A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

I'm heading to Venice to catch the Vernissage of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and cover it for World-Architects. In turn, this blog will take a short, two-week break. Ciao!

Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale by Léa-Catherine Szacka, published by Marsilio, 2017. Paperback, 264 pages. ( Amazon ) One week from today the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale opens to the public. To get myself in the mindset for a trip to Venice to cover the event for World-Architects, I just read this book that takes an in-depth look at the 1980 Biennale, what is considered the first true architecture Biennale in Venice (the art Biennales date back to the late 19th century). I've known about the The Presence of the Past  exhibition, curated by Paolo Portoghesi, for a while, mainly through images of the "Strada Novissima" in the Arsenale. But reading Léa-Catherine Szacka's case study of the exhibition, I realized just how narrow my understanding was – limited in large part to a superficial appreciation of the twenty Postmodern facades lining the "Strada." But the exhibition was a bit more than those false fronts, and t...

Late last month, in a post about dancers at Casa Luis Barragán , I mentioned seeing and reviewing Jill Magid's The Proposal . I saw the documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival the same day as the post, and yesterday I (finally) posted my review on World-Architects. Read it by clicking here or the image below. [Image: Jill Magid] See also a couple related book reviews on this blog and my Unpacking My Library blog: Las Torres de Ciudad Satélite Critical Spatial Practice 8: The Proposal: Jill Magid

Here are a couple photos of Tencent Seafront Towers  (2018) in Shenzhen, China, by  NBBJ . (Photographs:  Fernando Herrera ) 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 the weekend architect Will Alsop died at the age of 70 after a short illness . I'd written about a couple of his notable buildings on this blog: the Peckham Library in London, which won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2000, and the Sharpe Centre for Design at OCAD University in Toronto. I'd actually seen the latter in person, so I wrote about it from my experience and with my photos; here are a few of those, showing the building propped above its predecessors and the view down to the shadows cast by the angled stilts. It was a jarring building when completed in 2004 and is a strong element in Toronto's architectural renaissance this century.

Here are some photos of Manna House (2014) in Los Angeles by Jeremy Levine Design . (Photographs: Tom Bonner) 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

Revisiting Postmodernism by Sir Terry Farrell and Adam Nathaniel Furman, published by  RIBA Publishing , 2017. Paperback, 200 pages. ( Amazon ) An architect would need to have been asleep for the past five or ten years to not realize that Postmodern architecture has made some sort of comeback. A younger generation of architects is embracing the Platonic forms, pastel colors, and historical glances of the movement that took hold of the architectural profession in the 1970s and 80s. What exactly today's neo-Postmodernism is, and how prevalent of an effect it will have on the profession, is hard to say, since the design of neo-Modern buildings — glass boxes — is alive and kicking. Nevertheless, it's hard to deny the evident appreciation of Postmodern sensibilities that is being filtered through today's technology (e.g. Photoshop) and the critical distance that comes from the younger generation not experiencing Postmodernism firsthand. Just look at last year's Chicago ...

Today Morpholio launched "Smart Fill" for its popular TracePro app for iOS. With it came the short video below, with architects talking about why drawing matters and using the app's new feature, "a fill tool that not only calculates the area of the fill, it actually changes as the sketch evolves," in the words of Morpholio co-founder Anna Kenoff. Thankfully, the video is more about how architects draw in the digital age than being sold on the app; combined with some ambient music, it's an enjoyable way to spend 5-1/2 minutes. Coincidentally, one of the images provided by Morpholio for illustrating how "Smart Fill" works depicts WORKac's Kew Gardens Hills Library, which I posted about over the weekend . In it the tool is being used to do material take offs for the facades. I haven't used TracePro (back in 2012 I briefly played around with Trace ), but it looks like a decent app, ideally suited for the early stages of a design project, a...

Although it's been more than a few months since my last book, 100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs , came out last fall, I'd yet to put together a "Today's archidose" on the book as I did with 100 Years, 100 Buildings in a more timely manner the year before . Like its predecessor, the book highlights 100 projects, in this case parks, gardens, and other landscape designs built over the last 100 years, with the gimmick that there is only one building per year based on completion or some other important milestone (a trickier thing to nail down with landscapes than buildings). Here are photos of 25 landscapes culled from the archidose Flickr pool  (and some of my own that I just uploaded to Flickr) to give a taste of what's in the book. For more information on 100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs , which is published by Prestel, check out the page I set up for the book . Mouseover or click the photos below to see who photographed each landscape design. 1921 Östra Kyrk...

WORKac: We'll Get There When We Cross That Bridge by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, published by  The Monacelli Press , 2017. Hardcover, 360 pages. ( Amazon ) Amale Andraos and Dan Wood started WORKac in 2003 after both worked at OMA. They are celebrating fifteen years with this monograph, its title a play on the familiar phrase, "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." The title flip-flop, combined with the way the text snakes itself across the edge of the cover around "WORKac," hints at the firm's sense of humor , the playful nature of their work, and the way the duo upends conventions . The neon orange, green and pink lettering also alludes to the structure of the book: five-year chunks that hinge upon global events circa 2008 ("post-housing bubble") and 2013 ("post-oil-price crash") but also correspond with happenings in the office and in the life of the married partners (notably children and a deanship). These five year c...

"Pole vaulting in the chapel, bicycling in the laundromat, sky diving in the elevator shaft?" Might Bernard Tschumi have also asked, "Badminton in Rudolph Hall?" I leapt to Tschumi's words when seeing this photo on my Facebook wall, from an article at Yale Alumni Magazine : [Photo: Bob Handelman, via Yale Alumni Magazine] Apparently, turning "the Pit" on the fourth floor of the Yale School of Architecture into a badminton court is an annual tradition, with about 50 teams playing nearly 100 games, per the magazine. While the tournament takes over the central crit space a few night per week, students still work around the perimeter and on the mezzanine overlooking it. A view of the pit set up for a crit: [Photo: Seth Tisue, via Wikimedia Commons ] But the Yale architecture students don't just take over the pit, turning Paul Rudolph's space of education into a space of recreation; they also design t-shirts and posters. And according to...