A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

This year I featured nearly 200 architecture books on this blog, placing them into one of six day-of-the-week categories: Monograph Monday , Technical Tuesday , World Wednesday , History/Theory Thursday , Free-for-all Friday , and Wayback Weekend . Setting aside the last so I can focus on recently published books, here are my 21 favorite reads from this year, categorized as they were when I reviewed them and listed in order of the books' publication dates, indicated in parentheses. MONOGRAPHS: The Architecture of Point William: A Laboratory for Living by Kenneth Frampton and Michael Webb, published by ORO Editions (02/2021) Carlo Scarpa ("Classic format") by Robert McCarter, published by Phaidon (04/2021) Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life edited by Kieran Long and Johan Örn, published by ArkDes/Park Books (08/2021) OMA NY: Search Term by Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long, published by Rizzoli (10/2021) TECHNICAL: Pisé – Rammed Earth. Tradition and Potential...

Piranesi Unbound by Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor Princeton University Press , September 2020 Hardcover | 9 x 11-1/2 inches | 240 pages | 193 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780691206103 | $65.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : A draftsman, printmaker, architect, and archaeologist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) is best known today as the virtuoso etcher of the immersive and captivating Views of Rome and the darkly inventive Imaginary Prisons. Yet Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor argue that his single greatest art form—one that combined his obsessions most powerfully and that he pursued throughout his career—was the book. Piranesi Unbound provides a fundamental reinterpretation of Piranesi by recognizing him, first and foremost, as a writer, illustrator, printer, and publisher of books. Featuring nearly two hundred of Piranesi’s engravings and drawings, including some that have never been published before, this visually stunning book returns Piranesi’s artworks ...

Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde by Joseph Giovannini Rizzoli , November 2021 Hardcover | 9 x 11 inches | 876 pages | 698 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780847858798 | $50.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : In Architecture Unbound , noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the 1960s, social unrest and cultural disruption opened the way for investigations into an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture. Explorations emerged in the 1970s, and built projects surfaced in the 1980s, taking digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale projects finally landing on the far side of the millennium.   Architecture Unbound traces all of these developments and influences, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history not only of the sources of contemporary currents in architecture bu...

Apartment Blossom by Li Han and Jin Qiuye Donghua University Press, January 2021 Paperback | 5-1/4 x 7-1/4 inches | 176 pages | Chinese/English | ISBN: 9787566918352 | 79元 BOOK DESCRIPTION : As the second volume of Urban Studies Degree Zero Series , Apartment Blossom is a documentation on various balcony renovations of vernacular apartment buildings in Beijing with a collection of exquisite architectural maquettes. Due to the extreme weather conditions, the balconies in Northern China are usually enclosed by their owners. But by their eclectic approach to enclose the balconies, the owners have also made those balconies the highlights of the boring façades of the apartment buildings that are originally composed by repetitive standard units. The selected balconies in Apartment Blossom are both special and ordinary, which altogether form a brief imagery history of local balcony enclosure in Beijing for the past two or three decades. Apartment Blossom further explores the concept...

The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity by Michael P. Murphy with Jeffrey Mansfield and MASS Design Group Cooper Hewitt, November 2021 Hardcover | 7-1/4 x 10 inches | 256 pages | 250 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781942303312 | $45.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The Architecture of Health is a story about the design and life of hospitals—about how they are born and evolve, about the forces that give them shape, and the shifts that conspire to render them inadequate. Reading architecture through the history of hospitals offers a tool for unlocking the elemental principles of architecture and the intractable laws of human and social conditions that architecture serves in each of our lives. This book encounters brilliant and visionary designers who were hospital architects but also systems designers, driven by the aim of social change. They faced the contradictions of health care in their time and found innovative ways to solve for specific m...

Santa Fe Modern: Contemporary Design in the High Desert by Helen Thompson, photographs by Casey Dunn The Monacelli Press , November 2021 Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 240 pages | English | ISBN: 9781580935616 | $50.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Santa Fe Modern reveals the high desert landscape as an ideal setting for bold, abstracted forms of modernist houses. Wide swaths of glass, deep-set portals, long porches, and courtyards allow vistas, color, and light to become integral parts of the very being of a house, emboldening a way to experience a personal connection to the desert landscape. The architects featured draw from the New Mexican architectural heritage–they use ancient materials such as adobe in combination with steel and glass, and they apply this language to the proportions and demands exacted by today’s world. The houses they have designed are confident examples of architecture that is particular to the New Mexico landscape and climate, and yet simultaneously evoke t...