A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

I have to agree with the A/N Blog that Paris 26 Gigapixels -- a rooftop panorama from the top of Saint Sulpice that stitches 2,346 individual hi-res photos -- is quite a way to while away some time. The mansard roofscape definitely dominates the foreground, and well-known sites (Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, etc.) are highlighted, but I spent a little bit of time looking for some recent architecture. What did I find? [ Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, one of the popular sites highlighted.] [ Institut du Monde Arabe by Jean Nouvel.] [ Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterand by Dominique Perrault, behind the Pantheon .] [ La Grande Arche de La Défense by Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, surrounded by some of La Défense's other towers.] [ Tours Aillaud by Emile Aillaud, south of La Défense.]

This year the Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF) is extending its programming to Chicago , in a festival taking place May 5-9 at the Gene Siskel Film Center , with some films screened at The Wit up State Street. According to the web page, this is "how [the] festival works: 39 Films - ranging in length from a 2 minutes to 93 minutes. Each of the individual films have been curated into 15 programs. Tickets are sold by program and each program presents 1-4 films of varying lengths. Programs have a total running time of approximately 90 minutes. Most programs will be shown two times during the festival." Browsing the list of films, some of the highlights include: How much does your building weight Mr. Foster? Space Land And Time: Underground Adventures With Ant Farm Saving Lieb House Visual Acoustics My Playground Citizen Architect - Samuel Mockbee And The Spirit Of The Rural Studio Studio Gang Architects: Aqua Tower Malls R Us Eye Over Prague

Aggregations, or modular elements assembled into a whole, are fairly recent in their articulation as architectural elements. These differ from traditional modular elements like brick, in that aggregations limit one object to a means of making space; they do not combine with adjacent assemblies. I'm prompted to write about this after two projects hitting my inbox exhibited this trend, but Aranda\Lasch 's Grotto unbuilt proposal for MoMA PS1 immediately comes to mind as an earlier example, now six years old. As is the case with this AE series, I'm sure there are earlier examples of this "element," but the formation of space in this manner, with repetitive or parametric building blocks, seems to be a recent phenomenon. [Grotto by Aranda\Lasch | image source ] Grotto uses four "modular boulders" of polystyrene to create intimate spaces in the museum's courtyard. The four shapes allow the eventual form to be somewhat unpredictable -- it looks as if i...

Okay, make that FOUR launches, but that's still a lot for one place on one night. [Banners for two of the launches] On Friday, April 29 at 6pm at the Samsung Experience in Time Warner Center, Archinect , Designer Pages , Open Buildings , and Otto will be celebrating the launch of, respectively, Archinect v3.0 , an Architecture and Design Clique , the new version of Open Buildings , and the " new clique in town ." From the looks of it, this "Architecture and Design Clique" is what unites the four web pages, what Archinect is calling "an exciting new alliance." RSVP via any of the launch links above. Do it now, as I'm sure it will be crowded.

Greening Modernism: Preservation, Sustainability, and the Modern Movement by Carl Stein, published by  W. W. Norton , 2010. Hardcover, 296 pages. ( Amazon ) Towards Zero-Energy Architecture: New Solar Design by Mary Guzowski, published by  Laurence King Publishing , 2010. Hardcover, 208 pages. ( Amazon ) With the buzzwords "energy" and "sustainability" dominating any discussion on the present and the future, how these rarely defined terms are dealt with in books on architecture is increasingly important. All too often considerations of energy and sustainability in architecture are subject to "greenwashing" or a dose of hyperbole, such that buildings that do little beyond the minimum are embraced as models for our sustainable future. At a time when many believe action is needed more than thought, the opposite may be the case, so that movement forward can be theoretically grounded to best deal with dwindling resources, climate change, and t...

Erich Sattler Winery in Tadten, Austria by Architects.Collective, 2010 In the realm of architecture with a capital A wineries are a fairly recent building type. Most famous is still Herzog & de Meuron's Dominus Winery from 1997, but the ensuing years have seen a lot of " adventurous wine architecture " by Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Rafael Moneo, Glenn Murcutt, Renzo Piano, and Richard Rogers (according to the book of that name). Some of these buildings include hotels and visitors centers, testifying to the popularity of wine in tourism, now appended by some archi-tourism. These share the trait of being buildings in the landscape, some appearing to rise from the surroundings but others calling for attention with forms unimpeded by the constraints of more stringent building types. This small winery in the southeastern corner of Austria is notable for how it differs from these examples. Erich Sattler call...

LEVITTOWN | OPEN HOUSE #1 , originally uploaded by roccocell . House Dress by L.E.F.T , part of yesterday's Open House 2011 by Droog led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro , in Levittown , New York. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Here are some views of Van Alen Books at 30 West 22nd Street in New York City by LOT-EK , 2011. Tonight was an opening party (held at a bar next door) for the bookstore/event space, which opens for business on Monday. Photos are by archidose . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Reveal: Studio Gang Architects by Jeanne Gang, published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2011. Paperback, 256 pages. ( Amazon ) If I would have received this monograph, the first on Chicago's Studio Gang Architects , before posting the top ten of monographs in my library , I definitely would have included it in that list, either bumping another book out or extending it to eleven. That post was in reference to a Martin Filler opinion piece in Architectural Record, where he asked if the monograph in the vein of Le Corbusier was over, if their current state as unimaginative marketing pieces is spelling its doom in the face of web pages sharing architects' projects faster and wider than ever. My choices of post- S,M,L,XL monographs are ones that exploit the potential of books in some cases, but in all instances they offer readers something they could not find anywhere else: essays, graphic design, tactility, information, a point of view. Each monograph also finds an app...

Portugal: Arade Congress Centre , originally uploaded by McGregor Bowes . Arade Congress Centre in Algarve, Portugal by Miguel Arruda Arquitectos Associados , 2007. See more photos of the building in McGregor Bowes's flickr set . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Trying to find a book on my shelf the other day, I noticed that the logo for Princeton Architectural Press varied; it was not a static logo like the one for MIT Press . The latter was designed by Muriel Cooper in 1963 as an abstraction of four letters, M-I-T-P. It is a thoroughly modern design that can hardly be updated; it can only be ditched for another logo. PAPress, on the other hand, has a logo that refers to something physical, not language: the Parthenon (in particular, or a Greek temple in general). With this reference the logo can be updated almost constantly, keeping its architectural-ness clear in subtly different ways. [MIT Press at far left and right, with Princeton Architectural Press books in between; left to right: Intertwining by Steven Holl (1996), Aldo Rossi Drawings and Paintings (1996), Local Code by Michael Sorkin (1996), Mockbee Coker: Thought and Process (1997), Urbanisms by Steven Holl (2009).] If the above books are any indication, PAPress went fro...

" Festival of Ideas for the New City is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations working together to harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore ideas that will shape it. The Festival will include a three-day slate of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over eighty independent projects and public events." The upcoming festival (May 4-8, 2011) has a bevy of highlights -- keynote lectures by Rem Koolhaas, Jaron Lanier, and  Antanas Mockus; panel discussions on the heterogeneous city, the networked city, the reconfigured city, and the sustainable (the last is a mayoral panel) -- and projects related to it, but here I'm focusing on the StreetFest, in particular the competition-winning Tent Design that will punctuate the festival on Saturday the 7th, signaling it as something different than the usual street fair. [Image courtesy Family and Playlab; photo by De...

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than can find their way into reviews on my daily or weekly pages. 1: Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism by InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office | Princeton Architectural Press | 2011 | Amazon The 30th book in the Pamphlet Architecture series collects six infrastructural projects by InfraNet Lab ("a research collective probing the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics") and Lateral Office (founded by Lola Sheppard and Mason White in 2003). Five essays by the likes of Charles Waldheim and Keller Easterling are interspersed among the projects; gone are the days when pamphlets presented a single project by a single voice. The projects, ranging...

Here are a couple views of Renaissance Wagram Hotel in Paris, France by Atelier Christian de Portzamparc , 2009. Photos are by z.z . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

For those readers who haven't noticed the new widget on the far right side of this blog -- under "Friends" -- recently I started contributing "ideabooks" to Houzz , "the online version of cutting pages out of magazines and stuffing them in a folder." Previously I reviewed their iPad app and said it and the web page are " aimed at providing visual inspiration to homeowners looking to make fairly specific changes," such as painting a bedroom, remodeling a bathroom, or even building a house. Not surprisingly, many of the 117,000+ and growing photos (plus the even larger number of user-generated ideabooks) are geared to interiors, but with photos uploaded by architects, contractors, photographers, and other players in house design and construction, there is still plenty of architecture to find. My ideabooks naturally focus on architecture, staking out very particular themes that exploit the "browseability" of the site and the highligh...

I just realized the Jim Jennings Architecture 's Howard Street Residence in San Francisco -- completed in 2001 and published in Record Houses in 2002 -- no longer has its distinctive Cor-ten steel facade. modern exterior design by san francisco general contractor RYAN ASSOCIATES GENERAL CONTRACTORS As this Google Street View illustrates, the facade is now stainless steel, albeit the exact same design in terms of composition, perforations, and panel sizes. [967 Howard Street | image source ] As the architect asserts on his web page (the project is labeled Soma House), "the heightened grittiness of the [South of Market] neighborhood -- ceaseless graffiti -- has necessitated a complete material transformation of the facade of the 4,500 sf courtyard house. A screen of stainless-steel panels is replacing the Cor-ten steel in a move to adapt to the new urban condition rather than fight it." According to his web page, this iteration was completed in 2008. Update 0...