A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

IMG_3861a , originally uploaded by mo+ . Haus V/B in Seeheim-Jugenheim, Germany by mo+ messerschmidt | oligmueller | architekten , 2010. See mo+'s documentation of the project in their flickr set . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Open now for entries is the 3rd International Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction . Click the image for more information. Holcim Awards is also on Facebook .

Houses: Modern Natural/Natural Modern by Ron Broadhurst, published by  Rizzoli , 2010. Hardcover, 300 pages. ( Amazon ) The New Modern House: Redefining Functionalism by Jonathan Bell and Ellie Stathaki, published by  Laurence King Publishing , 2010. Hardcover, 240 pages. ( Amazon ) These two collections of contemporary residential architecture attempt to find unique strands within the well documented typology. One book looks at houses with strong ties to nature, and the other book finds houses that place function over aesthetics. How well does each argue and present its case? Modern Natural starts with a foreword by MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll, who uses Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe as the Modern masters most diametrically opposed in their views of nature. Broadhurst's subsequent introduction points to a preference for Mies's framing of and existential relationship to nature, but th...

House at the Park in Hamburg, Germany by splendid_architecture, 2010. Hamburg-based splendid_architecture recently won two awards for their design of "House at the Park" on the outskirts of the same German city. The BDA (Alliance of German Architects) awarded the house an "award for the most beautiful new built house," and it received a public vote for the same. Architects Nina and Stephan Schmid explain that "due to pre-conditions the house was built partly on piles, in order to integrate it into an old tree population." Seen from the road, the house sits at the far end of an expanse of grass, tucked by the trees as if for protection and views out. Getting closer the S-shaped ribbon that meanders from roof to wall to floor to roof to wall and floor again (in two directions) acts like podium, raising the house above the landscape that it also integrates itself into. The U-shaped plan on the first floor locates living spaces up front and be...

Here are two views of Laycock Street Housing in London, England by Brady Mallalieu Architects . Photographs are by Andrew Carr . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Cooper Union: Public Farm 1: Public Farm 1 at PS1 time lapse construction video from david basulto on Vimeo . (via Architizer )

This evening Cooper Union presents "Award-Winning Urban Designer and Author Diana Balmori in A Landscape Manifesto , a free reading, Q&A and book signing open to the public." A review of the recent monograph of the same name is forthcoming. Friday, November 19 at 6:30pm Rose Auditorium 41 Cooper Square Internationally known landscape and urban designer Diana Balmori will speak in the Rose Auditorium at The Cooper Union about her stunning new book, A Landscape Manifesto. Balmori's theory and practice of urban landscape design is an art that spans the divide between culture and nature, and combines the science of ecology with the formal aspects of aesthetics. During her talk, she will delve deep into the visionary thinking behind a variety of projects by Balmori Associates—including public spaces on the Memphis Riverfront and in the newly reclaimed port area by the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. Diana Balmori is an internationally recognized landscape and urban...

Here are two views of the " Cloudscapes " installation at the Venice Biennale by Tetsuo Kondo and Transsolar , 2010. [Photograph by Pedro Kok ] [Photograph by imagen solo referencial / chilemascophe ] To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Reimagining the Whitney Museum of American Art 's Renzo Piano-designed expansions, both downtown (happening) and uptown (not happening), seems to be a popular thing to do. [Whitney Downtown Museum by Axis Mundi | spotted at newyork-architects.com ] [NeWhitney by Tolou Studio | spotted at Architizer ]

Dear Readers, Yesterday marked exactly one month until my book is due at the publishers, one month to not only finish writing the thing but also finalizing all the images and permissions and coordinating everything with maps...so much that one month feels like half that. So needless to say postings on this blog will be slim for a month or so...a little bit slimmer than it's been lately, if anybody's noticed. I'll take this time to share the usual photos, events, competitions, etc., so please e-mail me if you have any recommendations. Thanks, John

BOLLES+WILSON: A Handful of Productive Paradigms by Julia Bolles-Wilson and Peter Wilson, published by Bolles+Wilson, 2009. Hardcover, 296 pages. ( Amazon ) Architects Julia Bolles-Wilson and Peter Wilson have been practicing together since the late 1980s. Their competition-winning central library for their home base of Münster, Germany catapulted them into the international architectural spotlight a few years later, thanks to a book-length study on the building and of course the library's design itself, a sort of urban microcosm. In BOLLES+WILSON 's new monograph, featuring 25 years worth of buildings and projects, that library is acknowledged as "a base reference for subsequent projects." While later projects may not embody the library's structural expression, they extend its intelligent urbanism; their designs carefully respond to context, melding form and function with a diversity of urban conditions. This week's dose, the New Cit...

City Library Helmond in Helmond, Netherlands by BOLLES+WILSON, 2010 See also this week's book review, BOLLES+WILSON: A Handful of Productive Paradigms . The Dutch city Helmond is transforming its central shopping area, per a master plan by Professor Joan Busquests. Falling within that zone is the city's new library designed by BOLLES+WILSON . Its location is directly adjacent to Piet Blom's 1970's Tree Houses and Theatre, an earlier version of the Cubic Houses in Rotterdam. The library's design responds to the pedestrian shopping context in which it is situated by giving over most of its ground floor to retail. The library's functions at grade include the children's library, a cafe with outdoor seating next to the Theatre Court, and of course the entrances. This last piece, the main entry, is announced by a two-story cantilevered extension of the facade mounted with the word BIBLIOTHEEK, a theme also used at the northeast corner. These projection...

Here are a few photos of Wilo in Zaanstad, Netherlands by Benthem Crouwel , 2009. Photographs are by Klaas Vermaas . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg's Urban Vision by Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Rüedi Ray, published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2010. Paperback, 176 pages. ( Amazon ) Last week I reviewed a book on Frank Lloyd Wright's SC Johnson Tower in Racine, Wisconsin. Fifteen stories tall, it is constructed like a tree, with floors cantilevering from a concrete core. In theory Betrand Goldberg's Marina City towers in Chicago are akin to Wright's earlier design, as Goldberg intended the "corn cobs" to built in the same manner. Even though the pair were built with exterior columns, they are so well integrated into the scalloped balconies that their expression between the residences and the parking garage below is what gives them away, as ones eyes move from the top of the towers to their bases and the rest of the project. But let me backtrack, as I think I'm getting into too much detail too soon. Yet it's hard, because there is so much to talk about ...

Tonight at the Storefront for Art and Architecture : From the Storefront's web page : Storefront is pleased to invite you to our second edition of the INTERROGATION SERIES presenting the book Event-Cities 4 on Friday November 12, 7pm, through an inquisitive dialogue between Bernard Tschumi and Peter Cook . About the book: Event-Cities 4 (MIT Press, 2010) is the latest in the Event-Cities series from Bernard Tschumi, documenting recent built and theoretical projects in the context of his evolving views on architecture, urbanism, and design. In this collection, Tschumi introduces the "Concept-Form": a concept generating a form, or a form generating a concept, so that one reinforces the other. The concept may be programmatic, technological, or social. The form may be singular or multiple, regular or irregular. Concept-forms act as organizing devices or common denominators for the multiple dimensions of programs and their evolution over time, and...

Maslice Nursery-School , originally uploaded by Wojtek Gurak . Maslice Nursery School in Wroclaw, Poland by R2 Rubik Leslaw . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Monsterpieces: Once Upon a Time . . . of the 2000s! by Aude-Line Duliere and Clara Wong, published by  ORO Editions , 2010. Hardcover, 100 pages. ( Amazon ) What an intriguing title. Monsterpieces. One part masterpiece and one part Frankenstein. Judging from the buildings arrayed across the bottom of the cover -- Bird's Nest by Herzog & de Meuron, Will Alsop's OCAD, Peter Cook's Kunsthaus Graz , and OMA's CCTV tower and Seattle Public Library -- the masterpieces of the 2000s are its strange creatures, buildings all about form over function. But what exactly are monsterpieces? In the hands of self-declared "rebellious daughters of the Koolhaasian 90s" Aude-Line Duliere and Clara Wong, they are speculations on what happens in these and other buildings well after they've served their original purpose, decades or centuries beyond their expiration date. In one instance OCAD is illustrated as a swimming pool during the "Pet...

360 House in Galapagar, Spain by Subarquitectura, 2010 The following text and images are courtesy Subarquitectura (Andrés Silanes + Fernando Valderrama + Carlos Bañón) for their design of the recently completed 360 House outside Madrid. Photograph are by David Frutos . A unique opportunity for us is in reality a problem that’s been posed thousands of times: to construct a house with a public program of social relation, associated with a single-family house on a sloping plot of land with privileged views, in this case of the mountains outside Madrid. It has no one solution, there are many, they’re even cataloged in books about houses on slopes. We try not to think of domestic spaces. On the contrary, we take as a point of reference works of engineering, motorway intersections, changes of direction. We proceed from generic solutions to the problem of descending, solutions that conceal great plasticity. We seek the poetic in all that seems to have been considered from the mere...

Frank Lloyd Wright's SC Johnson Research Tower by Mark Hertzberg, published by Pomegranate, 2010. Hardcover, 80 pages. ( Amazon ) Frank Lloyd Wright designed hundreds of buildings that were realized (hundreds more than weren't) and just about any of them could be the subject of a book, but none has a story like the Research Tower he added to the Johnson Wax Administration Building for S.C. Johnson & Son in Racine, Wisconsin. Three decades after the tower's 1950 opening it closed, and remains so to this day. Tours are given of the famous Administration Building with its mushroom-cap columns but they do not include the tower, above its second floor at least. This situation is due to a number of safety and functional matters (narrow stairs, small floor plates, leaky windows), all ultimately returning to the great architect and his ability to execute an amazing design that the client never wanted or could use but was grateful for anyways. In his third book on Fra...

New York City Day 4 - Last Day (16 of 33) , originally uploaded by Rachel De Stijl . Dream Downtown Hotel in New York City by Handel Architects, 2011. The design is a renovation of one of a pair of Albert C. Ledner's 1960's National Maritime Union buildings in Chelsea. Previously the slab on Ninth Avenue was transformed into The Maritime Hotel . Above is the 17th Street elevation; check out what's happening on 16th Street . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose