A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Columbia University opened the third building on its Manhattanville Campus yesterday. The Forum was designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, who is also responsible for the first two buildings on campus: the Jerome L. Greene Science Center and the Lenfest Center for the Arts. Below is a slideshow of photos I took at yesterday's opening of The Forum, which I had a hard-hat tour of in July .

Here is an interactive slideshow with 74 of the photos I took last week at a press preview of the Pavilions at Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners . The slideshow moves from the Arrival Hall, along the Main Path, to the Pavilions and its various Galleries that are organized with Passages around a central Water Garden. It's an amazing building that is well worth seeing in person. The Pavilions at Glenstone open to the public on October 4; visit the Glenstone website for information on tickets, which are free but must be reserved in advance. My review of the building will be on World-Architects later this week, linked from this blog for convenience.

The "So You Want to Learn About" series highlights books focused on a particular theme: think "socially responsible architecture" and "phenomenology," rather than broad themes like "housing" or "theory." Therefore the series aims to be a resource for finding decent reading materials on certain topics, born of a desire to further define noticeable areas of interest in the  books I review . And while I haven't reviewed every title, I am familiar with each one; these are not blind recommendations. Well before the  death of Robert Venturi  last week at the age of 93, I'd planned a  "So You Want to Learn About"  post on  Learning from Las Vegas , the classic text by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour from 1972. It's only now that I finally got around to finalizing it. Last year I noticed that MIT Press had released a facsimile version of the hard-to-find and extremely expensive first edition; a co...

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown reviews (though some might go on to get that treatment), but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than find their way into  reviews on this blog . This installment features five coffee table books on contemporary single-family houses. Architects' Houses  by Michael Webb | Princeton Architectural Press | 2018 |  Amazon Nearly ten years ago I stumbled upon a used copy of Taschen's huge 100 Houses for 100 Architects , which highlights just what the title says: houses architects designed for themselves. Since then I've had a soft spot for such autobiographical residences, having composed a long feature at World-Architects, "Architects House Themselves." Architects' Houses  is the latest addition to this literature, in which Michael Webb presents 31 houses...

Here are some photos of the  Fjordenhus  (2018) in Vejle, Denmark, by Sebastian Behmann with Studio Olafur Eliasson. (Photographs by  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

Head on over to World-Architects to read my take on Robert Irwin: Site Determined , now in display at Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn.

Michigan Modern: An Architectural Legacy by Brian D. Conway with photographs by James Haefner, published by  Visual Profile Books , 2018. Hardcover, 300 pages. ( Amazon ) [Eero Saarinen's General Motors Technical Center (1956) graces the cover.] When thinking "modern architecture" what places come to mind? In the United States, at least, it's probably the Chicago Loop's commercial architecture, or Southern California's residential architecture, or even Columbus, Indiana's surprising density of modern architecture of all types. But Michigan? Most likely that doesn't bubble to the top. Yet even a cursory glance at this lovely coffee table book of 34 buildings in Michigan from the late 1920s to earlier this decade reveals that is a huge oversight. The state -- or at least concentrated portions of its southern half -- is crammed with some amazing modern architecture. [Frank Lloyd Wright's Dorothy Turkel House (1957) is one of the book's ma...

It's been six years since Phaidon released one of their gargantuan architectural atlases, meaning the publisher was overdue for yet another one. In 2004 they released the first, the  Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture ; four years later came the Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture ; and in 2012 they released 20th Century World Architecture . Another atlas should have come out in 2016 to stick with the every-four-years time span. Instead, we get Atlas of Brutalist Architecture , which comes out next month. [Images via Phaidon ] As boasted by Phaidon : This is the only book to thoroughly document the world's finest examples of Brutalist architecture. More than 850 buildings - existing and demolished, classic and contemporary - are organized geographically into nine continental regions. 878 Buildings, 798 Architects, 102 Countries, 9 World Regions, 1 Style BRUTALISM These spreads give a sense of what's inside the atlas – lots of photogr...

Here are some photos of Serpentine Pavilion 2018 by Frida Escobedo , on display in London's Kensington Gardens until October 7, 2018. (Photographs by  Laurence Mackman , who has many more photos of the pavilion 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

On Tuesday, the 17th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Skyscraper Museum is hosting a conversation between photographers Camilo Jose Vergara and Richard Berenholtz: The Lower Manhattan Skyline, with & without the Twin Towers . Details from the Skyscraper Museum : Photographers Camilo Jose Vergara and Richard Berenholtz reflect on their decades of focus on New York’s changing skyline, in images and conversation. In conjunction with the museum's new exhibition SKYLINE , two noted photographers of the New York will discuss their work over several decades of documenting the evolving identity of lower Manhattan. Berenholtz and Vergara will each show a selection of sequences that capture the lower Manhattan skyline from the same position over time and in many temporal conditions, recording in images that are authentic, poetic, and, ultimately, poignant. Join us on the evening of September 11 to remember the Twin Towers and pay tribute to what was lost and to the re...

TEN Arquitectos/Enrique Norten: Lines of Investigation by Enrique Norten, published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2017. Hardcover, 320 pages. ( Amazon ) Although the when and where are hazy, the first time I learned about the architecture of Enrique Norten it was definitely  Televisa Edificio de Servicios , which won the first Mies van der Rohe Award for Latin American Architecture back in 1998. It is a relatively early work for the Mexican architect, and although the curved form of the award-winning building is echoed in other projects (e.g. Escuela Nacional de Teatro , also in Mexico City), the buildings of Enrique Norten and TEN Arquitectos are a diverse bunch, sharing a strong understanding of tectonics and a formal bravado that are appropriate to every given site. My appreciation of Norten's work was carried through to last decade, when I was writing my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture  and when Norten had expanded his firm to N...

Head on over to World-Architects to read my piece on Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 , which is on display at MoMA until January 13, 2019, and is highly recommended.