A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The Architecture of Fantasy: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times Ulrich Conrads and Hans G. Sperlich; translated, edited and expanded by Christiane C. Collins and George R. Collins Frederick A. Praeger, 1962 Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11 inches | 187 pages | 232 illustrations | English | $16.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This book presents — for the first time in English — a copiously illustrated study of architectural fantasy in the modern world. Here in one volume is a selection of the unusual and the visionary in twentieth-century architecture, a fascinating record of the varieties in form, geometry, material, and imagery out of which architectural fantasy is spun. In recent years, architects and city planners have become increasingly sensitive to the charge of rigidity, plainness, and banality that was so often leveled against their work in the past. Today one sees a great, and sometimes frenetic, effort on the part of contemporary designers to inject more excitement an...

Radical Architecture of the Future Beatrice Galilee Phaidon , January 2021 Paperback | 8 x 10-1/2 inches | 240 pages | 250 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1838661236 | $59.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Architectural practice today goes far beyond the design and construction of buildings — the most exciting, forward-thinking architecture is also found in digital landscapes, art, apps, films, installations, and virtual reality. This remarkable book features projects — surprising, beautiful, outrageous, and sometimes even frightening — that break rules and shatter boundaries. In this timely book, the work of award-winning architects, designers, artists, photographers, writers, filmmakers, and researchers — all of whom synthesize and reflect our spatial environments — comes together for the first time. Beatrice Galilee  is a London-born, New York based curator, writer, critic, consultant, and lecturer of contemporary architecture and design. Formerly the associate curator of Arch...

The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago Patrick T. Reardon Southern Illinois University Press, November 2020 Paperback | 6 x 9 inches | 312 pages | 31 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0809338108 | $26.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Every day Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city’s downtown. But how much do they know about the single most important structure in the history of the Windy City? In engagingly brisk prose, Patrick T. Reardon unfolds the fascinating story about how Chicago’s elevated Loop was built, gave its name to the downtown, helped unify the city, saved the city’s economy, and was itself saved from destruction in the 1970s.   This unique volume combines urban history, biography, engineering, architecture, transportation, culture, and politics to explore the elevated Loop’s impact on the city’s development and economy and on the way Chicagoans see themselves. The Loop rooted Chic...

The China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanisms Jeffrey Johnson, Cressica Brazier, Tat Lam (Editors) Actar Publishers / Columbia GSAPP , November 2020 Paperback | 7 x 9-3/4 inches | 408 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1940291161 | $49.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Superblocks are the basic unit of China’s urban development, but they are also spatial instruments with social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications, operating between the scales of architecture and the city. These redefined ‘Megablocks’ then become laboratories for the consequences, opportunities, and potential global proliferation of Chinese urban models, reconsidered through the filters of ecology, economics, and ethics. In The Guide to Megablock Urbanisms , the Columbia GSAPP China Lab aims to document a wider conversation on the policies and collective experiences of large-scale development and advances of China’s urban future. Jeffrey Johnson  is the director of the School of Architecture at the University o...

Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide Margaret Fletcher, Robbie Polley Princeton University Press , December 2020 Hardcover | 7 x 9 inches | 288 pages | 600 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0691208077 | $29.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Architectural Styles is an incomparable guide to architectural styles across the centuries and around the world. Modeled after an architect’s plein air sketchbook, the volume features hundreds of detailed drawings by esteemed architectural illustrator Robbie Polley alongside incisive and informative descriptions. This unique guidebook takes readers from Europe and the Americas to Egypt, China, and India. It covers a host of historical and contemporary architectural styles, from ancient and classical to Pre-Columbian, Romanesque, Renaissance, Palladian, art nouveau, Brutalist, and biomorphic. It describes the histories and characteristics of the building traditions of each era and region of the world, and looks at key architectural elements su...

Openings: h2o architectes h2o architectes, Building Paris, Fanny Léglise (Editors) Park Books , January 2021 Hardcover | 6-3/4 x 9-1/4 inches | 344 pages | 230 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3038601982 | $45.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This book brings together twenty-nine projects from the past ten years, both completed and ongoing, designed by Paris-based h2o Architects. Arranged in thematic categories that stem from the firm’s singular approach to design and architecture, the projects vary greatly in type, scale and individual context, including housing developments in Paris, a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, a temporary school pavilion, a timber construction for a vineyard, the rehabilitation of Paris’s Museum of Modern Art, and other large public spaces. h2o Architectes’ proposals are united by an approach that is always both radical and sensitive, an ethos that emerges here from interviews conducted by architect and writer Fanny Léglise, while essays by architect and anthr...