A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Waste Disposal Facilities in Delft, Netherlands by UNStudio, 2001 UN Studio designed a waste treatment facility in Delft, Netherlands to handle 80,000 tons of domestic garbage and 25,000 tons of biodegradable waste. Recycled waste is processed on site, while non-recyclable waste is compressed and shipped to incinerators. The final design attempts to express the function of the facility in a cohesive whole, which it achieves while also creating a striking assemblage in a contemporary manner. Architects Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos are known equally well for their theoretical works as they are for their practice, UN Studio, common in the Netherlands. An interesting aspect of their built work, especially for an outsider, is the large amount of infrastructural and industrial objects in their oeuvre. It is refreshing to see such stimulating design applied to what is typically merely building, not archi...

Woodstock Library in Portland, Oregon by Thomas Hacker Architects, 2000 (Photos are by Timothy Hursley) Located on a highly visible corner in a commercial area of Portland, Oregon, the Woodstock Library, designed by the city's Thomas Hacker Architects , is a simple, yet rewarding, neighborhood library. The architect's goal was to create a "feeling of openness and availability", achieved through the integration of structure and architecture into a cohesive whole. Openness is an idea well suited to a library, an institution celebrating freedom of ideas and access to those ideas. But openness, or its familiar architectural metaphor - transparency, is not well-suited to the primary material of the written word, books. To prevent the adverse effects of sunlight, the architects provided deep eaves above the expansive cle...

Max Mara SoJo in New York, NY by Duccio Grassi Architects, 2001 New York City's Soho district has evolved over time from industrial and manufacturing uses to artists' lofts and galleries to its most recent incarnation as a fashionable area, primarily littered with retail and restaurants. The change from industrial to commercial has not drastically changed the fabric of Soho, since most new uses have primarily renovated existing buildings. Max Mara, on West Broadway, is an exception with two levels of new construction containing the fashion company's signature women's clothing. Rather than continuing the lot-line storefronts of adjacent buildings, the architects, Italy's Duccio Grassi Architects , cut back the entry at an angle to the street. Horizontal wo...

Villa Arena Restaurant in Amsterdam, Netherlands be Benthem Crouwel Architects, 2001 Floating in the atrium of Amsterdam's Villa Arena Home Furnishing Center is a restaurant designed by London's Vigile & Stone Associates, in cooperation with Amsterdam's Benthem Crouwel Architects . Reachable via second-floor footbridges, the restaurant's most notable feature is its patina-green, copper cladding, wrapping the oblong cylindrical object. Perched atop six slanted steel columns, the restaurant's exterior is in sharp contrast to the surrounding glass and metal of the atrium, just like the signage and furnishings of the adjacent shops. Popularized in buildings by James Stirling, and recently in Alsop & Störmer's Peckham Library in London, here the patina-green copper contains ...