates mainly on the personality and background of Jane Jacobs, the courageous, self-educated, enormously influential journalist and activist. He shows how, as a wife and mother in Greenwich Village, she learned from everyday experience to argue, both in print and at podiums, for the preservation of traditional, small-scale, urban neighborhoods that were undervalued in mainstream urban thought.
100 Years of Architecture, by Alan Powers. Laurence King Publishing, August 2016, 304 pages, $50.
This lively and original international journey through the last 100 years includes not only most of the classics of architectural history but also quirky and overlooked buildings that provide a fuller picture of what was actually new and unusual in every era. They include little-known projects such as Mario Botta’s Church of St. John the Baptist in Magno, Switzerland (1996), and Imre Makowecz’s Farkasréti Cemetery Chapel in Budapest of 1975, which could still inspire architectural ideas. Pairings of masterpieces such as Lawrence Halprin’s work with Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, and Whitaker at Sea Ranch, California (1964–72), and François Spoerry’s Port Grimaud in Var, France (1966–69), encourage readers to see these developments in new ways.
World of Malls: Architectures of Consumption, edited by Vera Simone Bader and Andres Lepik. Hatje Cantz, September 2016, 253 pages, $70.
This fascinating catalogue of an American building type that, like the skyscraper, spread throughout the world, contains essays by an international group of scholars, which are illustrated by malls of every conceivable type. Early European shopping arcades and department stores are included as precedents—but not the American strip malls that led to this privatized, anti-urban phenomenon.
Austere Gardens: Thoughts on Landscape, Restraint, & Attending, by Marc Treib. ORO Editions, May 2016, 107 pages, $19.95.
This small, richly illustrated essay uses modest insertions in landscapes, works of earth art, small Japanese gardens, and other examples to illustrate the value of restraint and careful custodianship of nature. Marc Treib, professor of architecture emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, shows how ecological balance and a sense of place can be created in numerous subtle ways.
Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist, by Jens Hoffman and Claudia J. Nahson. Jewish Museum, with Yale University Press, May 2016, 208 pages, $50.
There is nothing austere or subtle in the big, colorful landscape designs of Roberto Burle Marx (1909–94), the most famous modern Latin American landscape architect. The multi-talented Brazilian, who was also a painter, sculptor, and designer, first discovered the native plants of his home country at the Berlin Botanical Garden when he was studying abroad. He also became an early advocate for the preservation of rain forests. This catalogue of a traveling exhibition shows the full range of his work and chronicles its influence on seven contemporary artists.
The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, edited by Amale Andraos and Nora Akawi, with Caitlin Blanchfield. Columbia University Press, June 2016, 272 pages, $39.
Fascinating, well illustrated, and extremely timely, this compendium grew out of symposia that took place in Amman, Jordan, in 2013 and at Columbia University in 2014. In its essays, architects and scholars reflect on the ambitious buildings and skylines created in Arab cities during recent decades. Contributors consider issues of imagery, identity, religiosity, and of course the economies that fuel the ambitious building and rebuilding by many well-known and inventive architects such as Jean Nouvel, Bernard Khoury, and Mangera Yvars.
The Battle for Home: the Vision of a Young Architect in Syria, by Marwa Al-Sabouni. Thames & Hudson, April 2016, 184 pages, $25.95.
This deeply moving and unusually well-informed description of life today in Homs, Syria, by an architect, wife, mother, professor, and scholar of Middle Eastern architectural history is easily the most inspiring and poignant book of the season. It is pertinent today because of the horrific war in Syria, which surrounds the author. But it is also important because of her knowledgable explanation of the architecture and urbanism in the fountainhead of civilization, the Middle East, at a time when it is severely threatened. Al-Sabouni gives readers some hope as she makes us fully aware of the crucial value of the built world.
