A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

[Note: Due to a deadline, this blog is taking a break until the Pritzker announcement on March 7.] The Pritzker Architecture Prize website is indicating that the announcement of the 2018 laureate will happen on Wednesday, March 7 — 10am EST to be precise. So with just twelve days until the announcement, who do you think should win the Pritzker? As in previous years — well, every other year , about — I've set up a poll in the right column (mirrored at the bottom of this post) to see how well this blog's readers know their stuff. I've selected 25 candidates, but if you disagree with my choices vote "other" and please comment on this post with your pick. Check back here on March 7 to see who won – both the real Pritzker and this poll. For reference, the nine-member Pritzker Prize jury (now with four former Pritzker laureates*): - Glenn Murcutt* (Chair) - Stephen Breyer - André Corrêa do Lago - Lord Peter Palumbo - Richard Rogers* - Kazuyo Sejima* - W...

[Rendering of new 40th Street entrance | Image: Mecanoo/Beyer Blinder Belle] Curious about Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle's design for the renovation of the New York Public Library's grand building (officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building) next to Bryant Park? The $317 million plan was released to the public in November 2017, but the renderings that accompanied the release fail to impress on what exactly is going on. Thankfully the NYPL has a 9-minute film with some snazzy animated illustrations, like the one below, and some words from Mecanoo's Francine Houben. (Note that you'll have to sit through a few minutes of NYPL fluff to get to the architecture parts.) [Section perspective through new 40th Street entrance | Image: screenshot] Watch the video here:

On March 30, Columbia GSAPP is hosting a conference and opening an exhibition, both pertaining to Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Details are below. [Critical Holder Chart 2 (detail), c1991 / Image Credit: © 2017 Estate of Madeline Gins.] Encounters with Arakawa and Madeline Gins Conference in Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall, at 1pm: A half-day conference on the occasion of the opening of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery exhibition Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient . The event convenes architects, artists, historians and writers to offer fresh interpretations of Arakawa and Gins’ work and theories in the context of contemporary practices and scholarship. Among the conference participants are: Amale Andraos , Dean of Columbia GSAPP and co-founder of WORKac; Adrienne Hart , Artistic Director/Choreographer of Neon Dance (London), who is developing a new dance piece that draws on the life and work of Arakawa and Gins; Momoyo Homma (Tokyo), Director of Co-ordinologist Inc...

Way back in February 2015 I posted a heads up on three exhibitions  coming to the Parrish Art Museum – that barn-shaped building designed by Herzog & de Meuron. One of them, Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture , was slated to run in mid-2017. Turns out, it's not opening until March 18, 2018. So if you thought you missed it – you didn't! [Iwan Baan, Torre David #2, 2011] Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture March 18 – June 17, 2018 Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture is a comprehensive survey that explores the dynamic relationship between architecture, photography, and the viewer. Seen through the lens of historical and architectural photographers from the 1930s to the present, Image Building offers a nuanced perspective on how photographs affect our understanding of the built environment and our social and personal identities. The exhibition features 57 images that expl...

This morning I stopped by the Austrian Cultural Forum New York to check out The Projective Drawing , a new exhibition curated by Brett Littman with ten artists responding to Robin Evans's classic 1995 book, The Projective Cast . Head on over to World-Architects to see some photos I took and learn a little bit about the show that's on display until May 13.

Here are a few photos of GLASS (2015) in Miami Beach, Florida, by Rene Gonzalez Architect . (Photos: Maciek Lulko ) 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

John Vinci: Life and Landmarks  by Robert Sharoff and William Zbaren, published by  Northwestern University Press , 2017. Hardcover, 272 pages. ( Amazon ) Being a preservation architect means toiling in relative obscurity. After all, it's the details of what is being preserved – the building, the creation of a particular architect, the place where a famous event took place or a person lived – that are at the forefront of a preservation project, not the person in charge of its restoration. Gunny Harboe, for instance, is known by just about all architects in Chicago, but outside of the city his is hardly a common name, even though he's been responsible for the restoration of buildings by Wright, Mies, and many others. Ditto John Vinci, who's restored many notable buildings but was responsible for one in particular – the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room – that I first experienced as a teenager, on a field trip to the Art Institute. I learned that the space and buildin...

Here are a few photos of House Van Wassenhove (1974) in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium, by Juliaan Lampens. (Photos: Lukas Schlatter ) A post shared by Lukas Schlatter (@lukas.schlatter) on Jan 15, 2018 at 10:17pm PST A post shared by Lukas Schlatter (@lukas.schlatter) on Jan 20, 2018 at 1:38am PST A post shared by Lukas Schlatter (@lukas.schlatter) on Jan 16, 2018 at 10:07pm PST 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

Neighbourhood: Where Álvaro meets Aldo  edited by Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli, published by  Hatje Cantz , 2017. Paperback, 208 pages. ( Amazon ) Of the many countries that participate in the Venice Architecture Biennale, Portugal is one of those that does not have a home in the Giardini. As such, it ventures out into the city for a venue – not necessarily a bad thing, since it spreads out the exhibition beyond the confines of the Giardini and Arsenale and further embeds the exhibition in the city. In 2016, Portugal's contribution to the Biennale was located on Giudecca, the long island that, outside of Palladio's Il Redentore, doesn't see as many tourists as the rest of Venice. Curators Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli did this for a good reason though: they wanted to draw attention to an unfinished work by Alvaro Siza, Portugal's most famous modern architect. [Exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale | Photo: John Hill] Neighbourhood: Wher...

Built Unbuilt by Julien De Smedt and Julien Lanoo, published by  Frame Publishers , 2017. Paperback, 328 pages. ( Amazon ) Back in 2011, when I reviewed JDS Architects' Agenda: Can We Sustain Our Ability to Crisis? alongside a few other monographs, I described the format of Agenda as a "diary."& That book's many projects by Julien De Smedt – both on his own and with Bjarke Ingels as PLOT – were structured via timeline: a year in the life of JDS that started with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The new monograph, Built Unbuilt , sets aside a chronological format in favor of two halves: built works and unbuilt projects. Nevertheless, parts of the book have a casualness that makes them read like a diary. [Spread from "Built"] The first half of the book, "Built," is where the co-authorship comes across: Julien De Smedt is the architect, the head of the firm that designed the buildings, and Julien Lanoo is the photo...

Here are some photos of  La città lineare per Santa Croce  (1969) by Zziggurat (Alberto Breschi, Roberto Pecchioli) from  Radical Utopias Beyond Architecture: Florence 1966–1976 , which closed on January 21 at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. (Photos: Trevor Patt , who has lots of photos of the exhibition in his "Utopie Radicali" 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

On Thursday the tenth annual Times Square Valentine Heart Design was unveiled. I didn't make it to the press event that morning, but I did head there yesterday afternoon. I'm glad I did, because the installation's presence is more impressive after the sun goes down – appropriately so, given its location. Window to the Heart is the creation of ArandaLasch + Marcelo Coelho with Formlabs, with Laufs Engineering Design as structural engineer. This year's competition was curated by Design Trust for Public Space. Billed as "the world’s largest lens," the 12-foot-diameter installation was designed by ArandaLasch with 3D-printing manufacturer Formlabs "to distort and capture the image of Times Square, optically bending light – and attention – to the heart-shaped window at its center." With this goal in mind, the resulting effect is hard to grasp during the day: But is more understandable once the sun goes down: Times Square Arts, which comm...

From January 19 to March 3, Félix Candela's Concrete Shells: An Engineered Architecture for México and Chicago is on display in Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The show is curated by Alexander Eisenschmidt and is a collaboration between UIC and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Unfortunately, I'm unable to catch this exhibition, but the photos here, courtesy of Gallery 400, give a sense of the show and make me wish I could see it in person. Félix Candela (1910 - 1997) is hardly unknown to architects in the United States. (He is so famous for his concrete shell structures that a trio of them in Queens were considered his work for decades until some researchers determined they were designed by another architect .) Nevertheless, his life and work deserve more attention. (I had no idea he taught at UIC for most of the 1970s, for instance.) Description via UIC : Félix Candela's Concrete Shells: An Engineered Archit...