A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

MCHAP Book One: The Americas edited by Fabrizio Gallanti, published by IITAC Press/ Actar , 2016. Hardcover, 444 pages. ( Amazon ) In October 2014 the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)  announced the winners  of the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), with Álvaro Siza's Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, winning for 2000-2008 and Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, Florida, winning for 2009-2013. By the time this book documenting the prize and its seven finalists came out last year, the winner of the 2014-15 MCHAP was already announced : SANAA's Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut. MCHAP recognizes the best building realized in the previous two-year period (minus the inaugural) in North and South America, such that it functions like an Americas equivalent of the EU Prize – Mies Award . Even though it documents the winners and finalists, this book isn't really about them. This is clear from the intr...

Today is I.M. Pei's 100th birthday, so I've rummaged through the archidose Flickr pool to find a sampling of some of his buildings, listed in chronological order. Mouse over and/or click on images for photographer information. Jefferson Hall Conference Center, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 1963: University Village, New York University, New York, 1966: Sculpture Wing of the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, 1968: Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, Columbus, Indiana, 1969: East Building, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1978: John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, 1979: Le Grande Louvre, Paris, 1989: The same, photographed in 2016 when street artist JR made Pei's glass pyramid "disappear": Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong, 1990: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, 1995: Miho Museum, Shiga, Japan, 1997: Extension to the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, 2003: MUDAM-Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg,...

Here are some photos of La Seine Musicale (2017) in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, by Shigeru Ban Architects and Jean de Gastines Architectes . (Photographs:  JP2H ) 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

Renzo Piano: The Complete Logbook by Renzo Piano, published by  Thames and Hudson , 2017. Hardcover, 420 pages. ( Amazon ) This Building Likes Me: The Work of John Wardle Architects by John Wardle Architects, published by  Thames and Hudson , 2016. Hardcover, 440 pages. ( Amazon ) The cover of the updated version of Renzo Piano's Logbook  is appropriate, since the architect's sketches are as singular and distinctive as his buildings. Although I'm not certain which project the sketch represents, the inclusion of a sailing boat says as much about Piano as the building's waterfront site. Among the more than 70 projects included in the Logbook  are the sailing boats Piano designed from 1960 to 2007. A reflection of his love of sailing, the boats were also a means of testing out materials and ideas that would be applied to buildings. It would be hard to have an office sited on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean (photo below) and not  carry on ...

Today is World Book Day, or what is officially known as World Book and Copyright Day , started in 1995 by UNESCO. Although there doesn't appear too much in the way of celebrating this day – unlike, understandably so, yesterday's Earth Day – I figured I'd share a photo of the books I've been reading this weekend, all related to New York City; specifically, they are focused on the areas of my architectural walking tours this season: the High Line, Columbia University, and 57th Street.

I've been infatuated with POPS (privately owned public spaces) since at least early 2008, when I read and reviewed Kristine F. Miller's Designs on the Public . One chapter in her book is all about three adjacent, contemporaneous POPS from around 1983: the AT&T Building (Sony Tower), the IBM Building (590 Madison Avenue), and Trump Tower, the last of which has four such spaces (a covered pedestrian space, a passageway to 590 Madison, and two landscaped terraces. Other POPS posts on this blog looked at 100 William Street and  33 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan and The Galleria on 57th Street. A POPS is, per the great APOPS website , "a plaza, arcade, or other outdoor or indoor space provided for public use by a private office or residential building owner in return for a zoning concession." Or as the office of NYC Comptroller Scott M. Stringer puts it in their audit that was released a couple days ago, "Currently property owners are benefiting financially ...

[Editions of Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History in multiple languages | Image via CCA ] The Canadian Centre for Architecture has just posted a video of a conversation held at the CCA on April 6: "A Conversation with Kenneth Frampton: Can There Be a Global History Today?"  The event consisted of a roughly half-hour talk by Frampton, followed by talks by Cornell's  Esra Akcan and MIT's Mark Jarzombek , and then a roundtable discussion with the trio moderated by the CCA's Kim Förster. Frampton's talk is from the beginning to the 36:45 mark, while the discussion starts at 1:22:22. As the top image from the CCA's page for the event shows, Frampton is still best known for his Modern Architecture: A Critical History , which was first published in 1980, has been updated three times since and, according to his comments, will be updated one more time. But when it came time for me to write my own (lite) version of a global architecture...

According to the drone footage embedded at the bottom of this post, Apple Park is the official name for the company's 175-acre headquarters in Cupertino, California, what was previously referred to as Apple Campus 2.0 and "The Spaceship." The last time I posted about Norman Foster's design was about a year ago , in regards to the 10-1/2-foot-tall by 46-foot-long panels of curved glass, a huge engineering feat. At that time there were also reports about "two glass doors that span four stories high," but no images. The latest drone footage reveals what appears to be those doors, found at the 2:30 mark in the below video: The April 2017 drone footage of Apple Park:

Here are some photos of Chi She (2016) in Shanghai, China, by Archi-Union Architects , featuring a robotic-built brick wall by Fab-Union Intelligent Engineering. (Photographs:  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

The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment  by Jesse LeCavalier, published by  University of Minnesota Press , 2016. Paperback, 282 pages. ( Amazon ) Think about Walmart and most likely architecture does not spring to mind. The company Sam Walton started in Arkansas in the 1960s became the world's largest retailer by erecting inexpensive and efficient boxes to store and display good sold cheaper than anybody else, not by championing attention-getting architecture. Nevertheless, their Walmart stores, Supercenters, and Sam's Clubs are instantly recognizable, and their interiors incorporate research on the benefits of natural light and other environmental factors toward getting customers to open up their pocketbooks. In other words, Walmart is well aware of the importance of architecture; it's just executed in a manner quite distinct from capital-A architecture. One aspect of Walmart's physical reality is logistics, which appears to have been ...

Here are some photos of the Building 27E Marine Base in Amsterdam by bureau SLA . (Photographs: 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