Edited by Denna Jones. Prestel Publishing, November 2014, 576 pages, $35. History looms over architects. In few other professions is there such a defined canon of masterpieces, such a tradition of reviving old styles. Yet, as Richard Rogers and Philip Gumuchdjian observe in their forward to Architecture: The Whole Story, “architecture is surely one of the most optimistic art forms.” Each generation searches for “new utopias, new ideals” and finds inspiration “from all our innovations and all expressions of harmony and beauty,” they say. Architecture always looks forward, but does revisiting the past offer new inspiration? That tension is at

Every year, hundreds of new architecture books find their way to Record's offices. Editors look at all of them, albeit some longer than others. Here are some of the ones that grabbed our attention in 2014. Notations: Diagrams & Sequences, by Bernard Tschumi.Artifice Books, August 2014, 304 pages, $40. An extensive collection of previously unpublished drawings, this book is beautifully bound in a red cloth cover, Tschumi’s signature color. It presents the conceptual “notations” behind a range of projects, arranged chronologically, from the Parc de la Villette in Paris to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. Tschumi’s expressive drawings, sketches,

Lina Bo Bardi 100: Brazil’s Alternative Path to Modernism, edited by Andres Lepik and Vera Simone Bader. Hatje Cantz Verlag, October 2014, 368 pages, $65. Lina Bo Bardi, by Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima with a foreword by Barry Bergdoll. New Haven: Yale University Press, November 2013, 256 pages, $65. Stones Against Diamonds, by Lina Bo Bardi. London:Architectural Association, 2013, 132 pages. Lina Bo Bardi is best known for the SESC Pompeia community center in S'o Paulo, completed when she was 72 years old, the culmination of a complex and contradictory bi-continental career. Now, two new books and the

These two new books provide strong and timely messages for people concerned with the present and future of cities. Both of them look at the dense, often chaotic conditions of big cities and find solutions where others have seen mostly problems. Click the image above for details about each book mentioned in this review. Focused on Latin America, McGuirk's book is carefully constructed, striking a balance between reportage and interpretation. A writer and curator who has worked as the design columnist for The Guardian, McGuirk describes what activist architects and politicians are doing to improve informal settlements in cities such

The City As Interface: How New Media Are Changing the City, by Martijn de Waal. nai010 Publishers, August 2014, 224 pages, $33. Smart About Cities: Visualizing the Challenges for 21st Century Urbanism, edited by Maarten Hajer and Ton Dassen. nai010 Publishers/pbl Publishers, June 2014, 250 pages, $33. Predicting the future of the city is a lot like predicting the future of human society. Urban areas embody the physical infrastructure of our cultures and economies, and will house 70 percent of the world's population by 2050. They are too complex for detailed extrapolations, yet we can make insightful observations about their

By Michiel van Raaij. nai010 Publishers, May 2014, 240 pages, $25. For more than a century, ornament in architecture was anathema in the Calvinist Netherlands—and elsewhere too. In his book Building as Ornament: Iconography in Contemporary Architecture, Michiel van Raaij, who is the editor in chief of the online architecture platform Architectenweb, interviews 10 well-known architects and architectural historians to reveal how this attitude has changed since the 1990s. The moralism of modernism, though, has not yet completely disappeared: “A successful ornament,” writes van Raaij, “represents a virtue and explains the function, status, structure and context of the building.” An

By Michael Agaard Andersen. Princeton Architectural Press, December 2013, 312 pages, $60. This handsome book on Jørn Utzon, the well-known but little-understood 20th-century architect, delves into his work in a way few monographs do. Utzon, who was Danish, is best known for his Sydney Opera House, a brilliant project but one that took many years to build and encountered numerous budgetary and technical problems. The author, Michael Agaard Andersen, concentrates on Utzon's work rather than his life. Andersen provides little biographical information, though some seeps into the text as he discusses the various building types that the architect explored, along

By Vladimir Belogolovsky. Rizzoli, April 2014, 300 pages, $75. Australia via Austria This exemplary new monograph on one of Australia's most prominent Modern architects tells Harry Seidler's story from the points of view of various people who knew or worked with him. The author, Vladimir Belogolovsky, a Russian-born American architect who directs the International Curatorial Project, provides an insightful introductory essay, along with commentaries by Kenneth Frampton, Norman Foster, critic Chris Abel, and the late Oscar Niemeyer. Abel's comments are particularly helpful, since he began his career in Britain but was based for a number of years in Australia, so

By Timothy M. Rohan. Yale University Press, July 2014, 300 pages, $65. A Shakespearean Tale Told in Buildings When Paul Rudolph's Art & Architecture Building at Yale opened in 1963, architectural historian Vincent Scully wrote that the design “puts demands upon the individual user which not every psyche will be able to meet.” The building was gutted by a suspicious fire in 1969, and, though the cause was never determined, the incident has been interpreted, in whispers and in print, as a rejection of the difficult-to-parse architecture and the difficult-to-pigeonhole architect. Much as the mystery or grandiosity or wit of