A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

100 Buildings  by Thom Mayne and Eui-Sung Yi, produced by The Now Institute, published by  Rizzoli , 2017. Flexicover, 262 pages. ( Amazon ) When visiting the page for 100 Buildings  on Amazon today, the "What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?" section lists one book: mine . This isn't surprising, given that both have "100 Buildings" in their title and have been published in the last couple years. But like many architecture books that share some similarities, the differences are also interesting. 100 Years, 100 Buildings  features one building per year for the last 100 years (1916-2015), while 100 Buildings  limits itself to the 20th century. My book is a fairly subjective sampling of visitable buildings spanning a whole century, given the year-by-year format, while the "must know" buildings in the book by Thom Mayne and  Eui-Sung Yi are free from such constraints, as long as they were designed and/or completed somewhere betwe...

Here are some photos of  Bishan–Ang Mo Kio Park  (2012) in Singapore by Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl . (Photos:  Trevor Patt , who has more shots of the park in this Flickr set .) 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

One of the buildings I went out of my way to visit on a recent trip to Berlin was Dominique Perrault's Velodrome and Swimming Pool, a project I wrote about way back in 2000 , one year after the project was completed and seventeen years before I'd see it in person. Each of the main elements is given a regular shape – pool is a rectangle and velodrome is a circle – that is set into the landscape. [Aerial view nabbed from Perrault's website] In the text on Perrault's website , written by Sebastian Redecke, "[the] sports buildings are unique in the city if for no other reason than that they are largely underground." This impression held true as I approached the buildings from the east, from the bottom corner in the aerial above – what turned out, unknowlingly, to be a backdoor. Basically I was approaching via the automobile access, which is logically located alongside the railroad tracks. From there I went left and walked up some stairs to the eastern edg...

Last week I was in Berlin covering the World Architecture Festival (WAF) for World-Architects . I had a little bit of free time to venture about the city, snapping photos of the below buildings. The biggest highlight was the Nordic Embassies, a complex I wanted to visit last year but only found a book on the design by Berger+Parkkinen instead (more of my photos  here ): On the way to the S-Bahn from the Nordic Embassies, I came across the Bauhaus-Archiv , designed by Walter Gropius in 1964 but not completed until 1979 by Gropius’s former employee Alex Cvijanovic: Another highlight was the Tchoban Foundation's Museum for Architectural Drawing , designed by Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov (more of my photos here ): A major disappointment was Dominique Perrault's Velodrome and Swimming Pool, which I wrote about back in 2000 and will write about again very soon (more of my photos here ): Lastly, walking back to the hotel from the Velodrome and Pool I came across...

Posts on this blog will resume next week. In the meantime, head to World-Architects to see my posts on the World Architecture Festival taking place this week at Arena Berlin.

Harry Seidler: The Exhibition: Organizing, Curating, Designing, and Producing a World Tour by Vladimir Belogolovsky Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers , 2017 Hardcover w/slipcase, 272 pages ( Amazon ) Harry Seidler: Painting Toward Architecture  curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY September 26 - November 22, 2017 Just as Vladimir Belogolovsky recounts a few times in Harry Seidler: The Exhibition that he learned about architect Harry Seidler (1923-2006) in 2010 from Emilio Ambasz, I first became aware of Seidler at a precise time. Although I don't recall the exact year, I was working on a proposal for a residential tower while employed at an architecture firm in Chicago. Faced with the need to do something creative with balconies, I stumbled upon the high rises Seidler had designed in Sydney. His work was a powerful precedent, since it was simultaneously logical and sensual, repetitive and flowing. This is evident in such proj...

On Friday Art in the Open: Fifty Years of Public Art in New York opens at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). On display until May 13, 2018, the small but visually dense exhibition (designed by Tsao & McKown) covers notable displays of public art in New York's public spaces from 1967 to the present. Though described by curator Lilly Tuttle in today's press preview as "not comprehensive," the exhibition's four parts touch upon just about all of the major pieces of public art executed in those years. Art in the Open does so first in the corridor, where a timeline along one side leads visitors to the exhibition proper and briefly presents important pieces of public art. Those included in the other three sections of the exhibition – Art in Public, Art in Place, and Art in Action – are highlighted by bands of tape with the name of the respective section. Based on the bit of corridor captured below, Richard Serra's controversial Tilted Arc  is not i...

Recently MVRDV, with the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute, completed the Tianjin Binhai Library , a "cultural center featuring a luminous spherical auditorium around which floor-to-ceiling bookcases cascade." [All photographs by Ossip van Duivenbode] As should be clear in just a quick glance, the sphere and cascade are bringing the library a fair amount of attention on the internet. As described by MVRDV, "The undulating bookshelf is the building’s main spatial device, and is used both to frame the space and to create stairs, seating, the layered ceiling and even louvers on the façade." MVRDV's Winy Maas calls this space "cave-like, a continuous bookshelf" and "a new urban living room." Furthermore, "The bookshelves are great spaces to sit and at the same time allow for access to the upper floors. The angles and curves are meant to stimulate different uses of the space, such as reading, walking, meeting and discussing...

Obra Architects Logic: Selected Projects, 2003 - 2016 by Jennifer Lee and Pablo Castro B Architecture Publisher, 2016 Distributed by Idea Books Hardcover, 416 pages ( Amazon ) Like many others, I'm guessing, I first heard about  Obra Architects , the duo of Jennifer Lee and Pablo Castro, in 2006, when they won MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program (YAP) and realized BEATFUSE! in the museum's Long Island City courtyard. Writing about it that summer (without having seen it in person, unfortunately), I described the wood and mesh construction as "more substantial coverage" than previous YAP installations and "a happy medium" between more open structures and blobby forms, the two evident poles at the time. More than other YAP winners before and since , Obra took the shade consideration of the competition to heart and produced something that actually looks like a respite from the summer heat. [BEATFUSE!, Long Island City, Queens, NY | Spread from Ob...