A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Storefront Newsprints: 1982-2009 by Storefront for Art and Architecture, published by Storefront Books, 2009. 2-volume paperback with slip case, 1,000 pages. ( Amazon ) Anybody who has visited the Storefront for Art and Architecture has probably walked away with a folded piece of newsprint with details on the exhibition on display. Since my first visit in 1997 I've amassed quite a few, storing them in a shoebox with pamphlets from other museums and venues I've visited in New York City and beyond. The Storefront newsprints have a way of standing out from the rest, in large part from the material they are printed on as well as the monochrome graphics employed. They are anachronistic without being reactionary. They recall a time before ink-jet printers and digital publishing, a time of literal cut-and-paste graphic design and printing in local copy shops. Yet the newsprint is a consistent medium in the nearly 30-year Storefront history, spanning a time of great changes aris...

Extracts of local distance is a project by Benjamin Maus, Frederic Gmeiner and Thorsten Posselt. "Countless fragments of existing architectural photography are merged into multilayered shapes. The resulting collages introduce a third abstract point of view next to the original ones of architect and photographer." Take a look at the project video: Extracts of Local Distance from STOESELTNTPRO on Vimeo . Now take a look at one of the finished pieces: [Elbberg Campus, top with detail below | image source ] The project, Elbberg Campus by BRT Architekten was featured on my weekly page in 2004:     The original photographer is Klaus Frahm , though I'm not sure if the three photos from my feature are the ones used for manipulation. Pieces of the wood louvers, curling metal facade, and wood decking can be seen in the collage, taking the space between the buildings and making it 100 times more dynamic. The image recalls Zaha Hadid's paintings , but i...

It's virtually impossible to write about The Pritzker Architecture Prize without discussing what other people are saying about the newest recipient. Coverage is fast and furious (see yesterday's ArchNewsNow for a few links and Google News for many more), and questions of "are they worthy" seem to take precedence over other concerns. This year's winners, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (aka SANAA), are known for minimal, ethereal designs of glass, metal and concrete. This fact is seen by James S. Russell ( Bloomberg ) as a disservice "at a time of profound challenges in the field." That they are the second duo (after Herzog & de Meuron ) and Sejima is the second woman (after Zaha Hadid ) to win the coveted prize is mentioned in just about all coverage ( Cityscapes ), and Christopher Hawthorne ( LA Times ) focuses on the former. While he quotes how the jury believes "it is virtually impossible to untangle which individual is responsible for w...

Hunch 13: Consensus edited by Salomon Frausto, published by  NAi Publishers , 2009. Paperback, 176 pages. ( Amazon ) About ten years ago on a trip to San Francisco I stopped by William Stout Architectural Books and found the first issue of Hunch buried under a pile of books, hard to find yet worth the search. The tall format book from the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands is a blend of the local and the international, combining contributions from within and beyond the confines of the "post-academic laboratory for design-based research in architecture, urbanism, and other issues related to the built environment." Twelve issues later Hunch is still going strong, with a larger format but a simila...

Kirkwood Public Library in Wilmington, Delaware by ikon.5 architects The Kirkwood Public Library was also features as a Building of the Week at american-architects.com. Click on images for larger color views; photographs are by James D'Addio . In 1972 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour released the first version of Learning from Las Vegas , a classic whose revised version five years later widely dissminated the notion of the decorated shed to a large audience of architects not content with Modernism. The idea that buildings should be seen as neutral containers for the more important signage in front of them points to the importance of the automobile in American life and the difficulty of conveying meaning via architectural language. This small library (22,500 sf) in Wilmington, Delaware by New Jersey's ikon.5 architects --their second for New Castle County--confronts the strip mall context of the highway where the building is sited as well as th...

London Olympics 2012 , originally uploaded by Manuel.A.69 . The View Tube for the London Olympics 2012 in London, England, 2009. Please comment if you know the architect responsible for the View Tube's design. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

On Monday the first section of Brooklyn Bridge Park , Pier 1, opened to the public, and on Wednesday the exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront opened at MoMA. The first is a six-acre portion of an 85-acre park that stretches from roughly Atlantic Avenue on the south to the Brooklyn Bridge on the north (see interactive map ) along the East River. The second consists of artists-in-residence at P.S.1 addressing the challenge of sea levels rising from global climate change. So how do we reconcile these apparently opposite ways of thinking about New York's waterfront, when issues of public space (short term) and eco-sustainability (long term) are both seen as important? [Brooklyn Bridge Park Opening | image source ]  Brooklyn Bridge Park is the result of a post-industrial landscape shaped by storage and shipping. The park can be seen as the successor to the warehouses that lasted about a century. But if predictions for rising water levels come true, the wat...

casa em santa teresa, arq. angelo bucci, rio de janeiro, 2008 , originally uploaded by m correia campos . Casa em Santa Teresa in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil by Angelo Bucci ( spbr ), 2008 To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Formique is an ongoing series that comments on contemporary architecture that ignores some of the basic human, environmental and other concerns that architecture should address, all in the name of formal invention. [166 Perry Street by Asymptote Architecture | image source ] A story in NY Daily News on Asymptote Architecture 's first ground-up building in Manhattan at 166 Perry Street in the West Village is aptly titled Reflect On This! One thing the faceted glass curtain wall reflects is the sky, which makes me want to quote Eartheasy's post on a side effect of such a thing: "Birds often strike windows because they see a reflection of clouds, sky or trees which gives the mistaken impression that they are flying into open air." The prevalence of all-glass exterior facades is mind-boggling when one takes into consideration the avoidable harm to our fine-feathered friends. Very few architects actually address this concern ( Studio Gang comes to mind), and in the ...

Jean Nouvel is the architect of the moment, with news on three major projects blanketing the digital airwaves: the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, the National Museum of Qatar, and 100 Eleventh Avenue in New York City. [Serpentine Gallery Pavilion | © Ateliers Jean Nouvel] The breaking news is Nouvel's selection for the Serpentine Gallery, an annual temporary structure in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park. Past commissions have gone to SANAA, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Toyo Ito, and Daniel Libeskind, many with Arup for engineering, including Nouvel's design. It's a who's-who list of starchitects, given free reign (not so free in the case of MVRDV's unrealized " mountain ") to build a no-budget pavilion with few programmatic requirements. Experimentation is the name of the game here. [Serpentine Gallery Pavilion | © Ateliers Jean Nouvel] The bright red pavilion immediately recalls Bernard Tschumi's folies for Parc de la Villette in ...

Build-On: Converted Architecture and Transformed Buildings edited by Robert Klanten and Luke Feireiss, published by  Gestalten , 2009. Hardcover, 240 pages. ( Amazon ) History for architects often presents a paradoxical situation: old buildings preserved are respected yet contrasted by new interventions. History has stopped becoming a model, in effect becoming canvases for anything-goes designs layered upon the existing. This is hardly a negative situation, though the variety of responses to different scenarios illustrate a gradient of respect between the past and present. That variety can be found throughout the pages of Build-On , a collection of primarily European projects where new buildings confront old ones in many creative ways. They range from barely apparent interventions like feld72's Million Donkey Hotel ( this week's dose ) to the strikingly oppositional, like Coop Himmelb(l)au 's Akron Art Museum . Th...

Million Donkey Hotel in Prata Sannita, Italy by feld72 Photographs are by Hertha Hurnaus . Prata Sannita is a small town (under 2,000 residents) north of Naples that is plit into the Prata Inferiore (medievel) and Prata Superiore (modern). The former is situated on a hillside and has lost population to the latter with its flexible grid. This place is the rest of Italy and Europe in miniature, an exodus of residents from small towns with local economies to urban areas tied into the global economy. In response to this situation a group of international artists were invited to the area to create proejcts with the participation of townspeople. Austrian architects and "urban strategists" feld72 created the Million Donkey Hotel , a minimal reconfiguration of a house abandoned by a local in a quest for fortune in the city. The architects moved to Prata Inferiore to build the hotel with residents, so the latter could convert other abandoned houses in a similar ma...

Manhattan is full of hidden gems, spaces tucked into the blocks formed by the island's famous grid. A religious space that comes to mind is a chapel by Louise Nevelson tucked under the Citicorp Center in St. Peter's Church. Unlike her usual black palette, the space is all white with a skylight and window bringing soft light to the small space layered with her relief sculptures. In a similar vein, though unfortunately not open to the public, is the Johnson Chapel at Trinity School on the Upper West Side, designed by Butler Rogers Baskett Architects (BRB). [photo by Woodruff/Brown Architectural Photography] The renovation is described by the architects as "one of subtraction, refinement and integration" with natural light "introduced by a light slot along the north wall, reflecting diffuse warm sunlight deep into the space." A simple palette of white wall and ceiling planes with wood flooring and wall panels/seating is accentuated by a stone bed and foun...

München Hauptsynagoge " Ohel Jakob" ( Zelt Jakobs) , originally uploaded by Wolfsraum . Jewish Center Jakobsplatz in Munich, Germany by Wandel Hoefer Lorch Architekten + Stadtplaner , 2006. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Today I received in the mail the March 2010 issue of Plan Magazine -- the one out of Ireland, not Italy. The cover story asks, "Could design blogs change the way we understand and produce architecture?" and features five blogs ( Archi-Ninja , The Architecture of Fear , BLDGBLOG , we make money not art ) including yours truly. Cover ninja Linda Bennett posts some details on the feature. This article on blogs comes almost three years after Postopolis! and an Architect Magazine feature ( Meet the Bloggers ) both examined the popularity and influence of architecture-related blogs. Obviously their popularity hasn't let up, and the number of them (see my sidebar) just keeps getting higher and higher, particularly as more architects end up out of work and need something to fill their newly found free time. As well many blogs are now put out by practicing architects, in most cases as an extension of marketing but in others as a means for exploration. The Plan Magazine feature ...

ASU Mesa Upper Floor Split View Down , originally uploaded by ken mccown . ASU Polytechnic Academic Buildings by Lake|Flato Architects in collaboration with RSP Architects , 2008. 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 project I found on Architizer that makes me wonder about web sites where users can input whatever they want. [ '66 Ford Mustang Restoration ] So, who will be the first to post their custom van on Architizer?

The last half of 2008 saw the unveiling of two superstar condo developments for Manhattan: 56 Leonard Street by Herzog & de Meuron and 23 East 22nd Street by OMA. Not surprisingly each project fizzled in the ensuing economic downturn; the release of the projects in September coincides with the federal government bail out of AIG, not a good omen.  While the city will probably never see these shifted and leaning buildings on their skyline, one lucky person can own one of the three hundred lucite models made for 56 Leonard Street in an ebay auction ending Wednesday. The 20" tall model is composed of 58 stacked pieces of the transparent material that lock into a full-height core also made of lucite. The model also includes a miniature Anish Kapoor scultpture at the base and a handy carrying case lined with foam for safe keeping. The case is emblazoned with words about the development that are composed into a profile of the building.  [56 Leonard St. Building Model (Herzog ...

London's Contemporary Architecture: An Explorer's Guide by Kenneth Allinson, published by Architectural Press, 2009. Paperback, 384 pages. ( Amazon ) My last visit to London occurred during the much ballyhooed Millennium celebrations, a mixture of fireworks in the Thames River and high-profile architecture along the same. In the press both were a disappointment, be it poor pyrotechnics or excessive lottery spending on projects still under construction when the calendar clicked over to 2000. My experience involved days out walking and riding the Tube, checking out the latest architecture, from the Millennium Dome and Jubilee Line extension built for the occassion to buildings by Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Will Alsop and others. My agenda was compiled from guidebooks, web pages (few at the time) and magazines, though unknown to me was Kenneth Allinson's guide to contemporary architecture, then in its first edition. A second edition came out later that year...

Restoration Center Berlin in Berlin, Germany by UTArchitects Photographs are copyright Ulrich Schwarz . In the southern part of Berlin the Restoration Center Berlin ( Restaurierung Zentrum Berlin ) occupies an 18th-century plantation whose barns were later demolished only to have garages built in their place. UTArchitects was retained to renovate a former farmhouse and design a new workshop building for the organization. The latter was enabled by the destruction of the garages, a remnant of the German Democratic Republic days. The design recalls the old farmhouse while responding to its site in a suitably contemporary manner. The site plan illustrates the workshop's relationship to the farmhouse and the street. A courtyard is created by the L-configuration of the two buildings with street access between the two buildings. The workshop presents a primarily solid elevation to the street and the neighboring apartment buildings. The metal roof wraps down the facade and five...