A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

House on 21st Street in Lubbock, Texas by Urs Peter Flueckiger Corrugated steel and West Texas certainly aren't strangers, but in the case of residential architecture they're not the type of bedfellows that industrial buildings make. Texas Tech University professor Urs Peter Flueckiger 's decision to build his 2,750sf house in Lubbock out of the material -- painted bright red, no less -- did not sit well with his neighbors, who see the material as appropriate for barns and sheds, not houses. Situated on a 50x150 (15x45m) foot lot, the house is an elongated "C" (or "U", depending on how you look at the plan) with every room opening to a courtyard, a traditional parti for the area. This grassy space is bordered on the long side by a bamboo pergola, which provides shade for the house's living areas and ...

Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier  by Adam Mornement and Simon Halloway, published by  W. W. Norton , 2007. Hardcover, 224 pages. ( Amazon ) When one hears the term corrugated iron (or the more contemporary corrugated metal or corrugated aluminum) a few conflicting images pop to mind: large industrial buildings, third-world shanty towns, Quonset huts , and the houses of Glenn Murcutt . Ranging from small to large, quick to labored, amateur to professional, and embracing other apparent opposites, the authors in this history/contemporary presentation of the material determine that what these applications have in common is the frontier. Since its invention in the early 19th century, and its use in London's docks and train stations, the material has always found itself on the margins, seen by people then and now as lacking dignity, expressing poverty, and looking just plain ugly. While this book presents a number of contemporary beauties by the likes of Murcutt, i...

Copenhagen . Ørestad , originally uploaded by stadtbild . 230 Dwellings in Ørestad, Copenhagen, Denmark by PLOT = BIG + JDS , 2005. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Here's two lectures next week at CUNY schools worth noting: :: Bubbles in Beijing: Architecture, Physics, and the Olympics Tuesday, April 1, 6:30pm The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street) "The Olympic aquatics pavilion in Beijing resembles a box of bubbles. This extraordinary structure and the feat of engineering required to build it will be discussed by Denis Weaire, physics professor at Trinity College Dublin, who first observed the efficiency of bubble structures. He'll be joined by Daniel Brodkin, a principal in the New York office of the engineering firm Arup." The lecture is free. Visit the The Science & The Arts Program site to reserve a seat. :: David Harvey: The Right to the City The Fifth Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism Thursday, April 3, 6:30pm The Great Hall, Shepard Hall City College of New York 160 Convent Avenue "Professor Harvey’s lecture, titled 'The Right to the City,' will examine who gets to exercise th...

Robin Hood Gardens, London , originally uploaded by Iqbal Aalam . Robin Hood Gardens in London, England by Alison and Peter Smithson, nearing its 1972 completion. There's a good deal of controversy swirling around this housing block, as cries for demolition are met with resistance by many in the British architecture community, particularly bdonline and their campaign to Rescue Robin Hood Gardens . See also: :: City of Sound :: Continuity in Architecture :: Google News :: Kosmograd :: PartIV To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Dale Jones-Evans Pty Ltd Architecture (dje) is an Australian office established in 1984, "a studio-based design practice committed to the art of urban, architecture and interior design," with an "approach [that] is personal, pro-active and professional." This may sound like the same interchangeable description from any other office of the same size (I often wonder if a potential client could really tell the difference between offices based on their firm descriptions), but dje does a couple things interesting in aligning these words with the firm's faces: they are situated in the work space and they are seen "working." This first image is the office's splash page. In a way it resembles a band photo, the majority of the "players" occupying themselves in some manner that clearly indicates who's the lead singer, or in this case the dj-e of dje. His eyes take aim at the camera and at the web surfer, as his employees talk, look at a magazi...

Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture by Sanford Kwinter, edited by Cynthia Davidson, published by  Actar , 2008. ( Amazon ) The presence of Cynthia Davidson in this collection of writings by theorist Sanford Kwinter (Associate Professor of Architecture at Rice University) may seem a bit strange at first (why not an Actar editor?), but when one realizes that the bulk of the collection is culled from ANY Magazine , which ran alongside conferences and publications between 1991 and 2001, her presence seems appropriate. Davidson -- editor of Log , ANY's successor -- is one of the strongest pieces holding together the close-knit group of architects and theorists d...

UIC Student Recreational Facility in Chicago, Illinois by Moody•Nolan & PSA-Dewberry Photographs are by Mark Ballogg. The greedy and destructive ways of American universities may seem like a lie when compared to the teaching and fostering of (typically) young people that such schools see as their role in society. But when one considers the footprints of universities, in particular urban ones, and the displacement of residents that many times accompanies the expansion of schools, these ways are clear. Certainly some schools learn to co-exist with cities and their residents -- buying up surrounding buildings and renovating them to school functions, for example -- but many, with the help of cities, find that co-existence next to impossible. One example of this unfortunate state of secondary educational affairs is the University of Illinois and Chicago (UIC), located west of the Loop. Displacing thousands of largely Italian residents for its inaugural opening in 1965, the schoo...

Renzo Piano Museums  by Renzo Piano, with an essay by Victoria Newhouse, published by  The Monacelli Press , 2007. Hardcover, 214 pages. ( Amazon ) In a piece in Bloomberg News last month , critic James S. Russell laments Italian architect Renzo Piano 's dominance of museum commissions in the United States. Citing timid museum trustees and an embrace of "architecture serving art" as reasons for this phenomenon, over the quality of Piano's output, which he sees as lacking in recent projects like the Morgan Library and LACMA, Piano nevertheless has a number of museum designs for the US either on the boards or underway. While I would agree that some of his recent designs do lack the clarity or quality of the Menil Collection or the Nasher Sculpture Center , they are still highly-skilled buildings that are better than the majority of what passes for architecture these days. While Russell's argument is pretty weak (are Piano's projects really so repetitive th...

The first time I saw, in Abitare , the story of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper of OMA's House in Bordeaux, France designed for a wheelchair-bound client, I was intrigued by the focus on the housekeeper and the chores she must do to keep the house and its well-known mechanisms in a reasonable state after the occupant's death. Koolhaas Houselife , the film by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine that presents the story of Guadalupe is part of an upcoming exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, On Mock-ups, Home Videos and Housekeeping: a video exhibition in 3 parts , running from March 25 to May 3 (the Guadalupe portion will run from April 3 to the exhibition's close). Here's a couple trailers from the filmmaker's blog.

west windows , originally uploaded by monkeyridingdog . New College Residence at the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) by Saucier + Perrotte Architectes , 2003. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Here's a couple buildings, old and new, in the news this week. Louis I. Kahn's Esherick House (1961) in Philadelphia hits the auction block .   [photograph by Ezra Stoller/Esto | image source ] Large for a single-person house (as it was designed), but small by today's standards, this dignified piece of architecture is supposed to fetch between $2-3 million. While this supposedly happened yesterday in an auction by Wright in Chicago yesterday, I've yet to hear or see any news on the sale; I'll post an update when known . The auction is actually May 18, not March 18. Me bad. [photograph by Todd Eberle | image source ] Wright commissioned Todd Eberle to shoot photographs for a catalog that also features an essay by Julie V. Iovine. This aspect of the auction reminds me of the catalog I saw at the Maison Tropicale when I visited it on the Queens side of the East River, where a nearly $100 catalog was for sale. Looks like pricey, museum-quality books to accom...

"Architecture used to be about beauty. Now it's just about money. What has changed? Well, everything, really, in three revolutions: social, theoretical, cultural. The social revolution occurred when democratic capitalism took money from the hands of a cultivated aristocracy and gave it first to the mercantile classes and then to the plebs (us). This fitted architecture with an entirely new client-class, which is really two classes -- the developers who build, and the people who buy. Neither of them is especially interested in architecture, urbanism or the making of place. [...] The second revolution was, if not theory-led, at least theory-coated. In the mid-twentieth century, design-meisters Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius jointly marched architecture towards an engineering aesthetic of bare functionalism. That they did not practice their creed made their preachings no less effective, and led, inevitably, to a wholesale burning of the books. Which was the third revolution. The...

escala , originally uploaded by yellow.kiddo . Museum of Modern Art ( MUMOK ) in Vienna, Austria by Ortner & Ortner , 2001. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Cost-Effective Building: Economic concepts and constructions  edited by Christian Schittich, published by  Birkhauser , 2007. Hardcover, 176 pages. ( Amazon ) The latest in Detail Magazine's in DETAIL series presents what could be called "un-Bilbao" buildings; those commissions not blessed with the almost limitless budgets that allow for expensive materials, formal invention, and a HUGE scale. Where previous books in the series looked at building types (single-family housing) or architectural elements (building skins), this one focuses on the less-thrilling aspect of architectural production: the budget. Building types in these pages range from single- and multi-family houses to schools and factories, with the book loosely arranged where essays and interviews partition the various projects into types. In this manner the book moves from small scale to large, from timber and masonry structure to concrete and steel, from private to (quasi-)public, from individual to col...

Hyperborder: The Contemporary U.S.–Mexico Border and Its Future by Fernando Romero/ LAR , published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2007 ( Amazon ) This highly-anticipated book presents an interdisciplinary overview of what is one of the most contested places in the world today: the US-Mexico border. Given the recent decision for the United States government to strengthen border security via both manpower and a lengthy wall, it's no surprise that the area is ripe for research and speculation from an architectural point of view. Fernando Romero and his Laboratory for Architecture, a Mexico City-based practice, bring both together in this well-made book.   Romero's experience with Rem Koolhaas comes across clearly in the ...

Bridging Tea House in Jinhua, China by LAR / Fernando Romero Photographs are by Iwan Baan . As an architect practicing in Mexico Fernando Romero -- director and founder of Laboratory of Architecture ( LAR ) -- is concerned with borders and the bridging of borders, be it physically, socially, environmentally, or in other ways. His recent book Hyberborder is surely indicative of this consideration, as is his design for a museum that would actually span the border between the United States and Mexico, as a museum "devoted to the migration flows between the two countries." This tea house in Jinhua Architectural Park is a small-scale version of that unbuilt museum, suitably called the Bridging Tea House and based on "two...

P1030193.JPG , originally uploaded by jgeis . 1532 House in San Fransisco, California by Fougeron Architecture , 2006. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

A few Tokyo buildings photographed by vigggo , from newest to oldest. The Iceberg (2006) by CDI . Motoakasaka Imanishi Building (1992) by Shin Takamatsu . Aoyama Technical College (1990) by Makoto Sei Watanabe . Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) by Kisho Kurokawa . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose