A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Here are a some photos of the TID Tower  in Tirana, Albania, by 51n4e . (Photographs:  Marcin Mularczyk ) To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just: :: Tag your photos  #archidose

New Swiss Architecture  edited by Nathalie Herschdorfer, texts by Maya Birke von Graevenitz, published by  Thames & Hudson , 2015. Hardcover, 304 pages. ( Amazon ) One of the perks of being an editor at World-Architects is the occasional trip to Switzerland for work. Before 2012 I had made only one trip to the country, and it wasn't much of one: six hours in Zurich to see a couple of buildings (Calatrava's Stadelhofen Station and Corbusier's Heidi Weber Museum) and zipping through Basel on the way to Vitra just over the border in Germany. But in the last few years I've managed to see a great deal of great architecture in Switzerland; primarily in Zurich, where World-Architects is based, but also in Basel and the areas between Zurich and the Italian border (driving from Zurich to Venice and back is what one yearly trip entails). About a handful of the buildings I've visited are found among the 50 excellent projects gathered in New Swiss Architecture . (Note:...

Here are a some photos of the  Made in Europe: 25 years of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award exhibition on display at the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, Poland. (Photographs: Maciek Lulko ) BIG's Danish National Maritime Museum: Norman Foster's Millau Viaduct: Snøhetta's Oslo Opera House: Barozzi / Veiga's Philharmonic Hall of Szczecin: Riegler Riewe Architekten's Silesian Museum Katowice: HS99's CINiBA/The Scientific Information Center and Academic Library in Katowice, Poland: Municipal Stadium Transport Hub in Wrocław, Poland, by Maćków Pracownia Projektowa, Zbigniew Maćków: To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just: :: Tag your photos  #archidose

I just couldn't resist posting this January 1989 episode of The Eleventh Hour , a nightly public affairs show on WNET. I was not familiar with the show, since it was a bit before my time in New York. Nevertheless I was disheartened to hear that even though the show won five Emmy Awards the year of this episode, it was cancelled in 1990 due to "a lack of long-term financial support and the need to cut costs at the station." [L, L-R: Elliot Willensky, Robert Lipstyle, Michael Sorkin, Lebbeus Woods, and "the man in the welder's mask" ( John Young? ). R, L-R: 2D-Donald Trump and Michael Sorkin] Here's the description of the episode from Madara's Videos on YouTube : "This episode of Eleventh Hour with host Robert Lipsyte was aired on WNET on Jan. 10, 1989 and looks at issues surrounding the development of the West Side railyards that would eventually become Trump Place (aka Riverside South). The first guest is Elliot Willensky, author, AIA Gu...

Here are a couple renderings Flickr user "d.teil"  has posted of DFZ Architekten's  competition-winning design for the renovation and expansion of the Gutenberg Museum Mainz , Germany. According to "d.teil," who worked on the winning design, second place went to C. Mäckler, third place to Arno Lederer, and honorable mention went to EM2N, Basel. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just: :: Tag your photos  #archidose

[Map of projects in Affordable Housing in New York] Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City Hunter East Harlem Gallery, 2180 Third Avenue (at East 119th Street) February 10 – May 15 Of the three exhibitions presented here, this is the only one (so far) that I've seen in person. Curated by Matthew Gordon Lasner from Hunter College, and Matthias Altwicker and Nicholas Dagen Bloom from NYIT, Affordable Housing in New York  (AHNY) opened a few days after the similar-sounding but unrelated exhibition  Affordable New York  closed at the nearby Museum of the City of New York. I missed that exhibition, which was curated by Thomas Mellins, but according to Untapped Cities , "it aims to situate New York City as a pioneering force behind the affordable housing movement," and it "also emphasizes the range of people that are served by the various initiatives here." In this regard, there is a good deal of overlap (as wel...

Here are some photos of TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (2008) in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, by Herzog & de Meuron (photographs by Wojtek Gurak ). To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just: :: Tag your photos  #archidose

On the way to work this morning I popped into a thrift store near my office and just couldn't resist plopping down .99¢ +tax on an old issue of Architectural Digest – if for no other reason than as fodder for a blog post. This  "AD100 Architects"  issue came out in August 1991, which happened to be the exact month I started undergraduate architecture school, but more importantly was a time when Postmodernism was still influential – if rapidly waning in the face of Deconstructivism and other -isms. I took the issue to lunch and snapped a few shots inside (pardon the poor quality lighting). So here are a dozen highlights of the good, the bad, and the ugly (I'll let readers decide which is which) from the pages of the AD100 presented in alphabetical order. Ricardo Bofill's home for his parents near the Costa Brava, Spain: House in Colorado designed by Theodore Brown and built with logs, concrete and Cor-Ten steel: Pool and garden Richard England designed...

Binational Urbanism: On the Road to Paradise by Bernd Upmeyer, published by Valiz/Trancity, 2015. Paperback, 224 pages. ( Amazon ) Reviewed by Matas Šiupšinskas Split Identities Mass migration is not a modern phenomenon. From crusades to slave trade, people have been displaced or have been displacing themselves in order to reach new territories of opportunity. Even if migration has recently become a huge problem and is seen only negatively, some voices express different kinds of opinion. In a contemporary global economy migration does not always end up with permanent displacement, and because of that it becomes possible to look into migrants differently. So what kind of new perspective opens up by this twist of perception? Bernd Upmeyer argues that in the recent decades a new phenomenon appeared: binational urbanism. A binational urbanist is constantly living between two different cultures and two different sets of urban landscapes. He is not a migrant, but an ultimat...