A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

MAD Rhapsody by Ma Yansong Rizzoli Electa , November 2021 Hardcover | 10-1/4 x 12-1/2 inches | 288 pages | English | ISBN: 9780847869626 | $75.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Conceived and designed by Ma Yansong, founder of MAD Architects, MAD Rhapsody documents the buildings of this avant-garde architecture firm and traces the development of their ideas through associated practice including art, research, and exhibition projects. With photographs, drawings, and models, the book highlights 23 projects from the past six years, both built and in process. Known for their “organic and dreamlike architecture” that creates a dialogue with nature, earth, and sky, MAD projects reach all over the globe.   At age 46, Ma Yansong is one of China’s best-known architects. His curvilinear, free-form, and futuristic designs are often compared to those of his mentor, Zaha Hadid. Ma’s greatest inspiration is nature; his opera house in the northern Chinese city of Harbin resembles a snow-capped mo...

Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design by Albena Yaneva 010 Publishers , December 2009 Hardcover | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches | 128 pages | 30 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9789064507144 | €19.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The book presents an ethnographic account of the design rhythm in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Written as a collection of short stories, it draws on the mundane trajectories of models and architects at the OMA and shows how innovation permeates design practice, how everyday techniques and workaday choices set new standards for buildings and urban phenomena. In these stories of invention the "Eureka!" moments are missing. They are replaced by routine gestures of model making, recycling, assembling, recollecting, rescaling. This enquiry on architecture-in-the-making is based on participant observation in the office of Rem Koolhaas, extensive interviews with architects, and photo documentation on various pro...

Sandfuture by Justin Beal The MIT Press , September 2021 Paperback | 5-1/2 x 8-3/4 inches | 257 pages | 22 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780262543095 | $24.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki's most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture's role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki's life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in...

Canadian Architecture: Evolving a Cultural Identity by Leslie Jen Figure 1 Publishing , November 2021 Hardcover | 8-3/4 x 11-1/2 inches | 224 pages | English | ISBN: 9781773270388 | $45.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Canadian Architecture: Evolving a Cultural Identity surveys the country’s most accomplished architectural firms, whose work enhances cities and landscapes across Canada’s geographically varied expanse. Author Leslie Jen explores a number of significant projects in urban and rural environments—private residences, cultural and institutional facilities, and democratic public spaces—that profoundly influence our interactions with each other and the communities in which we live. Accompanied by stunning photography, Canadian Architecture is a testament to a thriving, diverse and innovative design culture that continues to play an integral role in shaping our national identity. Leslie Jen is an architecture and design journalist based in Toronto, where her consultancy p...

OMA NY: Search Term by Shohei Shigematsu, Jason Long Rizzoli , October 2021 Paperback | 8 x 11 inches | 676 pages | 5,565 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780847869206 | $95.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Well into its fourth decade, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), founded by Rem Koolhaas in 1975, remains one of the most influential and successful practices of its kind. OMA describes itself as “a firm operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism that applies architectural thinking to domains beyond.” OMA New York, has grown from an American outpost to a full-fledged operation with its own attitudes, contributing to the evolution of the globally acclaimed office. Through a diversity of projects, the firm has transformed our understanding of the city and our evolving relationship with art, fashion, food, sustainability, and other quintessentially twenty-first-century preoccupations.   The works presented here elaborate on OMA’s philosophy...

Theoretical Practice by David Chipperfield Artemis London Limited, 1994 Hardcover | 6 x 8-1/4 inches | 191 pages | English | ISBN: 9783760884233 | $45.00 FROM THE FLAPS : "As architects we are privileged to work with the physical world — with materials, brick, stone, wood, glass, metal, with forms and with light. We do not deal in speculation about or observation of the physical world but with the very stuff itself. Poets, painters and politicians should be jealous of our advantage." In this book, David Chipperfield sets out a theory of design that rejects centralised ideologies and acknowledges the importance of both intuition and intellect. For Chipperfield, all design is an intellectual craft, involving the reconciliation of ideas as well as responding to the influence of process and materials. Images from built projects reinforce his themes while the central body of the book emphasises the experimentation carried out in projects for buildings in England, Japan, and G...