A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Kind of Boring: Canonical Work and Other Visible Things Meant to be Viewed as Architecture Paul Preissner Actar Publishers , February 2021 Paperback | Page Size inches | 244 pages | English | ISBN: 9781948765138 | $34.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Being boring (or boringness) has been one of the qualities of architecture an architect desperately tries to avoid. Not to provoke (or at least try to provoke) some reaction from one’s audience is to admit to a lack of ideas or an absence of creativity. In Kind of Boring , Paul Preissner rejects the idea that architecture should demand anything from its audience. The “boring and dumb” architecture documented in this book leaves us alone. In this way, the work of Paul Preissner Architects produces a conceptual space, a meaning independent of our relationship to the work; we can only understand (or misunderstand) it. Kind of Boring looks at the origin of architectural ideas behind a work and the theoretical and practical consequences re...

It's a Helluva Town: Joan K. Davidson, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and the Fight for a Better New York Roberta Brandes Gratz Bold Type Books, November 2020 Hardcover | 5-3/4 x 8-1/2 inches | 256 pages | English | ISBN: 9781645036869 | $28.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The J.M. Kaplan Fund was established in 1945 by Jacob M. Kaplan, and would go on to play a critical role in New York City's cultural and urban life. Kaplan's long leadership of the Fund (1945-1977) was marked by determined advocacy, including the effort to save Carnegie Hall from destruction, support for institutions like The New School for Social Research and the South Street Seaport Museum, as well as to bolster the cause of union democracy, the arts, and the co-operative movement. Since the 1970s, the Fund has been led by Kaplan's daughter, Joan K. Davidson, who has led the Fund to its current place as a forceful presence in New York City's civic life, supporting the Westbeth Artists Housing, Gree...

Reviviscence: A Bridge over Genoa Photographs by Andrea Botto Rizzoli , March 2021 Flexicover | 9-3/4 x 12 inches | 208 pages | English | ISBN: 9788891830302 | $65.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : An artistic photographic book dedicated to the reconstruction of the Polcevera Viaduct, also known as Ponte Morandi, in Genoa, which tragically collapsed in 2018. Andrea Botto, a photographer and visual artist specializing in large works, uses his shots to describe the stages involved in the demolition of the old Ponte Morandi and the construction of the new infrastructure designed by Renzo Piano. His lens follows each phase of the undertaking with technical expertise and attention to the composition of the image, in a skillful combination of documentary reportage and aesthetic research. Botto has been working for RINA Consulting, the Italian agency supervising both the demolition and the construction of the new bridge, which is set to become a new landmark in Genoa, having been designed ...

With Intention to Build: The Unrealized Concepts, Ideas, and Dreams of Moshe Safdie Moshe Safdie, in conversation with Michael J. Crosbie Images Publishing , November 2020 Hardcover | 9-1/4 x 9-1/4 inches | 184 pages | English | ISBN: 9781864708493 | $35.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Moshe Safdie explains that probably more than half of his lifetime design work is unbuilt, and he considers his unbuilt work to be some of his most significant work. In this richly illustrated book, replete with detailed diagrams, sketches, models and studies, Moshe Safdie explains that for those who design in order to build, not succeeding in building is never a failure (there are many reasons why a project might not be built) because these designs are part of the evolution of an architect's work. This volume is a fascinating journey through Safdie's thoughts and career, and also a historical reference of the social and political forces at play at the time. Not only a treatise on Safdie...

American Buildings and Their Architects, Volume 5: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century William H. Jordy Oxford University Press , 1986 Paperback | 6 x 9-1/4 inches | 470 pages | 204 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780195042191 | $15.95 BOOK DESCRIPTION (from back cover) : American Buildings and Their Architects is an ambitious, five-volume study of American architecture. Each volume is designed around a representative group of buildings, which were photographed and studied in detail by the authors. Presented in their social and historical context, these buildings illuminate not only the development of American architecture, but the governing philosophies of America's most prominent architects.  Volume 5, The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century , examines the influence of European modernism on American architecture from 1930 to 1960. Beginning with Rockefeller Center, a premier example of the effect of modernism on Beaux-Art...

Housing and the City: Álvaro Siza and James Gowan Ellis Woodman and Manuel Montenegro with Tony Fretton Drawing Matter , 2018 Paperback | 9-1/2 x 12-1/2 inches | 72 pages | 71 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780995630932 | £16.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : As Ellis Woodman points out in his Introduction to this extensively illustrated discussion of the housing projects of Álvaro Siza and James Gowan, this publication frames an encounter between the work of two men who might be considered an unlikely pairing. However, both men were engaged in critical response to the tenets of the Athens Charter that they sought to resolve in their low-cost housing experiments of the 1960s and 70s. The implications of the different social, political and economic contexts in which they enacted this difficult task makes the juxtaposition of their work a fascinating and fruitful process of discovery. Reflecting the spatial disposition of the Housing and the City exhibition held at the Architectural...