A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Posts will resume the first week of January.

To wrap up this calendar year, I'm doing a week of posts that look back at other posts during 2016. This last one lists my six (five was too difficult) favorite books that I reviewed or "briefed" in 2016. Note that while these books were featured on my blog this year, they weren't necessarily published in 2016. Adjaye Africa Architecture by David Adjaye, edited by Peter Allison Aldo van Eyck: Seventeen Playgrounds by Anna van Lingen, Denisa Kollarova Austere Gardens: Thoughts on Landscape, Restraint, & Attending by Marc Treib A Field Guide to American Houses, The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture by Virginia Savage McAlester Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston by Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, Chris Grimley Manual of Section by Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, David J. Lewis

To wrap up this calendar year, I'm doing a week of posts that look back at other posts during 2016. Here are the five best exhibitions (all, it happens, in New York City) that I saw and wrote about in 2016. GARDEN CITY | MEGA CITY  at the Skyscraper Museum Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie  at the National Academy Museum A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond  at the Museum of Modern Art Manus x Machina   at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (exhibition design by OMA) Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design  at the Jewish Museum (exhibition design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro)

Two days after Xmas architect Eero Saarinen is getting the American Masters  treatment, when PBS premieres Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future . If Wikipedia is accurate, this is the sixth time the series has profiled an architect; he follows episodes on  Charles and Ray Eames  (2011),  R. Buckminster Fuller  (1996), Frank Gehry (2006), Philip Johnson (2003), and I.M. Pei (2010). With such masterpieces as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the TWA Terminal in New York, and Dulles Airport in DC from his short career (he died in 1961 at the age of 51), Eero Saarinen is definitely worthy of being added to the show's small number of architects. A trailer for the documentary: I got a peek at the one-hour documentary and would definitely recommend it, particularly for those who only have a rudimentary understanding of Saarinen's life and buildings. Even for those well versed in Saarinen, The Architect Who Saw the Future  has a number of surprises...

To wrap up this calendar year, I'm doing a week of posts that look back at other posts during 2016. Here are the five most visited posts at the World-Architects Daily News , where I'm editor in chief. 'XXX' in Times Square Tower with Photovoltaic Facade Wins Building of the Year Remembering Hadid Through Her Paintings Zumthor Selected for Beyeler Expansion Alejandro Aravena and the Future of the Pritzker Prize

To wrap up this calendar year, I'm doing a week of posts that look back at other posts during 2016. Here are the five most visited "Today's archidose" posts. Click the links to see more photos of each project and for photographer credits. #912, Casa Borgo by Carlo Scarpa : #916, Vienna DC Towers by Dominique Perrault Architecture : #914, James Corner Field Operations' ICEBERGS installation at the National Building Museum : #909, Hal Ingberg Architecte's Chromazone installation inside the New Cultural Centre in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce : #926, Drieburcht Multi Sport by VenhoevenCS architecture+urbanism, with drawings by Jean-Luc Moerman :

To wrap up this calendar year, I'm doing a week of posts that look back at other posts. To start, here are the five most visited posts in 2016. My 18 Favorite Instagrammers - June 18 - 6,065 clicks Apple's Big Curved Glass - March 11 - 5,383 clicks 10 Homes that Changed America - April 6 - 5,105 clicks 10 Towns that Changed America - April 22 - 4,922 clicks Architects Choosing Biz Cards? - September 6 - 4,419 clicks

Here are some photos of the Peanuts Hut (2016) at the Setouchi Triennale 2016 in Shodoshima, Japan, by Nagisa Kidosaki Semminer. (Photographed by Ken Lee ) 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

Yesterday, in preparation for a new walking tour I'll be giving in the spring, I stopped by the Galleria, a residential tower from the 1970s on East 57th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues. Specifically I went to see the thru-block POPS (Privately Owned Public Space) that Jerold Kayden describes in his 2000 guide to POPS as "easy to miss" yet "subdued." Here is a plan of the enclosed space, which spans from 57th Street to 58th Street, taken from the APOPS website : I was coming from the 59th/Lexington subway stop, so I accessed the Galleria from 58th Street on the north. In either case, the POPS is reached by walking down some steps, a fact that creates some vistas across the zigzag space when seen from the entrance doors. The 57th Street side is more open (photo at left, below), while the 58th Street side is blocked by a couple bridges lined in wood (photo at right, below). The red-tile pattern in the floor is a consistent motif that draws one to...

Here are some photos of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza | Fundación Francisco Giner de los Ríos (2014) in Madrid, Spain, by AMID.cero9 . (Photographed by Ximo Michavila ) 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

The Difficult Whole: A Reference Book on the Work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown edited by Kersten Geers, Jelena Pančevac and Andrea Zanderigo, published by  Park Books , 2016. Hardcover, 208 pages. ( Amazon ) "The Difficult Whole" of this book's title refers to chapter ten in Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. In the chapter, titled "The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole," Venturi writes: "The difficult whole in an architecture of complexity and contradiction includes multiplicity and diversity of elements in relationships that are inconsistent or among the weaker kinds perceptually." Although this is an intricate statement that requires a chapter to explain, it's clear that Venturi's focus, as in the rest of the classic book, is on architectural form. In this book published by Park Books in cooperation with FORM Laboratory for Architecture as ...

MONU #25 - Independent Urbanism Magazine on Urbanism , October 2016 Reviewed by Mindaugas Reklaitis [All images courtesy of Bernd Upmeyer/MONU] Sociologist Wendy Griswold wrote in her book Cultures and Societies in a Changing World that "the social world always changes first, with culture lagging behind." This phrase highly impressed me and I started to collect pieces of evidence to prove or reject this idea personally. And while I was reading MONU's most recent issue, #25 on Independent Urbanism , Wendy’s insight was following me in every single page, treating urban environment as an expression of collective culture. Independent Urbanism focuses on countries that recently established or regained their independence, and analyses what consequences this huge social transformation brought to their cities and urban environment. In the wide geography of the case studies, starting with the Baltic countries, former Yugoslavia region and finishing with Taiwan, you ca...

Here are photos of two public toilets in Shodoshima, Japan, each photographed by Ken Lee . Hideyuki Nakayama Architecture , 2016: Tato Architects , 2013: 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