A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

PS1 Young Architects Program, 2009 , originally uploaded by downtownBLUE . Afterparty , this year's P.S.1 Young Architects Program by MOS , 2009. The installation opened Sunday and runs until September 28. Also on display at the museum is YAP 10th Anniversary Review , "a visual chronicle of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art's Young Architects Program, one of the most acclaimed architectural arenas for emerging talent of the last decade." Previously . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

2G 48/49 Mies van der Rohe: Houses edited by Moisés Puente, published by Editorial Gustavo Gili, April 2009. Paperback, 180 pages. ( Amazon ) As the cover photo to this double issue of the Spanish architectural magazine 2G attests, when one thinks of the houses of Mies van der Rohe, the Farnsworth House immediately springs to mind. Overlooking the Fox River near Chicago, the composition of glass, steel, travertine and wood is a house most distinctive, a museum piece notable for its transparency, purity of form and structure, and ability to attract architects from all over the world. Philip Johnson may have built his Glass House first, but the detachment of Mies's design from t...

Spuimarkt in The Hague, Netherlands by BOLLES+WILSON, 2008 Located on a prominent site in the center of The Hague in The Netherlands, the Spuimarkt combines cinemas, a supermarket and other retail into a large block whose openings, massing, and materiality belies its size. Designed by Münster, Germany-based BOLLES+WILSON with local architect Bureau Bouwkunde for ING Vastgoed , the shopping center elevates itself above similar projects in other cities by carefully addressing the urban context. The architects describe the Spuimarkt as a "permeable block," acknowledging the transient movement of visitors within the building's various spaces, what they further call the "tides and eddies of shoppers." They turn this flow of people into a spectacle via a Piranesian space of escalators at the main entrance on the north, on Grote...

Over at David Byrne's blog I came across this monstrosity by none other than Michael Graves , the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, Texas. The former Talking Head memorably says, "This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator." [Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, TX by Michael Graves & Associates | image source ] The architect explains the building "is a 300,000-square-foot office building and regional bank-processing center. A pitched roof marks the wing housing secure cash processing facilities on the lower floors, while a boardroom, meeting rooms, and dining rooms benefit from panoramic views of the Houston skyline visible from the two levels above. The wing opposite contains the storage vault under a green tile barrel-vaulted roof. These volumes are intended to exhibit the Bank’s commitment to security, as the loggia at the building’s entrance suggests outreach and openness." [Fed...

Alabama Veterans Memorial , originally uploaded by Burton24 . Alabama Veteran's Memorial in Birmingham, Alabama by Giattina Aycock Architecture Studio . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Brandon Safford's I Dream of Architecture , a new blog I linked to last Monday , has posted an interview with me , in which we discuss architecture, education, blogging, and other fun topics. Accompanying the interview are images from my CCNY Urban Design studio final project (the flip book one) in Lago Agrio , Ecuador.

Here's a couple views of the Mount Bonnell residence in Austin, Texas by Dick Clark Architecture . Photographs are by dick clark_dca . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Eikongraphia has posted MoPo 2009 , the third listing of the most popular architecture weblogs. Below is a comparison of each year, with the current ranking on the left. The quasi-objective list (its objectivity debated, rightly so, in comments on the MoPo 2009 post) limits itself to blogs from a single author, looking at feed subscriptions and Google hits to measure popularity. Yours truly has managed to nudge this blog from 5th to 2nd over these three years, showing that (almost) daily persistence aids in this sort of listing. With BLDGBLOG on top I can only stay at #2 or drop down the list from there. We'll see next year... MoPo 2009 1. BLDGBLOG 2. Archidose 3. City of Sound 4. Architecture.mnp 5. Pruned 6. Architechnophilia 7. Tropolism 8. Architectural Videos 9. Mirage Studio 7 10. Super Colossal 11. Subtopia 12. Landscape+Urbanism 13. Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy 14. Architecture Chicago Plus 15. Lebbeus Woods 16. Strange Harvest 17. Life Without Buildings 18. Ey...

Rotterdam-based 123DV Architectuur & Consult BV Liong Lie Architects sent us these images for their design of the art and conference center at Taets Art Gallery in Zandaam, Netherlands. The project involved the adaptive reuse of a large ammunition factory. [former ammunition factory turned art gallery | photo by Christian Richters] Regular readers should know I'm a big fan of interventions like these, especially ones that exploit the gap between old and new, like the House in Brejos de Azeitao or the S(ch)austall , a renovation of a pig barn into a showroom. [inside the renovated factory | photo by Christian Richters] The new spaces are inserted as platonic solids into the large void of the old factory, kept below the existing roof and appearing to hover above the floor on a band of LED light. [existing and intervention | diagram by 123DV] The oval conference room in the center of the open space draws the most attention, from its form as well as the random sp...

New Forms of Collective Housing in Europe edited by arc en rêve centre d'architecture, published by  Birkhäuser , 2009. Hardcover, 296 pages. ( Amazon ) Following previous exhibitions at the arc en rêve centre d'architecture in Bordeaux, France -- most notably Rem Koolhaas's Mutations and Voisins - Voisines , which focused on new forms of individual dwellings -- their Collective Housing exhibition and accompanying book collects notable projects but also asks difficult questions. This is not just eye candy. Perhaps in response to their exhibition on single-family houses, the museum asks if sustainable development today equals a resurgence of collective housing in urban locales. Naturally ...

e_3 in Berlin, Germany by Kaden + Klingbeil Photographs are by Bernd Borchardt . As the title to this week's book review, New Forms of Collective Housing in Europe , attests, designs of multi-family housing projects are in need of new ideas and new energy in response to a climate in many European countries where single-family housing outside cities predominates. One of the 45 recent projects collected in that book is Kaden + Klingbeil 's e_3, a seven-story building in Berlin's Prenzlauerberg quarter. While appealing at first glance, the project's qualities extend to its planning and development. In the same book, an essay by Ilka and Andreas Ruby describes the phenomenon of Building Groups in Germany. These entities target empty lots ...

The term "earth berm" -- preceding building, house or architecture -- conjures up images of 1970's shelters by the likes of Malcolm Wells (author of the seminal Earth-Sheltered House ) and others. The recent green architecture trend had to overcome associations with houses built during the decade's oil shortage, buildings rooted in hippie dreams of communing with nature and making the house part of the land. Now the spate of sustainable architecture exhibits a hi-tech appearance, in line with the projects featured by Paul Buchanan in his Ten Shades of Green . But a good deal of architecture -- green or not -- integrates earth as an architectural element, used not only for its thermal insulation but also for metaphorical linking of building and landscape and for capturing more space for use. [Pachacamac House by Longhi Architects | image source ] The hillside residence in Pachacamac, Peru by Longhi Architects , found over at Arch Daily , is as formally removed from...

DSC_0014-edit , originally uploaded by LM_09 . The St. Giles Mixed-use Development in London, England by Renzo Piano Building Workshop , now under construction (2010). Check out LM 09's St. Giles Court flickr set for more construction photos of the colorful development. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

On Tuesday I took my first stroll on The High Line , one week after it opened. It's an extremely photogenic park, so I took plenty of photos but distilled them to just over ten for this post and just under 40 for my flickr set . A slideshow of the latter is at the end of this post. Below are some thoughts from my visit, with the photos in a northerly sequence from the entrance at Gansevoort Street to the 20th Street terminus. For those not familiar with The High Line, it is a new park built atop an unused freight railway viaduct built in the 1930s on Manhattan's West Side in response to deaths from the previous at-grade line. Friends of the High Line is most responsible for spearheading an effort to turn the elevated railway into a park. Their efforts led to the city's support and subsequent ownership of most of the High Line. The parks' designer, picked in a 2004 invited competition, is Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro . For a little bit more background,...