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After 12 years of astonishing change in New York, Bloomberg earns mixed marks. Photo © Flickr User Noel Y.C. Nearly seven miles of Manhattan streets are closed to vehicular traffic for annual Summer Streets events, initiated by Bloomberg's administration in 2008. A rendering of Seaport City in Lower Manhattan. On a steamy afternoon in early August, a who's who of New York architects crowded into a conference room to hear city officials answer questions about Seaport City, a proposed mixed-use development meant to protect Lower Manhattan from flooding. The scope of the project is astounding—adding acres of landfill behind a

By Martin Filler. New York Review Books, 2013, 336 pages, $30. A Voice for Here and Now Martin Filler's new collection of essays appears in the wake of a significant shift in the tenor of architectural criticism. Gone are such provocative, if “unstable” (Filler's word), figures as Herbert Muschamp, and such cheerleaders for the star system as Nicolai Ouroussoff. Instead, we have their more measured successor at The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, as well as the similarly thoughtful Christopher Hawthorne at the Los Angeles Times and Blair Kamin at the Chicago Tribune. But Filler can claim to have launched

By Raymund Ryan with contributions by Brian O’Doherty and Marc Treib and photographs by Iwan Baan. University of California Press, 2012, 120 pages, $40. In recent decades, hundreds of new museums have sprung up in emerging art markets across the globe. In most of them, art remains confined to sterile, “white cube” galleries, while architecture and nature remain, quite literally, outside. A very different model, though, was pioneered more than 50 years ago by projects such as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, which showed how art, architecture, and landscape could be brought together. In White Cube, Green

In 2012, architects Paul Dieterlen, Jorge Ruiz Boluda, and Agustín Durá Herrero envisioned a motley crew of guests for an “Inspiration Hotel” conceptual design competition in Spain. The surreal assortment includes Salvador Dalí, Le Corbusier, Albert Einstein, Álvaro Siza, Mies van der Rohe, Steve Jobs, Eero Aarnio, Andy Warhol, and a flock of ducks. With Project Architect Company’s photomontage for its entry to the Haus der Zukunft competition in 2012, the architects wanted to impart a sense of historic Berlin to their scheme. They inserted stills from Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. At RECORD, we frequently

By Vishaan Chakrabarti. Metropolis Books, 2013, 252 pages, $30. Bright Lights, Big Cities Architect, planner, and one-time developer Vishaan Chakrabarti asks us to imagine a United States in which government invests in high-speed trains linking high-density cities and does not subsidize suburban sprawl. He admits this sounds a bit naive in an era of political paralysis and at a time when the middle class and wealthy—no matter their political affiliation—enjoy perks like the mortgage-interest deduction that help perpetuate the status quo. But he builds his argument with straightforward prose and lots of easy-to-read charts and graphs. Hyper-dense cities are more

In 2011, the Kunsthaus Bregenz mounted an exhibition of the art and architecture of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

By Brian Lutz. Pointed Leaf Press, November 2012, 224 pages, $85. This is a book on the model of Marilyn and John Neuhart’s The Story of Eames Furniture (Gestalten, 2010). It shares with that two-volume set an agenda—an emphasis on process and manufacturing—and a large size (14.2 by 11.8 inches) that does neither the reader nor the illustrations great service. Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman, by Brian Lutz. Pointed Leaf Press, November 2012, 224 pages, $85. First, the agenda. Lutz, a former Knoll associate, argues in his introduction that Saarinen’s furniture has never attracted the same scholarly interest as his

EcoArchitecture: The Work of Ken Yeang, by Sara Hart. John Wiley & Sons, 2011, 272 pages, $75. WOHA: Selected Projects, Volume 1, by Patrick Bingham-Hall. Pesaro Publishing, 2011, 280 pages, $65. In the present environment of instant communications and global architectural practices, the swirl of influences between East and West is as dynamic and complex as the trade winds that blow between continents. This pair of publications, EcoArchitecture, The Work of Ken Yeang, by Sara Hart, and WOHA: Selected Projects Volume 1, by Patrick Bingham-Hall, captures the complexity and promise of this moment. WOHA: Selected Projects, Volume 1, by Patrick

Emily Talen, Co-editor, Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City Readers: Michael Sorkin sounds tired, and who can blame him? This master of critique has made a career out of eviscerating buildings, architects, fellow writers, and anyone who rubs him the wrong way. How unexpected of him to now propose a why-can't-we-all-get-along harmony when so many are already lying dead on the Sorkin battlefield. We too would like to move on from this old and distracting debate. Unfortunately, while Mr. Sorkin tries to reinvent himself as the great peacekeeper, billions are wasted on efforts to ruralize the city.

A recent book by New Urbanist authors revives an old battle with Landscape Urbanism. Photo © Iwan Baan The High Line in New York, designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is criticized by Andres Duany for being too expensive and over-designed. It's hard to keep up with the musical deck chairs in the disciplines these days. The boundaries of architecture, city planning, urban design, landscape architecture, sustainability, computation, and other fields are shifting like crazy, and one result is endless hybridization–green urbanism begets landscape urbanism, which begets ecological urbanism, which begets agrarian urbanism–each “ism” claiming