Book Briefs #18: A Bunch of Journals

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: Kerb 21 edited by Dion Gery, William Kennedy, Harriet Robertson, Bella Leber Smeaton | Melbourne Books | 2013
The first legal-to-drink issue of RMIT's Journal of Landscape Architecture is themed "Uncharted Territories." The editors explain that these "manifest in an uncertain future," and therefore the contributors are those who "have the capacity to charter these territories and operate within them." They even map the 23 contributors within a landscape-like surface (akin to the cover) that moves from "essence of discipline" to "proliferation of knowledge" in the x-direction and from "intentional" to "intuitive" in the y-direction. Most lie on the perimeter, leaving a hole in the center; this middle ground equates perhaps with those not comfortable with an uncertain future. Whatever the case, the essays, projects and interviews are wide-ranging in subject, so landscape architecture is represented, but so is art (most notably with Marina Abramović), fashion, technology, and even publishing. The issue gives landscape architecture students plenty of ammunition for laying out the course of their practices and potentially the future of the profession.

2: Soiled No. 4 - Windowscrapers edited by Joseph Altshuler | CARTOGRAM architecture+urban design | 2013
Windowscrapers is the fourth issue of the 'zine Soiled, following the appropriately titled Groundscrapers, Skinscrapers, and Platescrapers (issue five will be Cloudscrapers). Billed as "an architectural periodical that makes a mess of the built environment and the politics of space" and "a venue for architectural storytelling," Soiled is one of the freshest architectural publications I've come across in recent years. It has the editorial focus of another favorite MAS Context, balanced by the diversity of CLOG. In the case of Windowscrapers, transparency, refractivity and reflectivity are "probed" in essays, illustrations, stories and projects on voyeurism, (intellectual) slapstick comedy, window shopping, (creative) historic preservation, and art, among other things. It makes me curious how writers and architects will respond to "air-space as a site for occupation, manipulation, and activation" in the next issue.

3: (IN)formal LA: The Space of Politics edited by Victor J. Jones | eVolo publications | 2013 | Amazon
Technically a book rather than a journal, this title is the first non-skyscraper-competition book of hopefully many more from eVolo. It is a slim and handsome skinny book that originated from a 2011 workshop at the USC School of Architecture, organized by Stefano de Martino and Victor J. Jones, who edited the volume. A central portion of the book documents the workshop, set off from the other pages in yellow. The rest of the contents are essays, both old and new, all addressing Los Angeles's informality in some manner. Ironically, the book starts with its antithesis, the severe formal and institutional control of the Getty Center in Diane Ghirardo's "Invisible Acropolis," immediately moving to a more appropriate text culled from Roger Sherman's great book L.A. Under the Influence. Reyner Banham's well-known BBC documentary about the city is an inspiration for much of the proceedings, evident in the way the USC students left the studio for the city and the way the contributors prioritize firsthand experience over other accounts.



4: Boundaries n. 7: Free Architecture edited by Luc Sampò | Boundaries International Architectural Magazine | January - March 2013
What is "free architecture"? According to Boundaries editor-in-chief Luc Sampò it recalls "free software," which is the forerunner of the open-source movement, where code is shared amongst programmers rather than horded as proprietary. Most likely you are reading this blog post on a browser, like Firefox, that uses open-source software. Open-source, or free architecture follows the same principle: architects share designs that can be used around the world by whoever chooses to download the plans and build away. This runs counter to the typical semi-copyrighted nature of most architectural works, but the application to third-world and developing countries is obvious, something that comes across in the selection of projects gracing the pages of this issue, most of which are labelled with Creative Commons licenses.

5: Boundaries n. 8: Architecture and Utopia by Author | Publisher | April - June 2013
Where to go after "free architecture"? One logical step is into the realm of Utopia; after all, isn't open-source a Utopian ideal? Doesn't open-source break down political and social boundaries to promote architecture as a means of bettering people's lives? Not surprisingly, this issue is heavier on material outside of projects, unlike its predecessor. There is also research, photography, and manifestos. The latter (as well as a "year that was" paying tribute to Utopias of the 1960s) is a highlight of the issue, featuring responses by architects like Rintala Eggertsson and TYIN. Utopia is hardly the most popular topic in architectural discourse today (an introductory essay by Nathaniel Coleman discusses how architects like Zaha Hadid divorce their ideas of Utopia from political and social concerns, something much in the news recently), but it's not an idea that will go away, no matter how impossible the goal may be. As the gap between rich and poor increases, architects become more socially aware, and Utopia follows close behind.

6: a+u 2014:03: Supermodels by Hisao Suzuki | JA+U | February 2014
In 1982 Hisao Suzuki traveled from Japan to Spain, lured by the architecture of Antonio Gaudi. He stayed in Barcelona and has since been the principal photographer of El Croquis. His photographs involve visits to completed buildings but also to the offices of architects, where he often shoots architectural models. This handsome volume of A+U assembles a smattering of the 1,000 model photos Suzuki sent to the Japanese publication for consideration. Most of the models are by well-known architects, like the cover photo of the Prada Tokyo by Herzog and de Meuron. Likewise, most are lit by natural light, Suzuki's preferred means of lighting models. His stories accompanying the photographs are as rewarding as the consistently beautiful photos of the models themselves.

Book Briefs #17

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: The Working Drawing: The Architect's Tool edited by Annette Spiro and David Ganzoni | Park Books | 2014 | Amazon
On the way to realization, any building or landscape must be documented with working drawings, the primary means of making the architect's design understandable to others, particularly the contractor. These drawings consist of plans, elevations, sections, details, and sometimes 3-dimensional representations, often with lots of notes explaining what is represented. All too often these drawings aren't as celebrated as the sketches that are a more immediate representation of a particular architect's ideas about a building or landscape. But this big book finds the art in 100 working drawings from the 13th century to present, giving architects something to pore over when drawing stair details and bathroom elevations gets them down – or when 3-d modeling software like Revit has them hankering for something more tangible.

2: Concrete: Photography and Architecture edited by Daniela Janser, Thomas Seelig, and Urs Stahel in collaboration with Eva Kurz, Therese Seeholzer, and Corinna Unterkofler | Scheidegger and Spiess | 2013 | Amazon
At first glance this hefty book with its chip board cover appears to document the building material concrete in architecture. Of course, the glassy building on the cover questions this assumption. The book is actually a catalog to an exhibition at the Fotomuseum Winterthur last year, an exhibition that asked: "To what extent does photography influence not only the way architecture is perceived, but also the way it is designed?" and "How does an image bring architecture to life?" "Concrete" therefore refers to making architecture "real" through the dissemination of images. The gratuitously illustrated book traces architectural photography from St. John's College in Cambridge in 1845 to a small, curated selection of recent images. The city is the means of exploring images of construction and even demolition in chapters on Zurich, Paris, Berlin, New York City, Calcutta, and others. The photographs are accompanied by scholarly texts that ask, for example, "how can the city be shown concretely?"

3: Jørn Utzon: Drawings and Buildings by  Michael Asgaard Andersen | Princeton Architectural Press | 2013 | Amazon
Last year was a big year for Jørn Utzon, as the late Danish architect's Sydney Opera House turned 40 and people celebrated both the architect and his most famous building. It's not surprising that this historical monograph coincides with that anniversary, nor that it features the sails of the famous building on the cover. More surprising is the way professor Michael Asgaard Andersen focuses on Utzon's less celebrated buildings and unbuilt projects. Instead of being arranged chronologically, the projects are discussed thematically: Place, Method, Building Culture, Construction, Materiality, and Ways of Life. This tactic prioritizes both Utzon's intentions and the author's interpretations; the drawings and construction photos that reflect the book's subtitle tie together the chapters to make it a visual delight for architects and historians.



4: Hugh Maaskant: Architect of Progress by Michelle Provoost | nai010 publishers | 2013 | Amazon
It took ten years, but Michelle Provoost's historical monograph on Dutch architect Hugh Maaskant has finally been translated from Dutch to English. That is the same amount of time that the Crimson Architectural Historian devoted to investigating the work of the architect who did not build outside his home country. This extensive research shows in the incredibly thorough account of Maaskant's significant commissions and other projects, moving in a chronological yet overlapping fashion in chapters devoted to building types or individual projects. Provoost's heavily illustrated book is updated from the 2003 Dutch version with a new introductory chapter and a photo essay by Iwan Baan, many of them aerials showing Maaskant's buildings in their contexts all these decades later.

5: Building Together: Chipperfield Dudler, Gigon/Guyer edited by J. Christoph Bürkle, Alexander Bonte | Jovis | 2013 | Amazon
This slim book (just shy of 100 pages) documents a big project that is part of an even larger development. In 2007 architect Max Dudler won a competition to plan three parcels that were part of KCAP's Europaallee masterplan adjacent to main station in Zurich. Picking up on the planned access ways between parcels in KCAP's plan, Dudler broke down Parcel C into four buildings arranged around a courtyard and connected by bridge. He then brought in the architects that were runners up in the competition – David Chipperfield and Annette Gigon/Mike Guyer – to design one building each in a complex for UBS. Gigon/Guyer's mesh-and-glass contribution stands out from Dudler's and Chipperfield's rigid rationalism, but the ensemble works well in the spaces they create and the connections they make with each other, rather then as individual aesthetic or formal components. It goes without saying that it's also refreshing to see architects putting cooperation over ego.

6: Workscape: New Spaces for New Work edited by Sofia Borges, Sven Ehmann, Robert Klanten | Gestalten | 2013 | Amazon
"Business casual" is the name of the introduction to this collection of nearly 50 projects documenting what the editors call the "workplace revolution." More than just a glossy reference of office interiors and architecture projects around the world, the book documents a time when distinctions between work and personal life blur; when the spaces and surfaces of work spaces resemble living rooms; when companies fueled by technology expect long hours and employees expect comfort and perks. This sort of revolution could just as well happen without the input of design, but these projects show how important design is in creating environments that work well for both employer and employee in the 21st-century office.

Book Briefs #16

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: The Italian Townscape by Ivor De Wolfe | Artifice Books on Architecture | 2013 | Amazon
As somebody that spent a semester in Italy during architecture school, I can't get enough of books with photos of the country's distinctive and hard-to-dislike cities and towns, especially in and around Tuscany, where most of my semester was spent. So it's great to have this 1963 book by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, under the pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe (with photos by Ivy de Wolfe, in actuality Hastings's wife Hazel), which was reprinted by Artifice on its 50th anniversary. Nevertheless, Hubert's views of Italy are highly nuanced and personal, hardly resembling coffee table books with postcard photos. He wanted us to learn from the country's appealing urban conurbations as Modernism was transforming cities around the world, and to a certain degree it works through the photos and the sometimes quirky text (he starts the book by talking about bacon).

2: Sigurd Lewerentz edited by Nicola Flora, Paolo Giardiello and Gennaro Postiglione | Phaidon | 2013 | Amazon
Woodland Cemetery (aka Skogskyrkogården) in Stockholm is the most well-known project by Sweden's Sigurd Lewerentz (carried out with Gunnar Asplund starting in 1915), but a quick glance at the 150+ projects listed in the table of contents to this sizable monograph indicates this was one of many cemeteries or crematoriums that he designed. To somebody in the 21st century this may seem like typecasting or specialization, but as Colin St. John Wilson describes it in his introductory essay to this book originally published in 2002 by Electa (reprinted by Pall Mall and Phaidon this year): "Lewerentz did not flinch at the tragic sense...he fused the simple elements of construction into metaphors of brooding mystery." That mystery comes across in the many photos included in this book, but it is the architect's drawings that really come to the fore, making this a historical appreciation rather than a visual (eye candy) one. Nevertheless, this book is a must-have for anybody with an interest in an architect who deserves much more appreciation and attention.

3: New City: Contemporary Architecture in the City of London by Alec Forshaw | Merrell Publishers | 2013 | Amazon
While thinking of London may have triggered images of St. Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and other stone edifices, in the 21st century the city is being transformed by tall buildings of glass and steel (with some stone thrown here and there), many of them landmarks like their masonry predecessors. This book surveys the changes to the City of London (not to be confused with Greater London) through twelve geographical chapters, moving from "around St. Paul's" to "the Riverside." Each chapter maps the buildings (335 in the whole book) like a guidebook, but Forshaw opts for continuous text that meanders through each area like a walking tour, rather than breaking out each building into a separate entry. Actually many buildings would not merit inclusion if the book were a guide, even as each partakes in the city's 21st-century transformation. (See also 21st Century London: The New Architecture, also published by Merrell.)



4: Aircraft Carrier: American Ideas and Israeli Architectures after 1973 edited by Erez Ella, Milana Gitzin-Adiram, Dan Handel | Hatje Cantz | 2012 | Amazon
Last year's Venice Architecture Biennale was the first that I attended (writing about it for World-Architects). While I couldn't help from buying the miniature version of the "Common Ground" catalog (the big one was too big and costly to justify), in the year since I've gained three books produced from different exhibitions and pavilions at the Biennale. In addition to The Images of Architects and Wunderkammer (both part of the Arsenale exhibition) there is this book from the Israeli pavilion. While the other two books focus on the visual and tactile, respectively, as a source of inspiration for architects, aircraftcarrier is an overtly political affair, examining how global capitalism affected Israeli architecture. While the tongue-in-cheek tchotchkes (such as the peace-treaty bobble heads) don't have a strong a presence here as in the exhibition, the book is elegantly designed, making it a beautiful memento of a fairly serious show.

5: Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World edited by Seng Kuan and Yukio Lippit | Lars Müller Publishers | 2012 | Amazon
In 2009 Harvard GSD presented a comprehensive exhibition on Kenzo Tange, Utopia Across Scales: Highlights from the Kenzo Tange Archive, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the eponymous visiting professorship and included a conference. The latter helped to generate the essays in this handsome volume (with embossed cover and smooth, semi-gloss paper) that arrived when much scholarship on Tange was being produced, such as Project Japan and other books focused on his Metabolism influence. Photo/drawing portfolios are fitted between the essays, highlighting a few of Tange's most important buildings.

6: In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City by Mario Gandelsonas, Rafi Segal, Els Verbakel  | Island Press | 2013 | Amazon
This book also arose from an academic conference, but in this case it took more than five years to translate In Search of the Public from a two-day conference at Princeton University in October 2005 into a publication. These seven years saw a shift from the Bush to Obama administrations, but more dramatically the Arab Spring and Occupy movements challenged notions of the "public" through their actions a couple years ago. The conference proceedings, as documented in this slim volume, precede these important events, but the texts still find relevance as questions of public space continue unabated.

Book Briefs #15: Even More Journals

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages. See my recent installments on magazines: "a bunch of journals" and "a bunch more journals."



1: eVolo #05: ARCHI73C7UR3 X3NOCUL7UR3 | eVolo Magazine | Winter 2013 | Amazon
The fifth issue of eVolo Magazine is the first with a guest editor. Carlo Aiello hands over the reigns to Juan Azulay of MTTR MGMT with Benjamin Rice. Xenoculture is the issue's theme, and its focus is on the other that dwells within; the exuberant, the grotesque, the mutations that the majority fears, or at least are wary of. It's a topic that can easily be limited to the aesthetic, but the editors insert some pretty interesting interviews among the predominantly visual pages. Across five "acts" are contributions from a diverse array of architects, artists, and photographers, from Nick Cave and Francois Roche in Act 01 to David Maisel and Perry Hall (who contributes the cover image) near the end of the XL issue.

2: Harvard Design Magazine 35: Architecture's Core? | Harvard GSD | 2012
Starting with issue 35 of its biannual magazine, Harvard GSD is exploring the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism (urban planning and urban design), by looking inwards at their "cores" rather than outwards to their relationships with other fields. This may run counter to the popular thinking of inter-disciplinary processes and breaking down boundaries (or at least bridging) between disciplines, but as Dean Mohsen Mostafavi puts it his introduction to this issue, "we cannot speak of cross-fertilization...unless we understand and possess the know-how, creativity, and conventions distinct to each of these disciplines."

What follows are contributions by familiar names in academic circles: Preston Scott Cohen, K. Micheal Hays, Stan Allen, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Mario Campo, and many others. I particularly like Cohen's essay on "the hidden core of architecture" relative to late 19th-century changes in the construction and the subsequent shift to an architecture of facade and appearance; his call for transforming the core is a good one. Reinhold Martin's dissection of two books on "digital culture" and Farshid Moussavi's analysis of 30 St Mary Axe are other highlights. The other essays come at the theme from a multitude of ways, though given that it's the GSD academic flourishes prevail.

3: Harvard Design Magazine 36: Landscape Architecture's Core? | Harvard GSD | 2013
Emily Waugh (Survey Studio) is guest editor for issue 36, the middle of the three-issue focus on the disciplines taught at Harvard GSD (I'm especially interested in 37, the forthcoming issue on urbanism). There's a stronger structure to this issue; instead of the previous issue's loose collection of essays, Waugh breaks the contributions into four sections: Features (Jane Hutton's and Antoine Picon's one-two punch of material culture and digital culture, respectively, is a highlight), Territories of Engagement, Conjectures, and Excerpts. The bulk is made up of the first two, and I'd imagine that landscape architects will be drawn to the second, in which leading professionals (Andrea Cochran, PEG, Topotek 1, Dlandstudio, etc.) describe how their work addresses four areas: Scale and Scope, Approach, Tools, Challenges. Unlike the academic preference of issue 35, this one is a good balance of academia and practice.



4+5: Boundaries n.5: Architecture and Recycling + Boundaries n.6: Container Architectures | Boundaries · International Architectural Magazine | 2012 | Amazon
Each issue of the Italian magazine Boundaries is devoted to a theme, such as "Architecture for Emergencies" and "Architectures of Peace." Issues 5 and 6 have very similar themes, in that buildings made from shipping containers are another means of recycling; in fact, a couple of the projects collected in "Architecture and Recycling" use such containers. These two themes, and the projects found within, have a larger reach than, say, the first issue's focus on architecture in Africa; yet there still exists an emphasis on responsible architecture and finding alternatives for underserved people in much of the world. "Container Architectures" is an especially good issue, loaded with some of the best examples in the still-popular trend. It's as good (if not better in some respects) than the Container Atlas; and it's quite a bit cheaper.

6: Monocle Issue 63 | Monocle Magazine | May 2013 | Amazon
I have three issue of the UK magazine Monocle: the very first one, from March 2007; a special edition "devoted to building better cities, neighborhoods and residences" from summer 2008; and most recently an issue from a couple months ago. What is amazing when charting the changes between these three issues is how little has changed—the size, the design, the A-B-C-D-E structure, the page layout, the subjects, even the overall tone of the magazine. Sure, there are some tweaks to certain things (some flexibility in the column layouts, for example), but it's as if Tyler Brûlé and his crew had everything figured out before the first issue went to press. While the editors clearly have a knack for latching on to what's interesting, fashionable, and well-made, what I appreciate most about the magazine is just how much is crammed into each issue. Combined with a design that makes everything look appealing, the magazine is a great excuse for getting away from the screen and diving into some printed content.

7: Being BIG | Abitare | December-January 528 | Amazon
About every year or so, Abitare Magazine devotes a single issue to one architect after following them around for about the same amount of time. In 2009 it was Renzo Piano, followed by Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel in 2011, and most recently Bjarke Ingels at the end of 2012. Setting aside the fact of starchitect hero-worship and questions of if architects with the most press really need this much more, the idea is a great one. In the case of BIG, the editors are able to delve deeply into how Ingels travels back and forth between the offices in Copenhagen and New York, how he meets people, gets publicity, who he works with, what he's working on, what people think of him, and much more. The issue presents projects (most in-progress), but the focus is clearly on personalities, the architect(s) more than the architecture.

Book Briefs #14: 3 Monographs on 3 NYC Architects

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: Architecture as a Design Partnership by Spector Group | Visual Profile Books Inc. | 2013 | Amazon
Only one drawing is found in the pages of the Spector Group's second monograph: a watercolor of the Parthenon done 77 years ago by Charles Spector, the founder of the firm that is now in the hands of two more generations of Spectors (soon to be three, per the foreword by Charles's architecture-school-bound great-grandson). Photographs and renderings are the means of describing the approximately 75 projects organized into four sections: architecture, interiors, master planning, and residential. Descriptions are short and to the point, though unlike the longer list of buildings included in the "representative project portfolio" at the back of the book, there isn't a chronological or some other logical order to the projects. For example, the recently completed, glassy Mercedes-Benz showroom on 11th Avenue is immediately followed by the postmodern visage of the Birch Wathen Lenox School; projects jump around without an evident progression. Yet the representative project portfolio shows how the Spector Group has rolled with the changes (some semi-brutal buildings in the 1960s are followed by mirrored glass then postmodernism, and so forth) in its nearly 50 years of existence. The roughly 20 projects in the "soon..." chapter point to a little bit more adventurousness for the corporate firm.

2: Shelton, Mindel and Associates: Architecture and Design, Contribution by Joseph Giovannini, Photographed by Michael Moran | Rizzoli | 2013 | Amazon
Gracing the cover of Shelton, Mindel and Associates' first monograph is a duplex apartment sitting atop the Jean Nouvel-designed building at Broadway and Grand in SoHo. Many residential projects designed by Lee Mindel and the late Peter Shelton follow the same scenario, where another architect has shaped the larger canvas in which they work, be it a new building by Nouvel or Richard Meier, or a Beaux-Arts building on Central Park West. Their designs exhibit an amazing ability to fit well within any building, exuding a luxury that is balanced by their minimal hands. Texture, light, and clarity are paramount, going beyond style. When confronted with a relatively blank canvas, such as a house on Long Island, Shelton and Mindel (with architect Reed A. Morrison) are more adventurous, but the same considerations come to the fore. The qualities of the nearly 20 residences assembled in this book really jump of the pages, thanks to Michael Moran's photographs and the duo's consistent level of quality that occurs regardless of style.

3: Theater of Architecture by Hugh Hardy | Princeton Architectural Press | 2013 | Amazon
The least monograph-y (and for this and other reasons the best) of these three books is Hugh Hardy's autobiographical treatise on architecture expressed through 20 projects spanning much of his 5-decade career. Hardy is known for architecture for the performing arts (exactly half of the projects in the book are such), with both Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, but the title's "theater of architecture" is a broader statement about designing for human experience. As Hardy puts it in the preface (my emphasis): "Even though these projects do not all look the same, they all were created with the intention of setting the stage for their inhabitants' different journeys of discovery."

Hardy's approach to design comes across in the lengthy descriptions for the projects fitted into ten thematic chapters: A Talisman, Entry, Legend, Place, Contrast, Time, Public Space, Continuity, Environment, Intimacy. Experience and context are of the utmost for him, evidenced in the commissions he chooses (theater restorations, public spaces, and so forth) and the way he traces the history of each project well beyond his involvement. Clients are also important for Hardy, and their voices are included in sidebar interviews conducted by Mildred Friedman. PS New York should be commended for taking the mix of photographs, descriptions by Hardy, and client interviews, and making a very readable book that carefully uses color throughout. I'm a big fan of monographs that push the typology beyond its norms, so I appreciate the effort and execution of Hardy's (more than a) monograph.

Princeton Architectural Press has created a trailer for the book, featuring the ever-youthful Hardy talking about his early days in architecture and some of the ideas he explores at greater length in his excellent book:

Book Briefs #13: A Bunch More Journals

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages. See my recent installment with "a bunch of journals."



1: eVolo #04: Re-imagining the Contemporary Museum, Exhibition and Performance Space | eVolo Magazine | Summer 2012 | Amazon
A quick glance at the cover of eVolo's fourth issue may tip readers that something is different; namely, where is the tall building? With eVolo's annual Skyscraper Competition (again, the results of which make up a good chunk of the issue) and all things tall, it's a bit odd that the cover image is a mushroom-like building that hugs the ground rather than rising vertically from it. Yet the issue's focus on "re-imagining the contemporary museum, exhibition and performance space" gives the project (MVRDV's China Comic and Animation Museum) a context that maintains eVolo's coverage of the cutting edge, even if cultural buildings rarely rise above a few stories. The issue is basically split into thirds: the 2011 eVolo Skyscraper Competition (on which I was a juror), some opinion pieces, and the cultural projects; my favorite is this last one, which makes up about half of the issue. One reason is that the thorough drawings and photos or renderings for the built and in-progress projects are often accompanied by critical text, giving writers the chance to discuss striking architecture while exploring it in a larger context.

2: Ground Up 01: Landscapes of Uncertainty | Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at University of California at Berkeley | 2012 | Amazon
"Landscapes of Uncertainty" is the first issue of the "student-initiated and curated" journal of the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. The issue was assembled against the backdrop of last year's global uprisings, so the uncertainty addresses the "tension between these societal shifts and the physical landscape that we both inherit and construct." Essays and projects are split into three sections: Unclaimed Territories, Temporal Environments, and Pop Up; I'm guessing that the theme of subsequent issues will find relevant threads to group contributions. Issue 01 is a solid collection that gives a good snapshot of how landscape architects and students are addressing important issues today. The next topic is "Grit," and for those interested the call for submissions deadline is January 4, 2013.

3: New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color | Harvard GSD | 2011 | Amazon
The theme for the fourth issue of Harvard GSD's New Geographies (there was a Zero issue) is a simple one—color in cities. Yet the many responses indicate it is a complex issue that hasn't really been addressed that much. As editor Gareth Doherty mentions in his introductory essay, the theme is not about race, color perception, optics, or other areas of color, but "the interrelationships, spatiality, and geographies of color in the built environment"—the physical nature of color. Often I describe how collections in journals and books benefit from varied responses to a theme (a description that might be trite enough to retire), but I think in the case of New Geographies 3 that variety is at the extreme end of the scale—in terms of geography, subject matter and form the diversity is stunning. What is praiseworthy is how the diversity of the contributions becomes the key to issue's success. Each essay (be it an interview with Petra Blaisse or Alan Hess's analysis of color in 1950s suburbia, to choose two examples) is a self-contained response to color in the city, creating a gradient across the issue, a gradient that is reinforced by the two-way, honeysuckle-to-turquoise color shift on the page edges (coincidentally, I think, is the location of Doherty's photo spread of Irish houses in the middle of the book, where the gray page edges let the red and green facades stand out even more). This gradient is echoed on the book's cover, where the table of contents resides, sans page numbers; pagination happens inside, but it's basically unnecessary, as this is a book to be browsed and savored, just like the presence of color in the city it wakes us up to.



4: Boundaries n.4: The Other City | Boundaries · International Architectural Magazine | April - June 2012 | Amazon
The theme for the fourth issue of Boundaries refers to the informal settlements of the poor in cities around the world. The cover illustration depicts a vertical city rising from a flat base that is mirrored by the slums silhouetted against the steep terrain they occupy; the image hints at the proximity, inequality, and interrelationship of this "other city." The projects and research in the issue are targeted at Bangkok, São Paulo, Caracas, Manila, Dehli, Buenos Aires, and other places where informal settlements predominate. While many of the images inside echo the cover's illustration, the varied responses to the enormous difficulties of informal housing seem to share one important trait: They strive to improve the infrastructure and well-being of the places and people while embracing their positive aspects and incorporating residents into the process; eviction and clearance is not the preferred solution. There are no easy answers to such a large, multi-faceted issue, but it's a testament to the vision of Boundaries that they tackle it head on, reminding us once again of problems that need to be addressed.

5: Mark #40 | Frame Publishers | Oct/Nov 2012 | Amazon
Most issues of Mark magazine jump around through various strands of contemporary architecture, highlighting a number of new buildings that vie for the reader's attention. Issue #40, on the other hand, has seven Japanese houses at its core. This is not to say this it is just limited to residential architecture on the island nation, just that the usual variety of buildings swirls around the houses designed by ON Design, Suppose Design Office, and others. We can thank Cathelijne Nuijsink (whose book How to Make a Japanese House is one of my favorites of 2012) for this theme and many of the interviews for the seven houses. It's been seven issues since my last Mark review, and I'm glad to see the "bookmarks" feature is still going strong, even as it discusses the unfortunate demise of 010.

6: CLOG: Rendering | CLOG | 2012 | Amazon
Like previous issues, the various short contributions to CLOG cover a wide area around the theme, be it theoretical slants, technical talk, or the blurring of reality in renderings. (Disclaimer: An essay I wrote on Allied Works' MAD project in NYC is included in this issue.) I especially like the editors' contributions, which stand out on yellow paper and take the form of semi-objective explorations of renderings in terms of labor, money, lingo, types, and the composition of elements in images, some of them from elsewhere in the issue. A long interview by the editors with Luxigon and MIR points to a loosening of CLOG's format of short essays and visuals.

Book Briefs #12: Conversations

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.

Number 12 in this series focuses on some titles in Princeton Architectural Press's Conversations with Students series, slim volumes that focus on a single architect or designer.



1: Tadao Ando: Conversations with Students edited and translated by Matthew Hunter | Princeton Architectural Press | 2012 | Amazon
The most recent installment in the series features six lectures by Tadao Ando at the University of Tokyo in 1998, a time when the Great Hanshin-Awaji Quake hit Kobe. This English-language publication comes a year after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a fact that Ando makes explicit in the preface. In response to both events the architect has planted trees to "create an opportunity for ... spiritual recovery." The last of the six lectures deals with this response to the earthquake that hit Kobe, but the other five give a glimpse into Ando's thinking when he was taking his architecture beyond the confines of Japan. Some of the most valuable passages recall his early days and projects, and how his studio is an example of "living architecture."

2: Conversations with Paolo Soleri edited by Lissa McCullough | Princeton Architectural Press | 2012 | Amazon
Given the name of the series, Conversations, it's pretty clear that the architect in question should be conversing with somebody—an interviewer, students, a room full of people, what have you. But much of the content within the books are one-way. It is much more the case with the Paolo Soleri title than others I've read. There is a short interview with editor Lissa McCullough, but the bulk of the book is made up of writings from Soleri's notebooks, as well as an essay by McCullough and ones by collaborators Marco Felici and Youngsoo Kim. The book is a good introduction to Soleri's ideas on architecture and cities, focused on the arcology concept and its realization outside Phoenix.



3: A Conversation with Frei Otto by Juan Maria Songel | Princeton Architectural Press | 2010 | Amazon
When traveling for two weeks through Europe after a semester in Italy, one of the buildings that I visited was the Olympic Stadium in Munich. The design, of which Frei Otto is usually given top credit, was one of the more impressive pieces of architecture that I experienced, not only for the expressive tensile roof structure but for the way the snaking roofscape worked with the landscape. Frei Otto's contributions to architecture and engineering have typically focused on the former's technological aspects, but the latter is indicative of larger considerations; those are expressed in the essays by Otto and a conversation between him and Juan Maria Songel originally published by GG in 2008.

4: Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students edited by Sanford Kwinter | Princeton Architectural Press | 1996 | Amazon
The Conversation that started the series was a lecture and seminar with Rem Koolhaas held at Rice University back in 1991. In the lecture Koolhaas discusses three well-known but unbuilt projects—Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, Bibliotheque de France, and ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology. The seminar, on the other hand, focuses on his thoughts on cities, including Houston, Rice's hometown. The third and last element is Sanford Kwinter's essay "Flying the Bullet, or When Did the Future Begin?" It's a small but solid book on an important architect and thinker. Yet over 20 years later, it might just be time to update Rem's conversations for the 21st century.

Book Brief #11: A Bunch of Journals

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages.



1: MAS Context 14: Communication | MAS Studio | Summer 2012
MAS Context is a quarterly journal created by Chicago's MAS Studio, led by Editor in Chief Iker Gil. The main idea driving the journal is the multidisciplinary responses to a particular topic for each issue. Those responding to issue 14's theme of communication include the Center for Urban Pedagogy, Klaus, Sam Jacob, Craighton Berman, Oriol Tarragó, and a bunch of international curators. Respectively they are coming at communication from civic policy, architectural criticism/cartooning, architectural practice, illustration, sound design, and exhibitions; and that's about half of the issue. Communication is a good balance of text (essays, interviews) and images (illustrations, visual essays) that are well-dispersed throughout the issue to make it a good browse and read. The theme is open-ended enough to invite varied responses from the contributors, but it's also a topic that is timely, what with more (and faster) means of communication at our disposal than ever before. Consensus is hardly to be expected, but the issue illustrates that what we communicate is as important (if not more so) than how.

2: Candide — Journal for Architectural Knowledge — 5 | Department of Architecture Theory RWTH Aachen | 2012 | Amazon
Candide is a bilingual (German, English) journal that is published twice a year. Unlike MAS Context no theme is given, but within the pages of each issue are five sections: Essay, Analysis, Project, Encounters, Fiction; this has been consistent since the first issue. In the fifth issue, Essay and Fiction feature short texts by a number of contributors. For Encounters, Ian Pepper examines Richard Serra's sculpture appended to the end of Robert Maillart's viaduct in Grandfey, an installation I was not familiar with but wish I knew of before my recent trip to Switzerland. Claire Zimmerman traces "architectural knowledge from Rudolf Wittkower to Reyner Banham," or from "legibility of form" to "memorability as an image." But the highlight for me is Project: Marcus Garvey Park Village, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies' only realized building. The thorough and multi-faceted history and oral history by Kim Förster reveals not only the commendable architectural design but also the greater intentions of the Institute and other parties (MoMA, UDC). Elsewhere the project might not be deserving of such attention, but it's a fascinating story that also captures New York City and the broader architectural culture in the 1970s.

3: OASE #87: Alan Colquhoun | OASE Foundation and nai010 Publishers | 2012 | Amazon
It's been many years since I've picked up my copy of Alan Colquhoun's Essays in Architectural Criticism (Opposition Books, 1981) to read his takes on modern architecture, Le Corbusier, typology, or Robert Venturi. While those topics rise to the fore among his writings, what I never realized until #87 of OASE was the quality of Colquhoun's architectural output. At the beginning of this journal looking at three sides of the man—architecture, history, criticism—is a short section documenting some of his projects, most with Colquhoun, Miller and Partners. What follows are essays by Kenneth Frampton (who introduced the collection of essays from 1981), Owen Hatherley, Michiel Riedijk, Sanislas von Moos, and others on Le Corbusier, typology, and so forth. The issue ends with the editors interviewing Colquhoun about his career and his views on how criticism, history, and theory have evolved in the last five decades.



4: Journal of International Affairs: The Future of the City | Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs | Spring/Summer 2012 | Amazon
The year 2012 marks the 65th anniversary of Columbia's Journal of International Affairs, which started after World War II as "a forum for exploring topics of global concern." Based on the longstanding belief that "innovative solutions to contemporary problems of international affairs demand interdisciplinary solutions," this issued devoted to the city pulls together architects, sociologists, economists, politicians, and academics of various stripes. Not surprisingly, the writing is quite academic, but a number of interviews (with Rem Koolhaas, Ricky Burdett, Rahul Mehrota, and others) are a plain-spoken alternative to some of the density. The essays and interviews appropriately cover a global context of cities: China, New York, Paris, and Singapore, to name a few. People interested in the future of cities will find much of interest and value in what can ultimately be seen collectively as a positive outlook on urbanism this century.

5: Kerb 16: Future Cities | RMIT University School of Architecture + Design | 2008 | Amazon 
Kerb, "a progressive design journal focused on contemporary landscape architecture issues from an international and national perspective," is celebrating its 20th issue this year. Issue 16, which I picked up recently in a remainder bin, is focused on "future cities," a broad topic that is surveyed by some familiar names (Alan Berger, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Arakawa + Gins, Arup) among others not as well known. While four years old, the issue's essays are still timely, looking at sustainable urbanism, sprawl, density, and other bits of urbanism. Flipping through it takes me back to Urban Design grad school the year before the issue came out. It's a solid collection of contributions that's very on-topic and ambitious in breadth.