A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Urban Bremerton: A Journal of Bremerton's Built Environment David Albright (Editor) David Albright Media, 2020 Paperback | 6 x 9 inches | unpaginated | English | ISBN: 978-1736372609 | $25.00 BOOK DESCRIPTION : When people talk about Bremerton, they often talk about what surrounds it—the ferries, the water, the mountains. They place it in the past—how it boomed in WWII, or give a nod to the future—“it has so much potential!” But what about the city itself, today? When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I filled my time by walking about the city photographing the buildings and streetscapes that caught my eye. This journal is the result of those walks, accompanied by essays and reflections from local writers. The goal is to capture the spirit of Bremerton - not the spirit of its historical heyday or it’s imagined future, but as it exists today. David Albright   a freelance journalist & video producer based in Bremerton and Seattle. His journalism work has been featured in The National...

Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges June Williamson, Ellen Dunham-Jones Wiley , January 2021 Hardcover | 8-1/4 x 10-1/4 inches | 272 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1119149170 | $65.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This amply-illustrated book, second in a series, documents how defunct shopping malls, parking lots, and the past century’s other obsolete suburban development patterns are being retrofitted to address current urgent challenges they weren’t designed for: improving public health, increasing resilience in the face of climate change, leveraging social capital for equity, supporting an aging society, competing for jobs, and disrupting automobile dependence. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges provides summaries, data, and references on how these challenges manifest in suburbia and discussion of successful urban design strategies to address them in Part I. Part II documents how inn...

Book of Models Manuel Aires Mateus, Francisco Aires Mateus; edited by Camilla De Camilli; photographs by Marco Cappelletti ArchiTangle , March 2021 Flexicover | 9-1/2 x 12-1/4 inches | 224 pages | 200 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3966800112 | 48€ PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This poetic and minimalist anthology presents 10 years of heritage of AIRES MATEUS design studios at the Accademia di Archittettura di Mendrisio in Switzerland. 100 images of largescale models built by students of AIRES MATEUS are brought together to create a family portrait. Each staged model is pictured with the essential schemes necessary to understand the volumes portrayed. Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus’ many years of experience in pedagogy and the use of models in practice are brought together in a manifesto which precedes the anthology of images. The importance of the model in the formation of architectural ideas and throughout the design process, as well as its potency as a standalone stateme...

UnderstandingUnderstanding Richard Saul Wurman A Richard Saul Wurman & Jack Dangermond publication, July 2017 Hardcover | 10-1/4 x 10 inches | 708 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1939621696 | $75.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. Before Information Architecture, before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand. Understanding Understanding precedes the whole process of learning, of giving yourself permission to understand the formations of facts, data, stories, pictures, words, conversations that allow you to understand. This book could be called A Celebration of Conversation or Musings with my Mentors. It is about the fantasy of...

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America Sean Anderson, Mabel O. Wilson (Editors) The Museum of Modern Art , March 2021 Paperback | 8 x 10 inches | 176 pages | 185 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1633451148 | $45.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States. The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book—and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a “field guide”—reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrat...

Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice: Voices from the Archives Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen Pax Forlag/ Lars Müller Publishers , March 2021 Paperback | 7-1/2 x 10-1/4 inches | 296 pages | 367 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3037786390 | 45€ PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice is a masterpiece of postwar architecture. The young Norwegian architect won the competition for its design in 1958 and the building was inaugurated in 1962. Through six decades, the beloved structure has been mired in phenomenology, poetry, and the personal memory of the select. Looking at the archives, a very different story emerges. In minute detail, this book presents the history of the origins and making of the Nordic Pavilion; spanning from the geopolitical context in an increasingly tense Cold War atmosphere, to the aggregates in the concrete of the audacious roof construction, to the iconic trees, many of which had already died before the second exhibition in 1964...