A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Last night I attended a preview of the new exhibition at Columbia GSAPP's Arthur Ross Gallery, Arakawa and Gins: Eternal Gradient . The exhibition opens this evening, after an afternoon symposium I'm going to attend. I'll have more on the symposium and exhibition next week. In the meantime, below is a slideshow of my photos from last night's sneak peek. A post shared by John Hill (@therealarchidose) on Mar 29, 2018 at 4:55pm PDT

Last week I happened upon and bought a first printing of the AIA Guide to New York City . Edited by Norval White and Elliot Willensky, the guide was first published in 1967/68 and has been updated four times since then. I include both 1967 and 1968, since the book's copyright indicates both years and various sources point to either 1967 or 1968. A "from the stacks"  blog post at the New York Historical Society Museum & Library  from October last year clears things up, revealing that the guide was created as a paperback for the AIA's annual meeting in NYC in 1967 and then printed the following year as a $6.95 hardback. Whichever year is adopted, the book's 50th anniversary hasn't elicited much in the way of celebration. I'm not aware of anything outside of the Historical Society blog post. The most recent update to the guide  was done in 2010 , and even though the AIA Conference on Architecture is being held in NYC this year, I'm not aware of any ...

Here are some photos of San Cataldo Cemetery (1971) in Modena, Italy, by Aldo Rossi with Gianni Braghieri. (Photographs: Trevor Patt , who has many more in his 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

Over at World-Architects I did a write-up of Image Building , an exhibition that opened last weekend at the Parrish Art Museum. Some of my favorite images in the exhibition, which "explores the many connections found among viewer, photographer, and architect, from the 1930s to the present," are by Steven Shore. I didn't include him in my write-up, so I'm focusing on him here, specifically his Uncommon Places  series from the 1970s. Sparsely populated, and with rich colors and tones, his photographs exude Hopper-esque qualities. When thinking about what to say about his photos, I decided to jump into Google Street View and find the locations, so see how much they've changed. It was not a hard feat, given that Shore labeled his photographs as the intersections where he took them. Even if via an app instead of in person, it was fun to come across the same spots that he depicted back then. Below are nine of his photographs and nine embedded Street Views. In some ca...

Concrete Map Chicago edited by Iker Gil Blue Crow Media , 2018 Double-sided, 16.54 x 23.39 inches Think "Chicago architecture" and most likely concrete doesn't spring to mind. Brick, as in the Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, for sure. And steel, of course, in the towers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his followers. But think deeper: Frank Lloyd Wright designed the masterful Unity Temple in Oak Park, which left its concrete frame exposed. And before his influential 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartment towers, Mies built the Promontory Apartments in Hyde Park, which likewise exposed its concrete structure. Although these two concrete buildings are not included in Concrete Chicago Map , they signal that the material was not completely alien to the Windy City. It would take architects working in the 1960s and later — those looking to move beyond the restrictions of these two, ever-present giants — to fully explore concrete's potential across Chicago and its sub...

Yesterday, a nice pool struck my fancy . Today it's this adaptive reuse project:  a creamery in Buenos Aires . According to Hitzig Militello Arquitectos, who were inspired by precious stones and the below-zero, granite-slab preparation of the ice cream, "The new diamond-like structure dialogues morphologically with the pitched roofs of a 20th century chalet." Covered in metal tiles and glass panels, the expansion is clearly contemporary but cleverly wed to the original. I like, for instance, the way two of three dormers on the side of the original are brought inside the expansion. These photos reveal how the spaces flow between new and old... ... and how even the second-floor seating area overlooks the shop area through the dormers, their glass replaced with glass guards. Lastly, the elevation and section drawings show how new infiltrates the whole old building, in those faceted windows on the left, and the spaces that carve deep into the original house. ...

Earlier today I was posting a project to World-Architects – L'Accostée House by Bourgeois / Lechasseur architectes – and was particularly taken with one aspect of it: the lap pool. Located on the first floor of the three-story split-level, the pool is tucked into the hillside, away from exterior windows. But it's far from a dark space. [Photo: Adrien Williams, courtesy of v2com ] The narrow windows on the left, in the photo above, borrow light from an adjacent living space, but it's the white space beyond the wood ceiling that is most intriguing. There, as the photo below reveals, is a tall space, where the compressed feeling of the pool opens up dramatically. [Photo: Adrien Williams, courtesy of v2com ] To understand how this triple-height space works, look at the plans below, where I added blue. The pool is a simple rectangular volume, but where it extends up three floors it grabs light from outside through narrow windows at the end, while also providing a view...

Here are some photos of Art Museum & Library, Ota (2017) in Gunma, Japan by akihisa hirata architecture office . (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

Just some URL news: Yesterday was the last day for my archidose.org URL. I'd had some issues with my webhost in recent years, and it got to the point where most of my blog stuff had moved to Blogger. So without much need for my own server and URL, I decided to ditch archidose.org. Everything here remains the same, though some of the images may be broken (many of them already were, due to my webhost problems). I'll be moving those images to Blogger in the coming months, but feel free to email me if you see a post with broken images.

One of the highlights of a semester spent in Italy nearly 25 years ago was a visit to Carlo Scarpa's Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy. With that, I'm super-excited to learn about Richard Murphy's new book,  Carlo Scarpa and Castelvecchio Revisited , put out by his own (I'm guessing) Breakfast Mission Publishing . [Cover and spreads courtesy of Breakfast Mission Publishing ] Some description from the publisher: Carlo Scarpa worked on the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona intermittently between 1957 and 1975. It is perhaps his most important project. His work there draws on all his remarkable skills. It demonstrates how to work creatively within a building which already possesses a complex history. It is a magnificent example of his highly personal language of architecture, not least his incredible eye for detail and mastery of the crafting of materials. And it contains a museum exhibition which is as radical and timeless today as the day it opened in 1964 and has serve...

Michael Graves: Design for Life by Ian Volner, published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2017. Hardcover, 240 pages. ( Amazon ) Ian Volner's biography on Graves did not start out as such. As he explains at the beginning of Design for Life , and recounted at a book talk at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York late last year, it was first "imagined as either an oral history or a memoir," eventually taking the latter form. But Graves died at the age of 80 in March 2015, not long after Princeton Architectural Press accepted Volner's book proposal. So the journalist had to switch gears, penning a slightly critical biography that is aimed at a general audience and benefits from his 40-odd hours of interviews with the late architect and conversations with many colleagues, contemporaries, and critics. I'll admit to not being very excited to read a bio on Graves; after all, I was trained to basically abhor Postmodernism. But Volner's writing – critical but also comp...

Here are some photos of Città de Sole  (2016) in Rome, Italy, by Labics . (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