A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Today and tomorrow I'm attending the Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering conference at Columbia GSAPP. With wifi access I can get some work done and post some highlights from the proceedings, cursory tidbits that serve to spark my memory, but which should also give people a sense of what is being presented and discussed. I'll add at least one thing of interest from each session below, updating it as the conference progresses. Day 2, Session 4: [ Succulent House by Murmur ; a house with udders for collecting water | featured in a talk by Sylvia Lavin on flaccidity and "an orgy of plastics." | image source ] [U.S. Pavilion at Expo67 in Montreal by R. Buckminster Fuller, catching fire in 1976; it was rebuilt years later without the acrylic skin | in Mark Wigley 's talk on plastic drawing the line between inside and outside, architects' ignorance of plastics, and the end of the material's Sixties/Seventies' exploration in a...

Over at Architectural Record, Martin Filler asks , "Is the architect's monograph our latest endangered species?" His wording "architect's" is very precise, as he rightly points out that "monographs on contemporary firms are heavily subsidized or wholly underwritten by their subjects." Or to put it another way, they are not monographs on architects, they are monographs by architects. Yes, Le Corbusier fashioned his own Oeuvre Complete -- including the layout -- between 1929 and 1970, yet it would be hard-pressed to compare today's  monographs to Corbu's influential eight-volume series. So, to use Filler's words again, are succeeding monographs "little more than glossy hardcover promotional brochures to entice an uninformed and impressionable lay clientele?" Not all of them, of course. As a way to state what monographs can offer in the way of quality presentation and worthwhile writing, below are some choice post- S,M,L,X...

Travels in the History of Architecture by Robert Harbison, published by  Reaktion Books , 2010. Hardcover, 288 pages. ( Amazon ) Histories of architecture are quite a particular bunch. Known by their authors -- Trachtenberg and Hyman , Sir Banister Fletcher -- the large-format and heavily illustrated books chronologically trace major buildings in Western history, from Egypt to Post-Modernism. Geared primarily to architecture students, these and other textbook-like histories take an art-historical approach to cataloging and describing buildings based on aesthetic and formal grounds. So Greek architecture is looked at in terms of the orders and proportions; Roman architecture, the arch; Gothic architecture, groin vaults and flying buttresses, and so forth. These are incomplete histories that ignore that developments are not always linear, skipping decades or more. They also play down the social, economic, political (minus important leaders and clients), and other contextu...

Here are three views of a Double House in Tilburg, Netherlands by Bedaux de Brouwer Architects , 2011.Photos are by Klaas5 . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Note: links and photos will be added to the text below as they become available on the Pritzker Architecture Prize page; see bottom of post for results of informal poll posted on this blog. Beginning of Press Release: Portuguese Architect Will Be Presented the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize in Washington, D.C. Los Angeles, CA—Eduardo Souto de Moura, a 58 year old architect from Portugal, is the jury’s choice for the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world as architecture’s highest honor will be in one of Washington, D.C.’s finest classical buildings, the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on June 2. In announcing the jury’s choice, Pritzker elaborated, "This marks the second time in the history of the prize that a Portuguese architect has been chosen. The first was in 1992 when Alvaro Siza was so honore...

Matter in the Floating World: Conversations with Leading Japanese Architects and Designers by Blaine Brownell, published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2011. Paperback, 256 pages. ( Amazon ) The arrival of this book in the mail happened not long before a 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of Japan, sending a wall of water six miles inland on the eastern coast near Sendai. Fairly widespread thoughts of sympathy and calls for donations for residents of the area -- still dealing with the uncertainty of the nuclear reactors affected by the two natural disasters -- were followed in architectural circles by appreciation of the building culture in Japan, especially in terms of how earthquakes are addressed by new buildings. The oft-repeated video of a swaying skyscraper in Tokyo certainly looks scary, but that was what the building was designed to do; it moves with the horizontal forces instead of trying to resist them. This approach, admittedly in use...

House in Hieidaira, Otsu City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan by Thomas Daniell Architects, 2009 The following text and images are courtesy Thomas Daniell . This is a single-family house designed for a lush natural setting in a new subdivision in the mountains above Kyoto. The site slopes away to the north, facing onto a National Park, with a view across a forest toward Mount Hiei (the most sacred mountain in Japanese Buddhism). In compliance with new building regulations that mandate orthogonal walls and gabled roofs, the house takes the form of a nagaya (traditional row house): a linear sequence of rooms contained in a long, narrow volume aligned perpendicular to the street. The house expands in section to follow the slope: single-story at the street façade, expanding to two stories at the rear of the site. This allows the gabled roof shape to define the interior spaces rather than simply sit on top of them. The bedrooms are half buried, whereas the living area is oriented toward th...