A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Alexander "Pruned" Trevi has tagged me on a meme with the following rules: 1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages). 2. Open the book to page 123. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the next three sentences. 5. Tag five people. The nearest book when I'm sitting at the computer isn't the book I'm reading (coincidentally, one of the books I'm reading -- the first work of fiction I've read in ages -- features a character who knows a book and author's worth by flipping to page 67 and reading paragraph 3) but the book I just finished, in a pile with a bunch of other books I've finished but have yet to review in my weekly page (more on that glut of back-reviews in a forthcoming post here). The top of the pile is Sanford Kwinter's Far from Equilibrium : Essays on Technology and Design Culture . He seems to have inadvertently foreshadowed this meme rather nicely. The forces behind the coming virtual city are driven by savage economic impe...

STL Architects is "a collaborative group of design professionals with a common vision and a passion for architecture, planning, and design...led by Luis Collado, Jose Luis de la Fuente and Tracy Susanne Salvia" with 15 professionals. They "believe that good architecture evolves through humble, team-based efforts." Their studio shot is a collage of black and white shots from the knees up on a bright orange background. Clicking on each person's name, one sees torso shots of each removed from the pack. I'm guessing the consistent treatment of their photos and the background conveys the humble, team-based nature of the studio. What I like most about the studio page is not necessarily the clever composition — something that enables them to add and subtract people, as necessary — but the fact that each person has a page with a description. While this may seem to be in conflict with the team-based nature that the studio wishes to convey to potential clients, it i...

Hamburg . BRT , originally uploaded by stadtbild . Dockland Office Building in Hamburg, Germany by BRT Architekten (Bothe Richter Teherani), 2005. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Paulo Mendes da Rocha by Paulo Mendes da Rocha & Rosa Artegis, published by Rizzoli , 2007. ( Amazon ) Featured twice previously on this weekly page -- as well as this week with his design for a chapel on the grounds of a ceramic factory -- the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha evinces an undeniable quality that comes from the simplest of gestures rendered unabashedly in materials like concrete or steel. His Square of the Patriarch , which graces the cover of this recent monograph on the Pritzker Prize-winning architect from Brazil, clearly illustrates such a stance: a strong belief in Modernism and its ability to transform the city. In most cases, for da Rocha, the ...

Chapel of Our Lady of the Conception in Recife, Brazil by Paulo Mendes da Rocha Located on the banks of the Capibaribe River in Brazil, on the grounds of the Brennand Ceramics factory, studio, and museum is the Chapel of Our Lady of the Conception. The design by Paulo Mendes da Rocha reuses a 19th-century building of masonry and tile in a manner that separates old from new yet acknowledges the dependence of the latter upon the former. Of the designs four main gestures, the first visible one is the exterior cladding of the existing masonry walls. The flat white surfaces, coupled with the partially recreated colonnade at the building's four corners, give the appearance of abstracted elevations, though one notices that the apertures respect the existing shapes and sizes of the openings. The next gesture one encounters is the "transparent crystal c...

Michiel at Eikongraphis's feeling that archives are a challenge is something I definitely share. And while the daily page you are viewing has its problems -- owing mainly to my use an old modified blogger template with the "new" blogger -- I'm first tackling the task of improving the archives of my weekly doses, as I control the code of that page and am not at the mercy of blogger. So what I've done on my weekly page is upload a beta version of the archive I've been working on, to ask readers for comments before I put in even more hours (notice the lack of "quality" posts in the last week or so) to include every dose back to week one in 1999. The idea is to consolidate four archives (by architect, by building, by date, by building type) into one sortable archive. The by location archive will stay, as one can browse geographically, with doses keyed to maps. Here's what it looks like right now: Here's a breakdown of the changes, from most imp...

... A Garden Blooms . Last summer I visited the Queens Botanical Garden for a sneak peak of its Visitors Center designed by BKSK Architects , featuring it as a half dose . Now this month's Metropolis Magazine gives the building some well-deserved treatment, with Fred A. Bernstein giving some in-depth reporting on the process of creating a LEED-platinum building in the multi-cultural borough I call home. Be sure to check out the slide show .

Model. , originally uploaded by Iqbal Aalam . A model of the Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank in Klagenfurt, Austria by Morphosis (2002). Be sure to check out the rest of Iqbal Aalam's Flickr set of architectural models. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Being back in the world of architectural practice after the brief graduate school respite, I find myself spending more and more time looking for and at materials and products and their applications. For me the last is the most important, as context is an overriding consideration for how certain pieces come together into a design. So when it came time to find a way to bridge this time spent into material for this blog, I decided to present certain findings as "architectural elements;" by which I don't mean the usual (columns, porticoes, canopies, balconies, etc.) but the atypical, the apparent threads I see across designs responding to new urban, social, environmental and other conditions. The idea is that other designers can find inspiration in the work of others, but also that the definition of architectural element can embrace the contemporary as well as the traditional. To begin this new series that will present two or three projects per post (read: not exhaustive) ...

pasillo entre luces , originally uploaded by atwose . Inside the Nazarí Wall Intervention in Granada, Spain by Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas (2004), featured about a year ago on my weekly page. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Patent Constructions: New Architecture Made in Catalonia edited by Albert Ferré, Ricardo Devesa and Jaime Salazar, published by Actar , 2007 ( Amazon ) Innovation in architecture is a double-edged sword: it can provide improved solutions to problems, but in many cases it can create new problems or come at the expense of time-tested methods. In modern and contemporary architecture innovation is viewed as a necessity, as modern life has spawned new problems that require new solutions (a situation of one innovation spawning another problem). Innovation also finds roots in the exploitation of the possibilities of industrial and computerized processes. The results of which can be found in the numerous books presenting novel ...

34 Apartments in Cambrils, Spain by Guallart Architects One of the projects feature in this week's book review, Patent Constructions -- a book that presents buildings and landscapes in Catalonia per their innovative architectural elements or products -- is this pair of building with 34 apartments in the coastal town of Cambrils. The square buildings designed by Guallart Architects are intended to take advantage of the project's proximity to the sea. Given the linear site's parallel relationship to the shore, one's immediate response might be a linear building giving each unit frontal views of the water, rather than square buildings with geometrically less "frontage." But the architects' decision works in a few ways: the space between the buildings is more usable than if a linear building landed on the s...

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne , originally uploaded by fabian-f . Inside the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Designed by Roy Grounds and opened in 1967, the museum underwent restoration by Mario Bellini with Metier 3 and reopened in 2003. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Tel Aviv , originally uploaded by jmtp . The Wolfson Center in Tel Aviv by Louis I. Kahn (ca. 1975). FYI: According to Brownlee and De Long's book on Kahn , "part of the Wolfson Center was completed after Kahn's death, without supervision from America." To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Berlin , originally uploaded by jmtp . The AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin, Germany by Peter Behrens (1908). I couldn't resist posting this photo, considering the book I'm reading . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

They might be worth something . This is an aerial view from the 1970s, showing the land around Orlando, Florida owned by Disney. An architect working at the firm that used the aerial as a design tool (as in the close-up below) snagged the large, mixed-media architectural drawing when the firm was going to ditch it. From free to $2,500 in 30 years, according to the Antiques Roadshow appraisal; not bad. The appraiser noted a couple things worth passing along here. First, given the copyright of the drawing (by Disney, if I recall correctly), the current "owner" could sell it or have it insured for something like the above dollar amount, but he could not duplicate it and make many more dollars. Disney could do that...if they found a market willing to pay for such a thing. Second, he pointed out the yellowing of the photo at the top of the page from sunlight, recommending that the owner keep it out of sunlight to reduce further damage. While I wouldn't argue with that recommen...

Designs on the Public: The Private Lives of New York's Public Spaces by Kristine F. Miller, published by University of Minnesota Press , 2007 ( Amazon ) See also my review of Miller's book  published in The Architect's Newspaper  (PDF). The term public space immediately brings to mind many images and ideas, but what tends to characterize it is its stance opposite private space. Be it in terms of ownership or freedoms, this traditional dialectic that describes some place as being one or the other is slowly eroding, as qualities of each infiltrates the other and as laws chip away at the definitions of each. This fascinating and timely book focuses on public space in the American city where its existence is not only exploited to the fullest, ...

House for a Musician in Scharans, Switzerland by Valerio Olgiati The name that architect Valerio Olgiati gives to his design for the atelier and residence for singer-songwriter Linard Bardill -- House for a Musician -- sounds like a project from an undergraduate architectural design studio, where the professor asks the student to design for a particular type of client (painter, musician, physicist). What's missing from those projects is the fact that houses are made for individuals, not types, something that is apparent in this house, regardless of its moniker. According to his own web site, Bardill is "Switzerland’s most successful children’s songwriter," with "ongoing activities in mainstream music, such as his work with large and small classical orchestras and the well-k...