by Tracy Metz and Maartje van den Heuvel. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers (distributed in the U.S. by D.A.P.), 2012, 296 pages, $45. As cleanup from Hurricane Sandy segues to rebuilding, Sweet & Salt could have been ripped from newspaper headlines. The not-sounderlying theme is of the Dutch as canaries in the global-warming coal mine. Much of Holland’s most productive land is below sea level, so the Dutch are acutely aware of subtle changes in the rivers, seas, and weather that get lost in all the background noise masking the climate-change debate in America. After all, Holland has built its culture, social
Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, edited by Joan Ockman with Rebecca Williamson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, 400 pages, $50. Academic Discourse Photo courtesy Associat ion of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Architecture students hard at work at drafting tables at MIT in 1898. Photo courtesy Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Architecture students hard at work at drafting tables at Kent State in 1967. What is the status of the “big book” today? The editors of Architecture School, along with the board of advisers of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture—which initiated the book
by Jonathan Barnett. Routledge, 2011, 248 pages, $54 (paperback). Jonathan Barnett is a believer (as am I) that architectural ideas have had a vital role in shaping cities. To bolster his assertion he lays out in City Design a rich history of the styles, movements, and ideas that have shaped cities from the Renaissance forward. He puts in context everything from “garden cities” to “megastructures” and places these movements in the broader arc of civic history. Particularly interesting is Barnett’s interweaving of landscape design and architecture, since few books have looked at the interdependence of the two fields and their
by Joseph Rosa and Robert Elwall. Edition Axel Menges, 2012, 108 pages, $68. This exquisite oversized book of Turner’s abstract black-and-white photographs spans 35 years (1974-2009), demonstrating how she has been able to expand a language developed for crisp geometric structures to a variety of modern buildings and enabling the reader to see them anew. Turner first became known for the book Judith Turner Photographs Five Architects (Rizzoli, 1980), which depicted the “white architecture” of the 1970s of Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, and Charles Gwathmey. Her photographs, like the buildings of those architects at that time,
by Shashi Caan. Laurence King Publishing, 2011, 192 pages, $30 (paperback). In the arc of an architecture or interior-design student’s education, she may encounter the image of Abbé Laugier’s “primitive hut” a dozen times. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but if you’ve ever sat in a darkened lecture hall and wondered, “Is that all there is?” then Shashi Caan’s Rethinking Design Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment is for you. Caan is the former chair of interior design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and a founder and principal of the architecture, interiors,
by Tracy Metz and Maartje van den Heuvel. Rotterdam: NAi publishers, 2012, distributed in the U.S. by D.A.P), 296 pages, $45. You can open Sweet & Salt to a photo of torrential water ripping through the streets of a medieval town or a golden-hued painting of a peaceful ice-covered pond just after the chilly sun has set. Is this a history, a guidebook, a cautionary tale of climate change, a dike-designer’s handbook, or an art book? In the hands of Tracy Metz, a long-time contributor to Architectural Record, and art historian Maartje van den Heuvel, it is all of the
The Eyes of the Skin is the "gentle manifesto" that grew out of the Finnish architect, teacher, philosopher, and designer Juhani Pallasmaa's concern about the "dominance of vision and the suppression of other senses in the way architecture was taught, conceived and critiqued."
Edited by Philipp Meuser, with essays by Ahn Chang-mo and Christian Postho. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 368 pages, two volumes in slipcase, $50. Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is probably the most isolated city in the world, both physically and culturally. Since there are few ways to learn about the city, a veil of isolation stimulates curiosity. Few publications have addressed the city's built environment; most focus instead on economic, political, and social issues. Architectural Guide: Pyongyang feeds this curiosity to some extent, providing unique information about Pyongyang, including both its architecture and its urban planning history. In an odd
By Andrew Blum. New York: Harper Collins Ecco, May 2012, 309 pages, $26.99. There's a revelatory scene in Terry Zwigoff's film, Crumb, in which the titular artist demonstrates his signature technique for revealing the grittiness of the real— telephone poles, cables, all of the varied rooftop flora of our urban infrastructure—in his cityscapes. When we think of the Internet (and often when we write about it) we generally see it as an ethereal realm of boundary-erasing placelessness. But our data actually makes its way through tangled knots of wire and fiber-optic cable, pulled through subterranean (and suboceanic) depths by workers
By David Adjaye. New York: Rizzoli, 2011, 568 pages, boxed set, $100. This handsome book is a culmination of a series of exhibitions held in Massachusetts; London; Bern, Switzerland; Lisbon; and Tokyo that showcased architect David Adjaye’s photographic survey of Africa’s urban environment. Architect David Adjaye’s new book, “African Metropolitan Architecture,” is a photographic survey of Africa’s urban environment. Click the image above for the slideshow. Six of the seven paperback volumes in this boxed set, edited by Peter Allison, consist of pictures of the diverse architectural forms that exist on the continent. The author, who was born in Tanzania
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