A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

I'm taking time off over the holiday weekend to spend time with friends and family. Posts will resume Wednesday. If you're celebrating, have a happy Labor Day !

Here's three buildings in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (the city of last week's dose ), all photographed by z.z. . SGAE (General Society of Authors and Publishers) Central Office by Antón García Abril ( Ensamble Studio ). Musical Studies Centre at the University of Santiago de Compostela, also by Antón García Abril ( Ensamble Studio ). Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela by Álvaro Siza

Earlier this year saw the opening of the Campus Center for Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. Designed by Dominique Perrault, the building is appropriately called "The Campus Valley." [aerial photomontage | image source (PDF link)] Comprising classrooms, library, event spaces, cinema, theater, shops, outdoor sports fields, administrative support, and parking for the 22,000 university students, the submerged project recalls the Velodrome & Pool he designed for Berlin, in which the presence of the two buildings barely rises above the surrounding landscape. [view from main road | image source (PDF link)] While the two buildings in Berlin are objects that nestle themselves into the ground plane, this building is the ground plane. [view from the stair side of the valley | image source (PDF link)] The valley, which ramps down from the south and returns up via stairs to the north, is but one "bar" element of four: the circulation that is the va...

Balastera 6 , originally uploaded by Srgio2000 . Football Stadium in Palencia, Spain by Francisco Mangado. See more stadium photos by Srgio2000. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Shift: SANAA and the New Museum edited by Joseph Grima and Karen Wong, published by  Lars Müller Publishers , 2008 ( Amazon ) Tadao Ando Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth by Philip Jodidio, published by  Rizzoli , 2008 ( Amazon ) These two books on two recent museums by Japanese architects -- 2005's Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth by Tadao Ando and last year's New Museum in New York City by SANAA -- are as different from each other as the buildings and their locales. Where the former's horizontality and repetition relates to its larger and immediate context, the latter's varied verticality relates to its prominent and deeply historical Manhattan site. The books cater,...

Field Installation 14 in Houten, Netherlands by JSA Rotterdam The following text and images are courtesy JSA Rotterdam ; photographs are by Arthur Blonk . Field 14 is an archaeological site on the southern edge of a new housing estate in Houten. The plot is about 11.4 hectares (28 acres) in size and is a listed monument. The land is currently in use as an orchard, pasture, and arable field. No physical traces of the archaeological finds or occupation history are visible at the site. In 2000 archaeologists investigated a small portion of the site, because of plans to build a bicycle tunnel there. Drillings carried out in randomly selected locations elsewhere on the site revealed stone foundations, probably belonging to a Roman dwelling. Other than that, Field 14 has essentially been left untouched. The subsurface must remain undisturbed, so that the archaeological remains are preserved intact for future investigation. In view of this situation, we developed a plan that involves...

rammed 7 , originally uploaded by Modified Enzyme . NK'MIP Desert Cultural Centre in Osoyoos, British Columbia, Canada by Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden architects + urbanistes , 2007. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

It seems like New York firms have a thing for bay windows, but not the usual symmetrical bays prevalent in residential architecture. I'm talking about angled bays that project from facades asymmetrically to orient views and jazz up building exteriors. The most well known recent example of this architectural element is the Switch Building in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The design by nARCHITECTS alternates these angled bays to give the building its name. A small building that would have most likely been overshadowed by Blue next door, the maneuver holds its own, while offering its occupants captured views up or down Suffolk Street. Bays typically provide seating space for residents, and these are no different. The projections give a public face to an intimate space of the domestic realm. [photographs of Switch Building by Frank Oudeman | image source ] Further uptown, near Madison Square Park is M127 in NYC by SHoP Architects . The condo project is a renovation of se...

Vigo, Campus Universitário. Alfonso Penela , originally uploaded by z.z . Rector's Building at Vigo University Campus in Vigo, Galicia, Spain by Alfonso Penela, 2003. See also Today's archidose #217 for EMBT's contribution to the same campus. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

[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...

Tonight is the premiere on Sundance Channel of their six-part docu-reality show Architecture School . Fellow architects have always agreed that there aren't any TV shows about architects -- unlike, say, lawyers or doctors -- because it would be so boring. Well, now there's a show about architects -- well, students at least -- and now we'll see if the shows proves us right or wrong. "The six-part series from creators Michael Selditch and Stan Bertheaud follows a group of students at Tulane University's prestigious School of Architecture as they submit competing designs for an affordable home in Katrina-battered New Orleans. The stakes are high: the winning model will be built during the course of the school year and put up for sale, enabling one fledgling architect to begin his or her career with a high-profile splash. ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL opens a window onto the art and science of architecture while telling a unique and uplifting story about the literal rebuilding o...

Synth-Dune 2 , originally uploaded by Sam's Notebook . Visitors' Center of the Marine World, Doñana National Park, Almonte, Huelva, Spain by Cruz Y Ortiz , 2001. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000 by Peter Eisenman, edited by Ariane Lourie Rizzoli , 2008 Architects that take the time and effort in exploring and sharing their thoughts on other architects, their contemporaries, is a rarity. More often architects partake in self-promotion, even if their debts to fellow architects are clear in their designs. Rafael Moneo's book Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects is a good example of a respected architect exhibiting his appreciation for his contemporaries, particularly in the realm of ideas. Another one is this recent book by Peter Eisenman on ten built and unbuilt projects spanning the last half of the 20th century. Featuring some obvious ( Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi, the Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind) and not-so-obvious ...

City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain by Eisenman Architects In a recent book Peter Eisenman analyzes Ten Canonical Buildings , what the architect describes as the "close reading" of notable built and unbuilt projects between 1950-2000. This close reading is rooted in the teaching of Colin Rowe, who espoused seeing "what ideas were implied by what was physically present." In other words it is finding what forms of architecture express beyond merely the forms themselves. Since Eisenman devotes his book to other architects, how his buildings fare with the same close reading is not apparent or acknowledged by the architect. Here I'll take a stab at a close reading of what could safely be called Eisenman's magnum opus , the City of Culture of Galicia in San Compostela, Spain. Now under construction, and not anticipated to be completed ...

Back in 2005 I posted about IKEA's bad behavior in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Their destruction of Civil War-era buildings to make way for a parking lot seemed like a new low for the Swedish perpetrator of inexpensive furniture. At that time the destruction of the one-story section of Marcel Breuer's 1969 Armstrong Building (aka Pirelli Building) in New Haven, Connecticut to make way for another surface parking lot next to the massive blue and yellow building seemed excusable. At least history would be partially saved, right? [Marcel Breuer's 1969 Armstrong (aka Pirelli) Building, pre-IKEA | image source ] The store in Red Hook opened this summer, with all apparently forgotten in the media whirlwind around New York City's first Swedish superstore. A dedicated water taxi shuttles people to and from Manhattan, while bus service links to subways in the not-so-immediate area. This apparently was not enough to reduce the number of parking spaces needed. So my disappointment over ...

IMG_2833 - Grandeur , originally uploaded by marklarmuseau . Liège-Guillemins TGV Station in Liège, Belgium by Santiago Calatrava , under construction since 1996. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City  by Mark Kingwell, published by Viking Press, 2008. Hardcover, 256 pages. ( Amazon ) "All great manifestations of social life have in common with the work of art the fact that they are born in unconscious life." - Aldo Rossi The interaction between our internal states and the exterior world is a subject ripe for investigation, as half the world's population finds itself in cities and a good deal of that number find the physical character of those surroundings lacking, to say the least. Rampant modernization, globalization, and an abstraction rooted in Modernism have morphed places into non-places, ubiquitous constructions that replace the unique and the local with a repetitive brandism. What seems to be missing is considerations of the body, that threshold of interaction between the internal and the external, the porous boundary between us and the rest of the world; or, in essence, our primary way of being in the world. ...

Trutec Building , originally uploaded by marco 2000 . The Trutec Building (aka DMC B6/2 Office Building ) in Seoul, Korea by Barkow Leibinger Architects , 2006. See also my recent comments on the building's facade. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose