A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Here are some photos of the Bowfell House in Windermere, Cumbria, England by Hubbard Architecture (2011). Photographs are by Wojtek Gurak . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

On May 22 the Tokyo Skytree Tower opened, providing access to its observation decks. It is the second-tallest structure in the world, behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. But what I want to know is... [Tokyo Skytree Tower Elevation | image stitched by archidose from this source ] Who designed it? Nikken Sekkei is credited as architect at  WAN and Wikipedia . But I recall early reports that Tadao Ando was responsible for the design. Of course, both could be correct, and Nikken Sekkei could be the executive architect, having executed Ando's design. But the news swirling around the opening of the "world's tallest free-standing broadcasting tower" omits any mention of Ando. Personally I have a hard time seeing Ando anywhere in the design, even if the steel lattice-like structure of the bottom half is pretty elegant; the top half is pretty clunky, the result of broadcasting functionalism over design, and observation decks designed like control towers rather than int...

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Crisis by Letizia Modena, published by  Routledge , 2011. Hardcover, 284 pages. ( Amazon ) Like many architects, I first encountered Italo Calvino's 1972 book Invisible Cities in undergraduate architecture school. Not surprisingly, it was assigned reading for a semester spent in Italy, alongside titles like Aldo Rossi's A Scientific Autobiography that can be said to be more architecturally relevant. Calvino's book is a fictional discussion between emperor Kubla Khan and Venetian traveler Marco Polo, in which the latter describes 55 cities that he has apparently visited within the former's domain. The cities -- falling into categories like "cities and memory", "thin cities", and "hidden cities" -- are highly fantastical, defying logic, sometimes gravity, and the "rules" that determined traditional cities. One conclusion determines...

Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center in Brooklyn, New York, NY by WEISS/MANFREDI, 2012 On  May 16 the Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened its new Visitor Center designed by New York City's WEISS/MANFREDI ; a week later I made a visit. Located on Washington Avenue, the northeastern corner of the garden and Prospect Park, of which BBG occupies a triangular section, the Visitor Center comes two years after BBG turned 100 years old. The building is a fitting addition to the garden as BBG advances in its second century; it is a good precedent for building sustainably and for merging building and landscape. Serving as the main entrance to BBG, the Visitor Center bridges the city and the garden. The Washington Avenue side is defined by a concrete wall (photo at left) and a plaza (right photo); the former is capped by a folded roof and clerestory windows, while the latter funnels visitors towards a gap in the building and the garden beyond. The movement through and along the...

Back in the summer of 2009, when it was reported that Chicago's Prairie Avenue Bookshop would close its doors , I held on to the notion that somebody might save the architecture bookstore, or at least the books. While I anticipated a savior would keep the consumer format, what eventually happened is more remarkable. Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates acquired 14,000 volumes from Prairie Avenue's owners in the fall of 2009, a couple months after the store closed, subsequently moving the books into a renovated residence on South Dorchester Avenue (top photo) as part of a public archive . [All images are stills from "What does it mean for us to be generous with one another?" with Theaster Gates | image source ] The Dorchester Project, as Gates calls it, encompasses more than the Prairie Avenue Bookshop Archive (below photos); it also contains 60,000 glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago's art history department and 10,000 LPs from Dr. Wax, a recor...

Here are a couple photos of the Parque del Cabo in Gijón, Spain by Ángel Noriega Vázquez, 1997. Photographs are by Paul Prudence . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

"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. This ninth edition of Book Briefs looks at Princeton Architectural Press 's "Architecture Briefs," a successful series "designed to address a variety of single topics of interest to architecture students and professionals." Previously I've reviewed or featured  Building Envelopes by Jenny Lovell, Writing About Architecture by Alexandra Lange, Model Making by Megan Werner, and Ethics for Architects by Thomas Fisher; a review of the latest, Urban Composition: Designing Community through Urban Design by Mark C. Childs, is forthcoming. The four series' titles below have been released in roughly the last twel...

[Looking southwest across Prince and Greene Streets | All photos by John Hill] On Tuesday evening, Camper unveiled its new Shigeru Ban -designed store on the corner of Prince and Greene Streets in Soho. The store maintains the existing stone exterior walls, enlarges the openings between columns, presents a new interior, and caps it all with a pitched roof made from the Japanese architect's signature cardboard tubes. It's alternately whimsical and serious, designed to surprise people in a number of ways. [Looking west] A glance at Google Street View reveals the existing condition: a one-story PoMo building located on the southwest corner of the intersection (catercorner to the Apple Store Soho) next to a party wall mural that echoes the area's cast iron architecture. The new roof gives the building a stronger presence than before, partly from the jarring contrast between the cardboard tubes and the surroundings. Note the inside of the store between the stone column...

Here are some photos of the Eye Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam, The Netherlands by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects , 2012. 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

Recently I watched documentaries on a couple architects -- Costas Kondylis and John Portman -- whom I'd least expect to receive the treatment. Which begged the question, "Why?" Perhaps the answer lies in "How?" So in lieu of straightforward reviews of each film, below is a side-by-side comparison (actually a top-bottom one, given Blogger's limited formatting capabilities) of Building Stories and  John Portman: A Life of Building . Running Time: Kondylis: 58 minutes Portman: 52 minutes Director: Kondylis: Toni Comas Portman: Ben Loeterman Writer: Kondylis: Stuart Elliott Portman: Ben Loeterman Interview footage with architect: Kondylis: No, but actor portrayal in one scene; some audio and footage of architect looking at his buildings Portman: Yes, footage of interviews as well as candid meetings, lectures, etc. Predominant type of building photography: Kondylis: Looking up, tilting; some time-lapse Portman: Lots of time-lapse Samp...

[All photos by John Hill] Thanks to the AIA, Doug Aitken's Song 1 installation on the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. was extended to May 20 for conventioneers and others interested in the filmic facade.The multimedia piece is similar to, but more architecturally engaging than his 2007 Sleepwalkers at MoMA . The song of the title is " I Only Have Eyes for You ," a doo-wop number written in 1934. The song gets stuck in the head, even though Aitken cuts the song up across the installation's 35 minutes, morphing it with electronic music, ambient noise, and other sounds. The piece is as much an aural accomplishment as a visual one. Photos from my visit are below, and at bottom is a clip of Song 1 made by the artist.

The first issue of the World-Architects eMagazine last month featured an installation at Rice University Art Gallery: reverse of volume RG by Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi. The striking images of the landscape in plastic and black hot glue are now accompanied by the below video from Rice Gallery. It's great to see the installation take shape -- from cardboard boxes and cherry pickers to an ethereal and minimal space.

I'm off to Washington, D.C. for the AIA Convention , so posts will resume early next week, and my weekly page will be on hiatus until the Tuesday after Memorial Day.

The deadline for NYIT's sLAB Costa Rica Kickster campaign , a project I featured previously , is six days away (May 21). As I type this they are ~$7,500 short of their new goal of $24,000. Below is a video about the project, which will result in students from NYIT helping to build a recycling facility they designed for Nosara, Costa Rica.

Fondation Vuitton , originally uploaded by JP2H . Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris France by Frank Gehry (expected completion 2014). Per the Fondation's website: Like a floating ship in the trees; wide opened to nature, the building imagined by Frank Gehry expresses the spirit of the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création, ever in state of becoming. It was conceived to be continuously reinvented with the passage of exhibitions and events. In exquisite harmony with the environment, its interior and exterior spaces breathe as one. *I inadvertently skipped a number in my last posting, hence the backtrack with today's archidose. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Here are reviews of three journals/magazines that I've received recently; a couple that I'm familiar with and one that is completely new to me. Boundaries #3 : A few months ago I looked at the first two issues of Boundaries , a magazine out of Italy that develops a theme for each issue. "Contemporary Architecture in Africa" and "Architectures for Emergencies" are followed by "Architectures of Peace." It's clear where the focus of Boundaries lies: it's the humanitarian and under-served in the realm of architecture. Editor Luca Sampò is obviously not alone in this regard, as more organizations and firms dedicate themselves to architecture and design for the 99%, if you will. Regardless, in an issue like "Architecture of Peace" one can still find projects by Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind, and Moshe Safdie, alongside lesser-known names like TYIN tegnestue Architects, Febrik, and Killian Doherty. In this regard it ...

Mini-Studio in Mexico City, Mexico by FRENTEarquitectura, 2011 Behind a house in a middle-income section of Mexico City sat a storage shed, surrounded on three side by neighboring buildings. Into this gap FRENTEarquitectura inserted an art studio of only 27 square meters (290 square feet). The petite intervention appears jewel-like in its setting, a faceted object new and white. Given that the building is intended as an art studio, minimizing direct sunlight is of the utmost importance. This consideration is aggravated by the fact that the studio faces the yard to the south. Therefore FRENTEarquitectura cantilevered the upper floor of the two-story volume, allowing the projection to shade the ground-floor space. Further, a skylight created by the folds of the roof channels northern light into the space. Using trapezoidal shapes and with a careful control of perspective, vanishing points are emphasized, achieving a dynamic and fluid space that awakens imagination while s...