A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Yesterday Ada Louise Huxtable died at the age of 91. Admiration for the influential architecture critic can be found all over the internet , on architecture and other websites reporting on her passing. In lieu of adding my own thoughts, which basically align with most of what has been written, I've transcribed a couple paragraphs from the introduction of Huxtable's 1986 book Architecture, Anyone? , the last collection of her essays from the New York Times , where she was architecture critic until 1982. First, Huxtable gives a little bit of advice to would-be architecture critics: "Obviously, I have enjoyed the work [at the New York Times ], and I have also enjoyed the rewards. I was alone when I started—the first and only full-time architecture critic in the American press—a fact that is generally forgotten along with The Times 's brave gamble on establishing the position, based on the belief that the quality of the built word mattered at a time when environment wa...

"I remember when I was about to publish my first book and I said to this friend of mine, Larry Rickels, that I had to get used to the idea of people reading it. He said no, you have to get used to the idea that people don't read books. I found that incredibly liberating. And I would say that with books it's the same as with exhibitions. The purpose of an exhibition is not to be seen, but to have a good party that will allow the people who are engaged to engage each other. It's the same with books. The purpose of books is not to be read. I buy books but do not read them. I own a lot of books. I write books, I collect books, I think about books, I copy books, I pay for books -- I'm in the book business. But I don't read books. Don't assume that exhibitions are meant to be seen, and that books are meant to be read. Buildings are by and large invisible, and that's to their credit." - Mark Wigley, in Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discours...

"While they would later be viewed as authentic, contemporaries dismissed brownstones as modern and artificial. Foreshadowing post-World War II broadsides against urban renewal and suburban architecture, critics in the nineteenth century decried the mechanical, dehumanizing monotony of brownstone rows. 'When one has seen one house he has seen them all,' wrote one writer, 'the same everlasting high stoops and gloomy brown-stone fronts, the same number of holes punched in precisely the same places.' 'The architecture is not only impressive, it is oppressive,' complained another critic. 'Its great defect is its monotony, which soon grows tiresome.' Still others, prefiguring 1990s dismissals of McMansions, lambasted the gaudy, overadorned stone fronts preferred by New York's brownstone nouveau riche: 'What we lack in invention, we can cover by "ornamentation" and hence we have miles of reiterated and unmeaning rope mouldings, filigreed...

" What defines a good (architecture/design) book for you? Ninety-seven percent is rubbish, I wouldn't touch it with a ... [sic] The rest is woth living for. For example Max Bill's Maillart . Lovely. Perfect. Not too thick. Super proportions. Fantastic typeface. Balanced. Nice bridges of course. Something contemporary? [...] Nine Swimming Pools by Ed Ruscha. It's old too, and an artist's book, sorry. Can't think of anything else. It's dreadful. No good Zumthor book, the one by Lars Müller just scrapes through. The book about Vals is a disaster [...] The Herzog & de Meuron book by Peter Blum, it's got something. [...] Honestly, it drives me nuts, all I can think of is rubbish. Even the Dhaka book I did for Louis Kahn, it was successful but I wouldn't say it's that good. [...] In short: Less is more. Little books, choice books, thin books, 'unpolished' books, normal books. Or an eight-pound door-stopper like the Valerio Olgiati ...

"Huge, drab buildings suddenly started to pop up like mushrooms all over the place. It was if nobody had created them, as if they multiplied by themselves. Sometimes, when we visit other cities and countries, we ask ourselves where the beauty of the olden days has gone. In some places we get the impression that all buildings have been designed by structural glass manufacturers; all the roads by asphalt companies; and all the parks by lawn mower firms. It seems as though the architects sign on the dotted line but are excluded from the decision-making process. We ask ourselves why everything has to be planned in one go and built at top speed right up to the last minute. In our opinion, things only work if they are allowed to evolve -- and that requires time. Perhaps it would be practical to oblige all architects and clients to live for a time in the buildings they construct. If you don't like a painting, you can take it off the wall, or put it away, or even burn it -- but archit...

"Architects have more to offer their clients and society than they realize. Integrating design morphology, material science, and environmental sustainability will undoubtedly inform everyone what is possible or achievable in the built environment, in a manner not previously seen. A focus on architectural science (distinct from building science) must equal our overwhelming obsession with form. It must become the foundation by which to certify a new architectural expertise -- comparable in breadth and scope to medical research. The National Science Foundation should be the logical choice to fund such research but -- incredibly -- it does not recognize architecture as a science! We must demand that our representative organizations, such as the AIA, lobby to change this. Today's broad societal concerns -- global warming, greenhouse gases, resource depletion -- will focus greater public attention than ever before toward architects for answers and innovative solutions. Should they ...

"Consumption and affluence have increased in many parts of the world, and although they seem to form a baseline of contemporary society, some counter-movements are also visible within consumer society. Not a wholesale refusal but some level of consumer savvy, such as re-use, purchasing sustainable, 'ethically produced' or local goods. Here, the market finds a way to respond. When viewed cynically, that indicates that there is no 'moral' component to the market, but that profit is the only concern. While this may be true, if the public enforces a conscience upon producers by choosing to purchase some goods over other (and price being one of numerous factors in that choice), the results are not necessarily bad. The TV-program Extreme Home Makeover encompasses a number of different features of this debate. On the one hand, it presumes the desirability of an identity expressed in architectural terms (although primarily on the surface more than in the space). Bedrooms ...

"'[Ric Scofidio] and I typically argue a lot,' [Liz Diller] says. 'Yes,' he says. 'We kind of beat each other up. He has his ideas, I have my ideas, and I think my ideas are better than his.' [...] 'Early in our relationship, we really pushed it many times to be on [sic] the breaking point,' he remembers. 'I mean really be on [sic] the breaking point, and then 20 minutes later we're back together and everything was fine. And I think that that has enabled us to be totally brutal and honest with each other.'" - "Portrait of a Working Marriage" in FLYP Issue 35 , which features a couple videos with DS+R and an audio interview with FHL co-founder Robert Hammond.

"My entry into the profession in 1972 coincided with a number of important architectural events, most dramatically, perhaps, the first energy crisis of the decade, which began with the oil embargo in October, the beginning of a long-term and severe increase in the cost of energy. Its immediate architectural effects were formally dramatic if somewhat short-lived -- the incorporation of solar panels, earth berms, Trombe walls, and a variety of other gadgets to create passive energy sources. Its long-term effects were more subtle bu more permanent -- a dramatic increase in the importance of the wall as a thermal barrier, resulting in not only a lot more insulation but also the decline or even disappearance of single glazing, uninsulated spandrels, exposed columns and beams, and thermal bridges. Whole architectural vocabularies -- the exposed steel frames of the Case Study Houses, the exposed concrete frames and mullionless glazing of the brutalist era -- declined or disappeared, and ...

"For Pierre Restany it was the society founded on the eternal that was obsessed with the values of permanence and materiality; today, instead, we share the understanding, matured from the 1960s onwards, that what is real is not eternal. ... The danger of contemporary culture is not the freshness of the image, its here and now, but rather its freezing, mummifying it in a form that remains immutable over time. The obstinate hope for perrenial monuments in the end testifies to a headstrong obtuseness that we have dragged behind us since the time of the Egyptians, and which consists of wanting, at all costs, to exorcise death and refuse the deeper meaning of life, which is precisely that of mutability." - Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi from New Directions in Contemporary Architecture: Evolutions and Revolutions in Building Design Since 1988 (Wiley, 2008, pp. 111) (Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi's book contains a bibliography of "50 books, 10 of which are must-haves." I don...

Hans Ulbrich Obrist: You wrote in the Observer in 1997 a piece on airports and London where you said that, “By comparison with London Airport, London itself seems hopelessly antiquated. London may well be the only world capital—with the possible exception of Moscow—that has gone from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the twentieth in any meaningful way.” And you carry on mentioning your admiration for the Hilton Hotel in Heathrow. Can you tell me why that building, and what relationship or dialogue you have in general with architecture or architects? J.G. Ballard: The Heathrow Hilton designed by Michael Manser is my favourite building in London. It’s part space-age hangar and part high-tech medical centre. It’s clearly a machine, and the spirit of Le Corbusier lives on in its minimal functionalism. It’s a white cathedral, almost a place of worship, the closest to a religious building that you can find in an airp...

[Geodesic dome over Midtown Manhattan | image source] "I find Bucky [Fuller] more and more inspirational, especially for the freedom of his research. Two projects done with Shoji Sadao in 1960 make the point. The first of these is the much-ridiculed dome over Midtown Manhattan, criticized either as “impractical” (how to buff the glass, how to get the traffic through) or as simply a megalomaniacal expression of an environment overly controlled [as I did ]. Such criticisms miss the project’s simple point: The membrane has a surface area approximately 1/64 that of the aggregated exteriors of all the buildings within it, and Bucky argued that the larger the dome, the greater the energy conserved. The Manhattan dome is simply rhetorical, a device to describe the environmental inefficiencies of standard practice." - Michael Sorkin, from "Bucky lives! Why Fuller matters more today than ever before" in Architectural Record , November 2008, p.

"Supposedly the emperor [Hadrian] sent the plans for [the Temple of Venus and Roma] to the professional architect Apollodorus . Apollodorus, one of the great architects of Imperial Rome, had previously served Trajan, and known Hadrian for perhaps twenty years; the modern historian William MacDonald describes the architect as "a man of considerable consequence, a writer and a cosmopolitan citizen." When Hadrian sent him the plans for this new work, Apollodorus criticized the technical construction and the proportions of both the building and its statues. Hadrian reacted, according to later gossip, by having Appolodorus killed. - Richard Sennett from Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (W.W. Norton & Co., 1994, p. 97)

"What [Karl] Marx was able to show was that these three necessary conditions of a capitalist mode of production [being growth-oriented, resting on the exploitation of living labor in production (i.e. a gap between what labor gets and what it creates), and being technologically and organizationally dynamic] were inconsistent and contradictory and that the dynamic of capitalism was necessarily, therefore, crisis-prone. There was, in his analysis, no way in which the combination of these three necessary conditions could produce steady and unproblematic growth. In particular, the crisis tendencies of capitalism would produce periodic phases of overaccumulation, defined as a condition in which idle capital and idle labor supply could exist side by side with no apparent way to bring these idle resources together to accomplish socially useful tasks. A generalized condition of overaccumulation would be indicated by idle productive capacity, a glut of commodities and an excess of inventori...

[Mannahatta Project's view of Mannahatta ca. 1609 overlaid with today's footprint of Manhattan | image source ] "When Dr. Eric Sanderson leads a tour through [Central Park], he and his flock usually pass Jagiello without pausing, because they are lost in another century altogether -- the 17th. Bespectacled under his wide-brimmed felt hat, a trim beard graying around his chin and a laptop jammed in his backpack, Sanderson is a landscape ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, a global squadron of researchers trying to save an imperiled world from itself. At its Bronx Zoo headquarters, Sanderson directs the Mannahatta Project , an attempt to re-create, virtually, Manhattan Island as it was when Henry Hudson's crew first saw it in 1609: a pre-urban vision that tempts speculation about how a posthuman future might look." [Mannahatta Project's view of Murray Hill ca. 1609 | image source ] "His team has scoured original Dutch documents, colonial Brit...

[Guantang Chuangye Sustainable Conceptual Master Plan, Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China by William McDonough + Partners | image source ] "Nature, whose status as a norm of beauty or as an ideal form waned, has since returned as a condition for the sustainability of all built environment. As such, nature plays a role in the twenty-first century that is as central as it ever was in the past. The challenges are enormous and the markets and demands seem boundless. When Bill McDonough , the famous nature design architect in the United States, plans the construction, from scratch, of cities and villages in China, he connects with his starkly nature inspired buildings in the US -- the GAP headquarters in San Bruno, California (1997), the Ford Rouge Dearborn Truck Plant in Michigan (2004), with its half million square foot 'habitat' roof, the largest in the world, or the IBM office in Amsterdam (2004) -- and suggests that he will, figurativ...

"The creation of a new capital city is not only about the articulation of a new national identity, but also more importantly about the creation of the state itself. The state constructs itself by opening up new spaces, closing others, inscribing them with the marks and symbols of the nation and state power, and organizing urban space around foundational norms and principles. These are self-constitutive acts; the state constitutes itself as an agent of modernity vested with the power and authority to control space, dictate the meaning of urbanity, shape the evolution of the public sphere, and suppress contending ideologies. By constructing a city, the state becomes an agent of the nation, the author that inscribes the nation into space, hence creating the nation-state. Giving shape to urban space by monitoring the architectural styles, erection of statues and monuments, and placement of squares, parks, shopping centers, and public buildings allows the state to establish its power a...

"Even as the high priests of contemporary architecture set themselves up as visionary artists or seers in a throbbing celebrity economy, architecture frequently ignores or underestimates its civic influence. Architects certainly deserve admiration for what they, alone among us can do: create monuments of the built environment. When Howard Roark, the architect hero of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead , points to a building and says, 'I don't care what anyone says about me; I built that ,' one cannot but admire the material certainty of his pride. But one toxic result of recent 'starchitecture' culture is the steady stream of theoretical bafflegab that pours from architectural schools and journals. This is usually the result of what me might call 'philosophical backformation': finding some plausible-sounding theoretical cladding to hang on an already conceived, even completed, structural project. Self-respecting architects would not allow useless aesthetic...

"Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest -- the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways -- and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in -- to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, ...

"Verb > You argue in your essay [on Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, in this issue of Verb ] that architects have had little to say about Fresh Kills. Why do you think this has been the case? May > ...little of substance to say, likely because the more you unpack a place like Fresh Kills, the more difficult it becomes to later repackage it in glossy optimism. No matter how sexy and natural it may appear in the various digital renderings, or how compelling its supposed rebirth may sound in the official statements , it is an absolutely horrible place, and it reveals horrible realities about our Modern American Lifestyles -- realities that are only growing more pronounced. The fact of the matter is that these realities are not easily overlooked. It takes effort to ignore them. Unfortunately, all too often architects play a central role in this effort. Why do you think architectural competitions are held? Glance beneath nearly every major architectural competition and y...