A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Things have been slow on this blog as of late, so now I'm making it official by going on summer break. Posts will resume the second week of August.

Here are some photos of James Corner Field Operations' ICEBERGS  installation now on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. (Photos:  Mark Andre ) 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

At lunch today I rode my bike over to Socrates Sculpture Park to check out Sticks , the 2016 Architectural League Folly. Designed by Hou de Sousa in a competition earlier this year, the folly departs from previous ones, such as 2014's SuralArk , in that it is functional: it is the venue for Socrates Sculpture Park’s Education Studio, which reportedly hosts over 10,000 students annually. According to the League , " Sticks utilizes preexisting park resources, including scrap materials stored on site, which will be incorporated into the structural grid of the walls and roof. The architects re-use existing resources to build Sticks is central to the sustainable mission of Socrates Sculpture Park." If you go visit Sticks , be sure to also check out Meg Webster's Concave Room for Bees , on display as part of Socrates Sculpture Park's 30th anniversary LANDMARK exhibition.

"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. Design/Build with Jersey Devil: A Handbook for Education and Practice  by Charlie Hailey | Princeton Architectural Press | 2016 |  Amazon On this blog I've reviewed books from Princeton Architectural Press's "Architecture Briefs" series numerous times, including a Book Brief devoted to four of the titles back in 2012. It's good to see the series still going, especially when other series (PAPress or otherwise) appear but then fade away just as quickly. Their Architecture Briefs are targeted primarily to students and young architects, so it makes sense to have one devoted to design/build. Instead of Rural Studio, which has...

MONU #24: Domestic Urbanism Magazine on Urbanism , April 2016 Reviewed by Colin Billings [Cover of issue 24 | All images courtesy of MONU] This, the 24th issue of MONU , is dedicated to "Domestic Urbanism," arguably the root urbanism of the city as a coherent human settlement. It prominently features interviews by MONU editor Bernd Upmeyer with Andres Jaque and Herman Hertzberger – one of the most important and vocal humanizing figures in architecture – along with 17 other contributions from brilliant emerging practitioners and critics. Shot from the perspective of urbanism, MONU #24 exquisitely illustrates the tensions between architecture and its building. The cover artwork by STAR strategies + architecture illustrates the sacred, intricate meshworks of our inner dramas brutally cemented together by the thinnest, most minimal of buildings. Many of the contributions delve into the poetics, profound political aesthetics, or advanced experimentation with the domi...

Monsieur Nouvel, what you have you done with your hair? [Screenshot from Getty Images when searching for a photo of Alvaro Siza's Leca Swimming Pool] Click here to see what Jean Nouvel normally looks like.

More news on my new book to follow soon...

Here are some photos of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy & International Affairs (2014) in Beirut, Lebanon, by Zaha Hadid Architects. (Photos: Trevor Patt ) 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

Make Architecture Books Again is a three-weeks-old, anonymous Instagram feed that is billed as "a daily excuse to vent the stacks." Photos are posted in threes to take advantage of the Instagram grid by showing the cover, an inside spread, and a detail from one book. Here are some examples from what definitely would have made my list of 18 favorite Instagrammers if I would have known about it at the time.

Here are some photos of a lesser known Scarpa building: Casa Borgo (1974) in Vicenza, Italy. (Photos:  August Fischer ) 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

Last week Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects was selected , with local architecture firm IDEA, to design the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) on Chicago's South Side. The project will be located in either Jackson Park or Washington Park on either side of the University of Chicago, near where Barack and Michelle Obama lived before departing for the White House. Once built, the OPC will house Obama's Presidential Library as well as other programmatic elements that will entail taking fairly large chunks of existing parkland. While the choice of Tod and Billie has been positively embraced by many people in regards to their quiet and thoughtful designs, the biggest question is still site selection and how the architects will handle it. From what I've seen of their work, I'm confident they can pull off something many people will appreciate for years to come. [Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago | All photos by John Hill, unless noted otherwise] The most geographically im...

Here are some photos of the new building of the Kunstmuseum Basel (2016) in Basel, Switzerland, by Christ & Gantenbein . (Photos: Frank Dinger ) These photos are primarily interior, so visit World-Architects for more information  on the animated Light Frieze that wraps the building's brick exterior. 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