A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Another year, another Thanksgiving break. Posts will resume on Tuesday or Wednesday next week. Image found here

Last week the Kimbell Art Museum unveiled Renzo Piano 's design for its new building opposite Louis I. Kahn's 1972 landmark . While the site plan and section don't reveal a heck of a lot about the design, it made me wonder why Piano is chosen not only for every other museum design (it seems) but for additions to important, and in some case iconic, pieces of Modern architecture. [Kimbell site plan | image provided by Kimbell Art Museum | © Renzo Piano Workshop] In addition to the Kimbell in Fort Worth, Texas... [Kimbell section | image provided by Kimbell Art Museum | © Renzo Piano Workshop] ...is Piano's controversial (PDF link) visitor center next to Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France... [Notre Dame du Haut visitor center | image source ] ...his unrealized addition to Marcel Breuer 's Whitney Museum of American Art in New York... [Whitney Museum expansion | image source ] ...and finally his addition to Richard Meier...

Art Gallery of Ontario at Sunset - Frank Gehry , originally uploaded by Scott Norsworthy . The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto by Frank O. Gehry, 2008. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Toshiko Mori Architect by Toshiko Mori, published by  The Monacelli Press , 2008. ( Amazon ) This first monograph on Toshiko Mori Architect features 30 built and unbuilt projects by the New York-based firm. The built works are primarily residential, with some retail and exhibition spaces, while the unbuilt/unfinished projects extend the range of types to larger buildings for institutional clients. In this steady movement to larger projects since the firm's 1981 inception, there is an apparent shift from simple, neo-Modern designs to more expressive and exploratory forms, most evident in the recently completed Syracuse University Link Hall . Instead of being organized chronologically or by building type, the book arranges the projects into three sections: History/Precedent, Material, and Site/Climate. Naturally these considerations ov...

Copenhagen Harbor Housing Project in Copenhagen, Denmark by tegnestuen vandkunsten Text and images are courtesy tegnestuen vandkunsten ; photographs by adam mørk . The project consists of 120 flats -- half of them social housing and half of them private -- and a communal house placed in the Copenhagen Harbor. It is the result of a 2003 competition with an unusual brief, partly in the 50/50 social housing-private ownership mix, but not least in the fact that the Copenhagen Harbor authorities had donated an area of water for the competition, as they wanted a model project to boost development on the southern harbor. The money saved from not having to buy land could instead pay for a large landfill that would accommodate buildings and cars. Our proposal was to eschew the landfill and instead build an artificial island in the form of a one-story parking garage. This would get rid of the cars that plague the spaces between the houses and bring the houses closer to the water. All fla...

Philharmonie , originally uploaded by my lala . La Philharmonie Luxembourg in Luxembourg by Atelier Christian de Portzamparc , 2005. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

A week ago the New York Csty Council approved a $3 billion project to transform Willets Point from what is seen as a third-world cesspool to a mixed-use development with " exciting retail and entertainment offerings, a hotel and convention center, thousands of mixed-income residential units and new public open spaces and other community amenities " on the 60-acre site. [Willets Point now | image source ] Eminent domain is the tool of choice for the transformation of the area near the new Mets Stadium that is home to auto shops, junkyards and other "undesirable" businesses. Pollution is rampant from the industrial uses in the area, as well as the lack of infrastructure like sewers. I've never been to Willets Point myself, but photos of it remind me of Lago Agrio , the frontier Ecuadorian oil town I studied a year ago. My attitude to the Queens area is similar: as undesirable as the place may be to most, that doesn't mean it should be bulldozed to a tabula r...

Richard Desmond Children's Eye Centre , originally uploaded by photourbanism . Richard Desmond Children's Eye Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital in Islington, London, England by Penoyre & Prasad LLP , 2007. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

[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.

Positions: Portrait of a New Generation of Chinese Architects edited by Frédéric Edelmann and Françoise Ged, published  Actar , 2008. ( Amazon )   Olympic Architecture: Beijing 2008 by the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design , published by  Birkhäuser , 2008. ( Amazon ) This summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, China broadcast to the rest of the world the country's efforts in physically transforming itself, just one example being the 30 million square meters (320 million square feet) of building added annually to the city since it was awarded the Games in 2001. Perceptions of the boom in China focus on the rampant urbanization accomplished via cookie-cutter concrete towers packed tightly together, the destruction of the traditional fabric in places like Shanghai, and the high-profile ...

China Academy of Art Xiangshan Campus in Hangzhou, China by Amateur Architecture Studio Photographs are by o d b / David Brown . About 80 years after its founding the China Academy of Art opened its third campus in Zhuantang Town, Xihu District of Hangzhou. The Xiangshan Campus is comprised of four schools (School of Design, School of Architecture, Public Art Institute, Media and Animation Institute) spread across 21 buildings. The campus wraps itself around the base of a forested hill, with Phase 1 to the north and Phase 2 to the south. Designed by Amateur Architecture Studio , the buildings and landscaping are a skillful yet varied composition that reflects the architect's respect of site and tradition. Phase 1 (first three images) consists of four classroom buildings and various smaller buildings, including studios, workshops, a library, a tower, and an athletic field. The classroom buildings are the most disti...

While masonry is often perceived as impenetrable, a suitable material for keeping out wind and rain, it is actually by nature porous, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the specific material and its treatment. Cavity walls, for example, are designed to shed any water that may weep its way through the outer brick and mortar facade. Brick is seen as a veneer that keeps out most air and water, but it is not the sole means of doing such. Some architects exploit this inherent porosity of masonry -- be it brick, stone or concrete -- by designing walls that allow light, air and water to penetrate. The most famous examples are surely Frank Lloyd Wright's four Textile Block Houses in sunny California. Wright used horizontal and vertical steel reinforcing bars and concrete grout (instead of standard mortar) to create three-dimensional compositions of flat and textured custom blocks, the latter either open or with glass inserts. The 1923 Freeman House shows the wonderful effects of...

The Sequence by Arne Quinze , originally uploaded by michaeluyttersp . The Sequence in Brussels, Belgium by Arne Quinze , 2008. Check out michaeluyttersp's set for a few more images of the installation. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

ORDOS 13:100 , originally uploaded by archidose . The interior spread from an exhibition pamphlet for the Architectural League's 13:100 | Thirteen New York Architects Design for Ordos (Mongolia) exhibition now on display. Check the original size to read the key to the 13 projects by New York-based architects. See my previous post on ORDOS 100 for more information on the project. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Portugese firm Kaputt! 's web page is basically a splash page, but it's quite an interesting one. A slideshow of hands on a scanbed next to model photos gives us the firm's contact information and "cast of characters." The images associate the hand of the architect with the architectural creation, an immediate relationship that seems often splintered these days. The names take this relationship one step further, by marking the skin with that which can only be handwritten, not typed and printed on a computer. And in case you're wondering about the faces that go with those hands: Check out the belly of an architect for one of Kaputt's projects.

Saxion 7 , originally uploaded by Marc ZZZ . Saxion Hogeschool Enschede in Enschede, The Netherlands by IAA Architecten , 2001. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties by Alastair Gordon, published by  Rizzoli , 2008. ( Amazon ) By completely rejecting the fruits of capitalism and the living and working requirements necessary to sustain this economic system, the young revolutionaries of the 1960s never managed to find an architectural vocabulary that could both change society and offer viable schemes for construction. This quote by James Wines, from his book De-Architecture , targets part of the nagging wonder of why this decade was so influential yet so fleeting, its principles shuffled aside in favor of less idealistic but more practical alternatives. Wines chaulks it up to the fact so few examples were built, yet believing that the relevant ideas explored at that time still linger in architectural discourse. Ma...

Alila Cha-Am in Petchaburi, Thailand by Duangrit Bunnang Architect Limited Photographs are by DBALP . Cha-Am is a former fishing village located on the sunrise side of The Gulf of Thailand, about 2-1/2 hours south of Bangkok. The white sand beaches of the area have made it an appealing vacation destination, one now home to Alila Cha-An, a beachside resort designed by Thailand's own Duangrit Bunnang Architect Limited ( DBALP ). Arrival at the resort is via monumental stone stairs that lead to a covered entry. This first glimpse hints at what lies beyond: the cover spans two parallel buildings oriented east-west. Once through this portal the design is laid out in front of the visitor, with simple wood and conrete structures overlooking a reflecting pool on axis with the stairs and the water beyond. This space recalls Louis Kahn's Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, where bi-lateral symmetry orients space towards an infinite vist...