A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space Michael Sorkin (Editor) Hill and Wang, 1992 Paperback | 6 x 9 inches | 252 pages | 9 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0374523145 | $20.00 Publisher's Description : America's cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogenous design. A new kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epc...

SOS Brutalism: A Global Survey Oliver Elser, Philip Kurz, Peter Cachola Schmal (Editors) Park Books , November 2017 Hardback with paperback supplement | 9 x 11 inches | 716 pages | 1,080 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3038600756 | $69.00 Publisher's Description : Widely disliked in their heyday and only recently beginning to be appreciated, brutalist buildings around the world are at risk of being lost—in many cases to demolition, and in some to insensitive reconstructions that would forever alter buildings’ appearance beyond recognition. SOS Brutalism is a distress signal, an attempt to galvanize public awareness of the architectural heritage that is at risk of being forever lost. The book, result of a major collaborative research undertaking by Deutsches Architektur Museum DAM and Wüstenrot Foundation, presents a global survey of brutalist architecture of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, covering around 120 key buildings from the period from around the world, many of th...

Countryside, A Report AMO, Rem Koolhaas Guggenheim/ Taschen , March 2020 Paperback | 4 x 6-1/4 inches | 352 pages | English | ISBN: 978-3836583312 | $25.00 Publisher's Description : The rural, remote, and wild territories we call “countryside”, or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities, make up the front line where today’s most powerful forces—climate and ecological devastation, migration, tech, demographic lurches—are playing out. Increasingly under a ‘Cartesian’ regime—gridded, mechanized, and optimized for maximal production—these sites are changing beyond recognition. In his latest publication, Rem Koolhaas explores the rapid and often hidden transformations underway across the Earth’s vast non-urban areas. Countryside, A Report gathers travelogue essays exploring territories marked by global forces and experimentation at the edge of our consciousness: a test site near Fukushima, where the robots that will maintain Japan’s infrastructure and agricult...

Justice Is Beauty: MASS Design Group Michael Murphy, Alan Ricks The Monacelli Press , December 2019 Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 384 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1580935272 | $60.00 Publisher's Description : Founded in 2008, MASS Design Group collaborated with Partners In Health and the Rwanda Ministry of Health to design and build the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, a masterwork of architecture that also uniquely serves a community in need. Since then, MASS has grown into a dynamic collaborative of architects, planners, engineers, filmmakers, researchers, and public health professionals working in more than a dozen countries in the fields of design, research, policy, education, and strategic planning. Amid ongoing recognition (the 2018 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture), MASS’s most recent project, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, has been feature...

MONU #31: After Life Urbanism Magazine on Urbanism , October 2019 Paperback | 7-3/4 x 10-1/2 inches | 128 pages | English | ISSN: 1860-3211 | $23.99 Issue Contents : Democratizing Death - Interview with Karla Rothstein by Bernd Upmeyer; The Cemetery of the Living by Miguel Candela; With Seven Bodies in My Backyard by Omar Kassab and Mostafa Youssef; Constructing Memorial Poles as Monuments by David Charles Sloane; Ghost Life Urbanism by Jérémie Dussault-Lefebvre and Sébastien Roy; Death and Burial: In the Past Lies the Future by Carlton Basmajian and Christopher Coutts; Beyond the Grave: Conscious Consumption in Life and Death by Sybil Tong; Cemetery and Crematorium Futures by Julie Rugg; The Silent City by Nicole Hanson; You Could Be Compost by Katrina Spade (Recompose); Mourn by Nienke Hoogvliet; Rest in Pixels - Interview with James Norris by Bernd Upmeyer; Watching the Wakes of Strangers through the Internet by Andréia Martins van den Hurk; Suburban Halloween Decorations ...

Torre Reforma L. Benjamín Romano, with texts by Felipe Leal, Ali Malkawi and Francisco Serrano, and photographs by Iwan Baan Arquine , April 2019 Hardcover | 8 x 12 inches | 240 pages | 70 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-6079489434 | $50.00 Publisher's Description : LBR&Arquitectos, a firm founded in 1976 by Mexican architect Benjamín Romano, designs and builds architecture projects based on four defining principles: sustainability, structure, high technology and artistic integration. The firm is responsible for one of Mexico City’s tallest skyscrapers, the Reforma Tower (2016), built on the corner of Paseo de la Reforma and Río Elba. At 57 stories and 807 feet high, the tower’s delicate silhouette made a striking addition to the city’s skyline. This book explores the process involved in designing and building the Reforma Tower, narrating how the architects navigated urban regulation in the center of a dense city and considerations of height, circulation, sunlig...

I'm taking a break from my sporadic reviews these days to present some finds made at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair  that is taking place this weekend. These are not books I purchased — they are far too expensive for my wallet — but they are some of the few books on modern architecture that I found in a sea of leather bindings, signed first editions, maps, and other older bound and unbound volumes. If you're in the market for some rare architecture books, take a look at the books below (in alphabetical order by bookseller) and then head over to the Park Avenue Armory between now and Sunday. Walter Gropius, work and teamwork (1954) by Sigfried Giedion, signed by Walter Gropius Appledore Books (booth E24), $1,500: Junge Französische Architektur (1930) by Roger Ginsburger Marilyn Braiterman Rare Books (booth C7), $400: Knoll Center/Ceiling Design  (1989) lithograph by Robert Venturi Marilyn Braiterman Rare Books (booth C7), $1,500: Anonyme S...