Essays by editors Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Matthew Gordon Lasner, and others discuss the history of the city's housing subsidies from 1900 to the present.
This is a superb history of the numerous ways that New York has provided subsidized housing for low-, moderate-, and middle-income residents from around 1900 to the present.
In the May 2002 issue of RECORD, William Saunders wrote a Commentary column (page 93) on Christopher Alexander's new book The Nature of Order, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life and his 1977 classic A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. The following essay is the full version of Alexander's response to Saunders.
Why do we need another book about Le Corbusier? Since well before his death in 1965, the prolific French-Swiss architect has been the center of a virtual industry of publications about his work.
We may think we know all there is about the most famous display of architecture to be mounted in the the U.S., the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark show, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932. But there’s always more to dig up about this ultra-influential event and the fertile period from which it emanated, as we find in Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson.
Art of the Airport Tower, by Carolyn Russo. Smithsonian Books, November 2015, 176 pages, $45. This big, beautiful photographic survey of 85 historic and contemporary air traffic control towers from around the world and throughout history was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
At a time when bookstores are a nostalgic throwback to the past, and Rizzoli, known so well for its architectural monographs, has just published Kim Kardashian West: Selfish, these six serious tomes present a brave face to the future.
If you’ve ever felt like a slacker, neither of these books will help. You’ll know even before you open them—one weighs 4.4 pounds; the other, more than 7—that they represent thousands of hours of painstaking effort.
There's something funny about architectural theory. It takes the building—one of the heaviest and most solid artifacts of human production—and evacuates it of any relation to the physical world.
By Russell Fortmeyer and Charles D. Linn. Images Publishing, April 2014, 224 pages, $78. Smart Skins Despite its title, Kinetic Architecture is not a book about buildings with components that literally move. Instead, its authors, Russell Fortmeyer and Charles D. Linn (both former editors at Architectural Record), investigate projects with envelopes that dynamically respond—in ways both visible and invisible—to their surroundings in order to modulate the interior environment, conserve energy, and enhance the comfort of occupants. Linn, an architect and director of communications for the University of Kansas School of Architecture, and Fortmeyer, an electrical engineer and sustainable-technology specialist at