A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

It was 1994 when Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth started Auburn University's Rural Studio , an undergraduate design/build program in Western Alabama. Since then the participating third- and fifth-year students have designed and built innumerable houses and community projects for the residents of Hale County, Alabama, in the process becoming a model for other university design/build programs in the United States and other countries. In conjunction with Rural Studio's anniversary, photographer Timothy Hursley "fired up the Alabama silo" last Friday: [Photograph courtesy of Timothy Hursley. For more on the silo, watch " SoLost: The Beauty of a Broken Silo ."] This two-decade milestone also sees the publication of Rural Studio at Twenty , by current director Andrew Freear , Elena Barthel, Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, who penned the first two PAPress books on Rural Studio, and Hursley, who shot the studio's projects for all three books. A review of Rural St...

Earlier today I received an email from Lesétablissements Tourneux in regards to their Lieu-Dit le Temple , a wooden temple in the archeological part of Bliesbruck, France. It's an appealing construction in the vein of the folly in the landscape. It has a strong presence at night, and it begs to be climbed. But it's a far cry from their Astronef, a rocket-like construction in the castle Malbrouck à Manderen. But what at first glance looks like a goof and arbitrary piece meant to shock... ...is very carefully placed, especially when seen from a distance: And like the wooden folly, the rocket is a means of experiencing the landscape, in this case via a periscope. It's hard to see each design coming from the same studio, but each folly is playful in its own way.

Here are some photos of Marchesi Antinori Winery (2012) in Bargino, San Casciano Val di Pesa, Italy, by Archea Associati , photographed by Marco Forgione . See my previous posts on the project from 2005 , 2011 , and 2012 . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos  archidose

GSD Platform 6 edited by Rosetta Elkin, published by  Actar , 2014. Paperback, 368 pages. ( Amazon ) While every student from every architecture school probably thinks that each year they is deserving of a book that sums up the projects, lectures, exhibitions, events, seminars, publications, and other happenings, not that many schools are able to make it happen. In particular a few Ivy League schools come to mind: Columbia GSAPP's Abstract , Yale SOA's Retrospecta , and Harvard GSD's Platform (the successor to Studio Works ). The latter is especially significant given its size (nearly 400 pages), its international distribution through publisher Actar, and the amount of material inside. A prospective student would no doubt be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff happening at the Graduate School of Design as evidenced by the projects, transcripts, and personalities throughout. Harvard GSD is not unique in needing to find an adequate book structure and graphic de...

Here are some photos of New Headquarters for BBVA (2015) in Madrid, Spain, by Herzog & de Meuron , photographed by Ximo Michavila . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos  archidose

On Tuesday, April 29, the team from Davis Brody Bond will discuss the design of the 9/11 Memorial Museum at The New School. Details are below. Memory, Authenticity, Scale, Emotion: A Discussion with the Architects of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum Tuesday, April 29, 2014 at 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall Join the lead design architects of the 9/11 Memorial Museum and scholars for a discussion of designing and building this new landmark museum located beneath the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan in New York, due to open this May. Architects from Davis Brody Bond will discuss the technically challenging and emotional task of building a museum to present and preserve the history and memories of the events of 9/11 and the challenges of translating the existing geometries of the site into a series of coherent spaces punctuated by surface, texture, and volume. A panel discussion with scholars w...

I've featured Swiss artists Zimoun a couple times before , and each time I see one of their installations made with cardboard boxes, cork balls and motors, I wonder what else they are capable of. A new avenue that achieves similar effects of sound and vision through aggregation and movement can be found in an installation at Art Museum Lugano : Instead of cardboard and cork, Zimoun uses 36 ventilators and 4.7 cubic meters (166 cubic feet) of packing peanuts to create a bubbling, foamy presence in one of the museum's galleries. What's most interesting is that while previous installations used objects (cardboard boxes) to create spaces for sounds, this one fills an existing space with a medium that enables visitors to visualize the movement of air.

Here are some photos of Hamar Kulturhus (2014) in Hamar, Norway, by Tegnestuen Vandkunsten , photographed by Flemming Ibsen . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos  archidose

The Vitra Campus: Architecture – Design – Industry edited by Mateo Kries, published by  Vitra Design Museum , 2014. Paperback, 200 pages. ( Amazon ) [Cover of German edition. All images are courtesy of Vitra Design Museum.] When I traveled for a couple weeks after the completion of a semester in Italy in 1995, the first stop was in Weil am Rhein, Germany, to visit the Vitra Campus . Nowhere else in Europe could the density of contemporary architecture be found, particularly with buildings by Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, and Zaha Hadid. Remember, this was in the days before Hadid won the Pritzker and had buildings opening at the rate of something like one per month. Yes, my friends and I missed the tour of the Fire Station literally by two minutes, but the experience of Gehry's Design Museum and Ando's Conference Center was enough to make the visit worthwhile. Just shy of 20 years later I was able to return to Weil am Rhein, and in the intervening years the campus of factor...

Wanted to visit Zaha Hadid's Dongdaemun Design Plaza but don't think you'll make it to Seoul anytime soon? Then hop on over to Google Maps and browse through the building through the interior street views. Here's a smattering of the building's mainly empty, white, and curvy interiors.

It's been a while since I've been to Brooklyn Bridge Park, so a couple days ago I was surprised to see the planned berm blocking out the noise of the BQE has been constructed: Even more surprising is just how well it works. When walking on the path alongside the berm, the sound of the three stacked lanes of traffic is completely nonexistent. It's amazing. Though it's also amazing to grasp the scale of the berm at the southern end, where the noise of traffic resumes:

[ Conflict Space , 2006 – All photos of the exhibition at The Drawing Center by John Hill.] There is something appealing about cycles, about the sun rising and setting, the changing of the seasons, the earth rotating about its axis as it revolves around the sun, even the way some of the best narratives seem to come full circle on themselves. The life of Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) is a remarkable cyclical composition when seen relative to the oldest and most recent pieces in the exhibition Lebbeus Woods, Architect , opening today at The Drawing Center in SoHo. First is Einstein Tomb , which was published as Pamphlet Architecture #6 (the long out-of-print title is available at The Drawing Center as part of the exhibition) in 1980. [ Einstein Tomb , 1980] Through words and drawings Woods speaks in PA#6 about Einstein's world-changing view of the universe as "a warp of finite duration and boundary yet of infinite renewal and continuity." Woods finds the circle to be...