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By Matthew Gordon Lasner. Yale University Press, 2012, 336 pages, $40. This superb study of co-owned housing in America-from the first cooperative apartment buildings in 19th-century New York City to condominiums around the country today-is not only an architectural history but also a social, political, urban, economic, and political one. With only 125 black-and-white images, the author manages to provide enough information for the reader to picture those apartment buildings and townhouses, while he explains the socioeconomic circumstances under which they were created. High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, by Matthew Gordon Lasner. Yale University Press, 2012, 336

Edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. University of Illinois Press, 2012, 224 pages, $60. SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City, edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. University of Illinois Press, 2012, 224 pages, $60. Focusing mostly on Rust Belt cities in the United States, this book examines urban-revitalization strategies in places such as Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, and Peoria, Illinois. In a lively foreword, urbanist Richard Florida argues that these cities should be wary of megaprojects like “heavily subsidized convention centers and downtown sports stadiums” and should look instead to smaller-scale, grass-roots efforts

The author, who covers architecture for Inhabitat.com, examines the need for new kinds of housing in the wake of disasters, poverty, and climate change, and shows projects from around the globe. 

This century's biggest architectural challenge is taking place in the developing world.

The Shape of Green by Lance Hosey. Island Press, 2012, 216 pages, $30. Did you know that a clean neighborhood experiences one-fifth less crime than an untidy one, that profit margins for businesses near Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library have risen 50 percent since it opened in 2004, that birdsong stimulates carbon sequestration by trees? Lance Hosey is on a mission to prove that society places value on beautiful environments, which makes them more enduring. His new book, The Shape of Green, leaves no case unturned for recognizing beauty as a valid consideration in green building. The Shape of Green

Even before Norman Foster presented his firm's scheme in late December to alter radically the New York Public Library's main branch, controversy swirled among scholars about plans to change Carrère & Hastings' 1897 Beaux-Arts masterpiece at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

A two-tier power system could deliver electricity more dependably to everyone. Blackouts caused by superstorm Sandy and other recent destructive weather events–coupled with dramatic system failures like the great Northeast blackout of 2003–have undermined confidence in the U.S. electrical grid's ability to keep homes and businesses humming. Those with means are increasingly installing their own power generation, and thus raising a provocative question: could the nation soon have a two-tier power system in which reliable electricity is a luxury, as is the case in many developing countries? Illustration © Andrew DeGraff Experts in electrical transmission tend to agree that the

Ezra Stoller, Photographer, by Nina Rappaport and Erica Stoller. Introduction by Andy Grundberg; contributions by Akiko Busch and John Morris Dixon. Yale University Press, 2012, 288 pages, $65. Balthazar Korab, Architect of Photography, by John Comazzi. Princeton Architectural Press, 2012, 192 pages, $40. Click the image above to see more photographs from the book. Click the image above to see more photographs from the book. Photography not only helped to define Modern architecture, it also created its celebrities. It is difficult to imagine mid-20th-century American design without recollecting Ezra Stoller's iconic image of SOM's Lever House or Balthazar Korab's shots

January 2013 Daniel Libeskind adds to his Jewish Museum Berlin. Something about Berlin brings out the best in Daniel Libeskind. It is here that he had his greatest triumph with the opening, in 2001, of the Jewish Museum Berlin, a building with cuts and slashes that make brutality palpable. On the audio tour, Libeskind says that some people will be nauseated by the museum's angles. But that's OK. If his way of talking about the symbolism of his buildings can seem overwrought (he is happy to offer almost any meaning until he finds one that sticks), in Berlin the architecture