Rem Koolhaas’s most recent publication (with Hans Ulrich Obrist) tells the story of Metabolism, a technocratic movement of the 1960s based on ideas of organic growth.
Edited by Harry den Hartog. 010 Publishers: 2010, 416 pages, $44. Related Links: The Vertical Village and How the City Moved to Mr. Sun This densely packed book presents a broad range of research on the remarkable growth of the greater Shanghai metropolitan area in recent decades. With more than 300,000 people moving to Shanghai each year, the city government is busy building satellite towns, some of which are themed on ersatz visions of foreign places. So today, you can live in or visit Holland Village or Thames Town. Other new towns, such as Qingpu and Jiading, employ more sophisticated
By Victoria Newhouse. The Monacelli Press, 2012, 272 pages. $50. You can’t count off four beats of a twelve-bar blues, let alone flip through an opera score, without being aware that time is one of music’s essential ingredients. Another is space, though notation reveals nothing about it. Harmony, rhythm, melody, and instruments are all negotiable, and shaped by the place where it’s imagined, performed, and heard. Slave songs were pitched to carry across an open field. Beethoven composed his Eroica symphony to rattle the walls of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Medieval polyphony depended on the reverberations of
By Richard Olsen. Rizzoli, 2012, 240 pages, $45. Click the image above for details about book mentioned in this review. Handmade Houses takes us on a delightful journey back to the heady and rebellious days of the 1960s and ’70s, when green design—the world of reduce, reuse, and recycle—was sired. Its author, Richard Olsen, is a West Coast architectural writer and editor; he is also the grandson and great-grandson of Norwegian carpenters. This tale is a lot more than hippies and hot tubs, however. Olsen provides a thorough history of the owner-built, woodbutcher movement from places like Big Sur, California,
Monadnock Summer: The Architectural Legacy of Dublin, New Hampshire, by William Morgan. David R. Godine, 2011, 160 pages, $30. Tomorrow’s Houses: New England Modernism, by Alexander Gorlin. Rizzoli, 2011, 256 pages, $65. Together, these very different books on New England houses provide an intimate introduction to American domestic architecture and the values it embodies. Architectural historian William Morgan’s Monadnock Summer focuses on one quietly elite, very small town but explains how the buildings there exemplified some of the aspirations and achievements of the nation. Architect Alexander Gorlin’s Tomorrow’s Houses concentrates on houses in New England built between 1912 (Purcell &
Edited by Nicola Navone. Silvana Editoriale and Mendrisio Academy Press, 2010, 196 pages, $54 Since winning an Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, Diébédo Francis Kéré has continued to garner accolades for his simple yet elegant work in his native country, Burkina Faso. One such honor—the BSI Swiss Architectural Award, given biennially by the BSI Architectural Foundation (a philanthropic arm of BSI Bank), with support from the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio and the Federal Office for Culture in Bern—led to the publication of this engaging book. The international award recognizes architects age 50 or younger who create sustainable
Edited by Marie J. Aquilino. Metropolis Books, 2011, 303 pages, $35 Beyond Shelter hopes to “stir a passion for reform.” It asks architects to claim responsibility for protecting people during natural disasters and shaping policy and rebuilding efforts after humanitarian crises—events that affect nearly 200 million people, mostly in the developing world. “There is still no career path that prepares students to work as urgentistes-design professionals who intervene at a crucial moment in the recovery process to produce enduring solutions,” writes Marie J. Aquilino, Beyond Shelter’s editor and a professor of architectural history at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris.
A follow up to the popular Design Like You Give a Damn (2006), this book covers more than 100 recent humanitarian design projects across the globe, selected and edited by Architecture for Humanity (AFH).
by Harry Charrington and Vezio Nava, editors. Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2011, 427 pages, $59 Thirty-five years after Alvar Aalto's death, his reputation as one of the giants of modern architecture remains unassailable. While the Euro has replaced the 50 Finnmark notes that carried Aalto's image into every Finn's daily life, his shadow looms large over Finland. For example, the University of Art and Design Helsinki merged in 2010 with the Helsinki School of Economics and Helsinki University of Technology to form a new institution named The Aalto University. As with any iconic figure, there is a constant process of re-evaluation and
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