A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Temple and Teahouse in Japan by Werner Blaser Birkhäuser , October 2021 (New edition) Hardcover (also available in paperback) | 9-1/4 x 12 inches | 172 pages | English (also available in German) | ISBN: 9783035623499 | 78€ PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : After a trip to Japan in 1953, Werner Blaser published his landmark book on classical Japanese architecture. His studies of 17th- and 18th-century wooden buildings document minimalist, grid-based structures using stark black-and-white photographs, some color photographs and numerous line drawings. His book, highly prized in terms of design and content, contributed significantly to introducing Japanese aesthetics to Western architecture, art and graphics. Mies van der Rohe, for example, gave it to many of his friends. The reprint is enriched by a text on the history of the book by Christian Blaser, Werner Blaser's son, a contribution by Inge Andritz on Mies van der Rohe and Japanese architecture, and a personal afterword by Tadao ...

There is no book review this week, since I've been busy preparing for the book talk I'll be giving for AIALA and LACMA tomorrow evening. Details are below for the free virtual event. On Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at 5pm PST I'll be presenting my latest book,  Buildings in Print , in a free Zoom talk moderated by Frances Anderton. The event is presented by LACMA and AIA Los Angeles and is organized by the AIALA Interior Architecture Committee. Details via  LACMA  and  AIALA : Author John Hill will present his new book  Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books  (Prestel, 2021). This exploration of nearly a century of architectural publications combining writing and illustration begins appropriately with Le Corbusier’s 1923  Vers une architecture  (translated to English as  Towards a New Architecture ). Hill has chosen one hundred seminal books and presents them in nine thematic categories starting wi...

Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley MCD × FSG, July 2021 Hardcover | 5-3/4 x 8-1/2 inches | 416 pages | English | ISBN: 9780374126582 | $28.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medi...

The Culture Factory: Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum by Richard J. Williams Lund Humphries , January 2022 Paperback | 5-1/4 x 8 inches | 144 pages | 20 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848223974 | $34.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The Culture Factory: Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum explores the key battlegrounds in the design of the contemporary-art museum, describing the intersection of art, aesthetics and politics at the highest levels, and the commitment of states, cities and wealthy individuals to the display of art. Global in scope, the book examines key examples from Europe and the Americas to contemporary China. It describes museum building as the projection of political power, but also as a desire to acquire power. So it is a book about ambitious peripheries as much as the traditional centres: Dundee and Bilbao as well as New York and Paris. It is commonplace to assume that the contemporary-art museum has become ever more spectacular, and t...

Fine Books & Collections  has an interview I did with Rebecca Rego Barry , in which I talk about Buildings in Print: 100 Influential & Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books  (Prestel, 2021), collecting architecture books, and a few important titles in my personal library. One of the latter is Bernard Tschumi's The Manhattan Transcripts , which is featured at the beginning of the chapter (above) where the book is found. (Tschumi, I should point out, was generous enough to provide a quote for the back cover; it can be read on my Building in Print  book page .) A short excerpt from the interview: RB : Can you tell us about a favorite (or two) from your collection? JH : Two books that impacted my development as an architect and someone who writes about architecture come to mind. The one that’s in Buildings in Print is The Manhattan Transcripts by Bernard Tschumi, first published in 1981 and then expanded a decade later. Originally a series of galle...

This is exciting: on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at 5pm PST I'll be presenting my latest book,  Buildings in Print , in a free Zoom talk moderated by Frances Anderton. The event is presented by LACMA and AIA Los Angeles and is organized by the AIALA Interior Architecture Committee. Details via LACMA and AIALA : Author John Hill will present his new book Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books (Prestel, 2021). This exploration of nearly a century of architectural publications combining writing and illustration begins appropriately with Le Corbusier’s 1923 Vers une architecture (translated to English as Towards a New Architecture ). Hill has chosen one hundred seminal books and presents them in nine thematic categories starting with the early modern manifestos and ending with contemporary theories and critiques, the last entry being Reinier de Graaf’s 2017 Four Walls and a Roof . He will explain the making of the book, highlight some of...

It's been three years since this blog transitioned from A Daily Dose of Architecture to A Daily Dose of Architecture Books , focusing exclusively on reviews of architecture books. After three fairly solid years of (almost) daily blogging, with more than 500 book reviews, I've decided to make changes to this blog, mainly paring down the load so I can present fewer books with deeper reviews and focus on other projects. So starting today, January 2, 2022, this blog is becoming  A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books . Why? First, though not first in order of priority, this blog has seen a significant drop in readership over those three years. While I'm not one to keep track of the Google Analytics on this blog, recent changes in Blogger, which is run by Google, have placed stats front and center in the backend, making me aware of the few clicks coming to this blog every time I work on a new post or edit an old one. This drop might be due to architecture books being very niche or...