A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

It was back in 2000 when I learned about Kowloon Walled City (via MVRDV's FARMAX ), and my interest in the vertical slum, as it's been called, was great enough that I wrote a piece about it for a friend's website that summer. Most of the photographs I used were pilfered from Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's definitive account of the late KWC, City of Darkness . In the meantime I've discovered a number of books on KWC ( most Japanese , for some reason), but none of them come close to the duo's book in terms of capturing the impressive physical form of the place but also the lives of the people that called the place home (a focus on the former over the latter is the source of much criticism over KWC's ongoing popularity with architects). I'm delighted to learn that Girard and Lambot are updating their "book of record" on KWC. Per their Kickstarter page , where they are trying to raise £50,000 toward the update, "City of Darkness Revisited...

Here are some photos of the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastián, Spain, by VAUMM (2011), photographed by Ximo Michavila . Back in 2012 I featured photos of the building's exterior and balconies , so the below photos focus on the interior. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos  archidose

Today would be Mies van der Rohe's 128th birthday . This year Google did not opt to "celebrate" it with a doodle, but they did so two years ago : I probably wouldn't have taken notice of this anniversary either, except for two recent projects – one built, one a competition – that both reference Mies in different ways. First is the Allianz Headquarters designed by Wiel Arets and just completed in Zürich: Per the website of the architect who happens to now head the Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology: "This new district’s master plan mandated that all building façades be composed of natural stone, yet it was chosen to frit this building’s full glass façade with an abstracted pattern of Onyx marble– from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion ." (my emphasis) The second project is OMA's winning design for the Axel Springer media center in Berlin. Announced on the firm's website today , the design that bested former OMA employees Bj...

Not many graphic novels treat buildings and cities as an integral part of their stories, so I'm intrigued by War of Streets and Houses , a new graphic memoir from cartoonist and author Sophie Yanow. [All images via Uncivilized Books ] Text from the publisher : The War of Streets and Houses is named after General Thomas Bugeaud's 19th century essay; the first manual for the preparation and conduct of urban warfare. The text greatly influenced Baron Haussmann’s famous re-development of Paris, and the planning of modern cities. In 2012 the author participated in the massive Montreal student strikes. In the midst of protesting crowds and police kettles, the military origins of urban planning suddenly became an undeniable reality. Sophie Yanow’s most ambitious work to date deftly melds the history of urban planning, theories of control with personal experiences of political activism. (via Atlantic Cities ) Available at

A couple years ago I attended the 2012 Facades Conference in New York City, what turned out to be a jam-packed day of design, technology and engineering focused on, naturally, facades. The 2014 conference, Facades+ Performance , takes place April 24 and 25 – the symposium on the 24th takes place in the CUNY Graduate Center's Proshansky Auditorium, and the workshops on the 25th are held at the Pratt Manhattan Campus. Click the image below for more information and to register for the event.

Here are some photos of the HBKU Student Center (2011) in Doha, Qatar, by Legorreta + Legorreta , photographed by Asli Aydin . Central patio designed with Jan Hendrix . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos  archidose

Shigeru Ban is the 2014 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize . Here's what I wrote at World-Architects on the award that was announced one hour ago: Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has been selected as the 2014 Laureate of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. In a statement on the Pritzker Prize website , the award recognizes the architect's "elegant, innovative work for private clients" as well as the "resourceful design approach for his extensive humanitarian efforts." Both poles of Shigeru Ban's oeuvre are evident in two projects completed last year: Tamedia Office Building in Zürich and the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand. The former utilizes an innovative timber structure to create a pleasing office environment, while the latter serves as a temporary cathedral following the 2011 earthquake that damaged the Christchurch Cathedral. The official 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony will take place a...

Over spring break I gave my first-year students an assignment to make a collage as part of a precedent study. If I had known about Jennifer A.E. Shields's Collage and Architecture , published in paperback last month by Routledge, I certainly would have used it to give them a little bit more guidance. Half the book, after all, is devoted to "collage methodologies in architectural analysis and design." The second half, in case you're wondering, includes six case studies, from Le Corbusier to Weiss/Manfredi, of "architecture as collage." Text from the publisher : Collage and Architecture is the first book to cover collage as a tool for design in architecture, making it a valuable resource for students and practitioners. Author Jennifer Shields uses the artworks and built projects of leading artists and architects, such as Le Corbusier, Daniel Libeskind, and Teddy Cruz to illustrate the diversity of collage techniques. The six case study projects from Mex...

Materials for Design 2 by Victoria Ballard Bell and Patrick Rand, published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2014. Paperback, 272 pages. ( Amazon ) Materials for Design was one of my favorite books I reviewed in 2007 (the book was published in 2006). In it, sixty case studies in five chapters (glass, concrete, wood, metals, and plastics) aim at strengthening the integral relationship between materials and design for students of architecture. The sequel, again penned by Bell and Rand, takes basically the same approach, adding masonry as a sixth chapter, but otherwise staying with the same format (and even the same tally of projects) that made the first book so good, all the while improving upon the few deficiencies of the first book (for me, that was mainly the inconsistent nature of the detail drawings). The focus is still on educating students (some of the content came actually from a graduate seminar Rand taught at NC State University), but this time there is an a...

LC FOTO: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer by Tim Benton, published by  Lars Müller Publishers , 2013. Hardcover, 416 pages. ( Amazon ) Le Corbusier is easily one of the top three most written about modern architects, up there with Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. A search for "Le Corbusier" in Amazon's books section yields 7,070 titles; if we safely say 10-120% of those books are by or about the Swiss/French architect, that's still around 1,000 titles (not to mention the additional titles that refer to him as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret rather than his pseudonym). Narrowing down the search by year, about 50 titles on or related to Le Corbusier came out last year, including this title by Tim Benton. What these numbers show is that any new publication on the architect must find a niche that has not been explored ad nauseam . Le Corbusier Redrawn and Cosmos of Light , two titles I reviewed last year, are cases in point; as is Benton's extremely detailed...

Here are some photos of the EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE – Mies van der Rohe Award 1988–2013 exhibition at DAM in Frankfurt, Germany, photographed by Frank Dinger . D10 House by Werner Sobek: Haus am Weinberg, Stuttgart, by UNStudio: Barcelona Pavilion by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Centre for Virtual Engineering ZVE by UNStudio: Norwegian Wild Reindeer Pavilion by Snøhetta: Metropol Parasol by J. Mayer H.: Dune House by Jarmund / Vignaes Architects: Strasbourg Hoenheim Tram Station by Zaha Hadid: Bibliotheque Nationale de France by Dominique Perrault: 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. 1: Kerb 21 edited by Dion Gery, William Kennedy, Harriet Robertson, Bella Leber Smeaton | Melbourne Books | 2013 The first legal-to-drink issue of RMIT's Journal of Landscape Architecture is themed "Uncharted Territories." The editors explain that these "manifest in an uncertain future," and therefore the contributors are those who "have the capacity to charter these territories and operate within them." They even map the 23 contributors within a landscape-like surface (akin to the cover) that moves from "essence of discipline" to "proliferation of knowledge" in the x-direction and from ...