Edited by Neil Spiller and Nic Clear. Thames & Hudson, November 2014, 352 pages, $50 (hardcover). This is actually three books in one. As a collection of 40 essays by 35 different authors, it is, first, an advertisement for the University of Greenwich's Department of Architecture and Landscape in its new location at the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site outside of London and its assumed new relevance. It is, alternatively, a platform for schools of architecture that indulge “radicality,” “innovation,” and visions of the “future.” And, finally, it is a history of various schools offering alternative (read: anti-institutional) modes of
By Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luiz Lara with a foreword by Jorge Francisco Liernur. University of Texas Press, January 2015, 424 pages, $81 (hardcover) $45 (paperback). Whose Continent Is It Anyway? Eurocentrism Is Hard to Break. Except for a handful of anthologies and books focusing on specific architects or events, Latin America has received little attention in English-language histories of architecture. The Museum of Modern Art, though, mounted three exhibitions (and published accompanying books) on the region in the 20th century—Brazil Builds in 1943, Latin American Architecture Since 1945 in 1955, and The Architecture of Luis Barragán in 1976—and
Edited by Rosemarie Haag Bletter and Joan Ockman, with Nancy Eklund Later. Yale University Press, February 2015, 348 pages, $80. Thirty years after the legendary show Modern Architecture: An International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), its curators, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, launched a series of symposia assessing the development of this new architecture. Whereas the MoMA show was accompanied by a book, the symposia had to wait almost 50 years for the proceedings to be published. It is like opening a time capsule—and a compelling one. The three Modern Architecture Symposia (MAS) took place at Columbia
By Jari Jetsonen and Sirkkaliisa Jetsonen. Princeton Architectural Press, October 2014, 224 pages, $50 (hardcover). Father and Son, Together and Apart This beautifully illustrated book covers most of the houses designed by Eliel Saarinen, with his partners and members of his family, and by his son, Eero, both with Eliel and with associates of his own. It is important because most writing about Eero pays far too little attention to the influence of his father or to the collaborative nature of both their practices. The authors, a photographer and an architect, know about cooperative family ventures, since they are married
By Deyan Sudjic. Rizzoli ex libris, February 2015, 488 pages, $25. This book begins, somewhat unpromisingly, with the author's disavowing the format he has chosen. About eight years ago, around the time he became the director of London's Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic agreed to write two books—The Language of Things (published in 2008), and this one, initially conceived as a “massive 250,000-word conventional dictionary of design.” The task seemed daunting, and Sudjic had not made much progress when his publisher relieved him of the problem—in the age of Wikipedia, people had stopped buying dictionaries. He could keep his advance, but
By David Ross Scheer. Routledge, August 2014, 258 pages, $40. In The Death of Drawing, David Ross Scheer, an architect and teacher specializing in digital technologies, lays out the contemporary practices of design that have pushed aside architectural drawing as the dominant means of architectural expression. The author crafts his sentences precisely, illustrating ideas that explain concepts clearly. If one wants to know what is going on in the profession and schools of architecture, this book is a must read. As a professor of architecture who teaches drawing, I was fascinated by this contemporary analysis of the act of creating.
By Rob Kovitz. Treyf Books, November 2014, 664 pages, $30. The only bit of original text in Rob Kovitz's diverting According to Plan is a last-page mission statement about his imprint, Treyf Books. The objective of that publishing project is described there as making "unusual books of an indeterminate type, sort of story-picture remix books for people who can't stomach any more schmaltzy Chicken Soup for the Soul." If we are to take that title, volume one of the enormously popular self-help series, as a stand-in for all things that limit creative possibility through oversimplification, overdetermination, and, yes, schmaltz, then
By Ulrich Pfammatter. DOM Publishers, May 2014, 584 pages, $116. This well-documented volume casts a wide net in gathering sustainable projects from around the world-including floating reed houses in Iraq and the glass-and-steel headquarters Christoph Ingenhoven designed for Swarovski in Switzerland-and has a foreword by Stefan Behnisch.
Edited by Carol McMichael Reese, Michael Sorkin, and Anthony Fontenot. Verso, May 2014, 544 pages, $50. Can the Good Times Roll After the Flood Waters Recede? Images courtesy Waggonner & Ball Architects at Waggonner & Ball devised plans for the Hoffman Triangle area that change its current state (top) into one that accommodates various water-storage options (above). The subtitle here is a bit of a spoiler. News flash: equitable, sound, socially responsible planning did not happen in post-Katrina New Orleans. This won't shock anyone who watched HBO's Treme on a regular basis. But that's the message conveyed by the book's
By Rem Koolhaas with a supplement by Jorge Otero-Pailos, edited by Jordan Carver. GSAPP Transcripts, September 2014, 104 pages, $18 The idea that Rem Koolhaas and his firm, OMA, staunchly advocate preservation might come as a surprise. His large-scale buildings, such as CCTV in Beijing; or the Seattle Central Library attest to a "starchitect" at work, one who pushes for the new and unique, not the old and historic. Koolhaas, not surprisingly, abhors this hackneyed epithet. And now, two of his past lectures-assembled with a concluding essay by Jorge Otero-Pailos, associate professor of historic preservation at Columbia University-make a strong
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