A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Here is the next installment of  "Book Briefs,"  the series of occasional posts featuring short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that publishers send to me for consideration on this blog. Obviously, these briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than those that end up as long reviews. American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life  by Richard K. Rein | Island Press | January 2022 | 6 x 9 inches | 352 pages | $35 | Amazon / Bookshop The multi-faceted writer, urbanist, and sociologist William "Holly" White was known to a general audience and architects/planners, respectively, for two books: The Organization Man , a 1956 bestseller about the culture of the corporate workplace; and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces , the 1980 book that became required reading for architecture students learning how to design spaces for the way people actually use them ...

Archives Universum 01: Flores & Prats Carlos Quintáns  C2C Proyecto Editorial , December 2021 Paperback | 6-1/2 x 9-1/4 inches | 148 pages | English/Spanish | ISBN: 9788412162530 | 15€ BOOK DESCRIPTION ( via Flores & Prats ) : Archives-Universum is a line of publications by C2C, arising after years of visiting different architects’ studios and noticing how life intermingles with work. Universum represents the awareness of how intense and interesting their work becomes, and the need to explain it in detail, to share it. Universum seeks to document a specific moment, providing a portrait of work-life spaces and adding an explanation of the projects that are underway at that moment in the studio, believing that they will be significant to its future. The narration of each Universum is two fold: a photographic one in which the images are shown, joined or cut, to offer unitary or multiple visions; and another written one that gathers texts that can explain that proce...

Architecture of Normal: The Colonization of the American Landscape Daniel Kaven Birkhäuser , February 2022 Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11 inches | 456 pages | 450 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783035624380 |  € 62 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : A multimedia exploration of the morphology of architecture in the American Southwest as defined by evolving modes of transportation. In examining advances in transportation, the book asks how we have come to acquiesce to the monotonous, isolating, and aesthetically bankrupt landscape of suburbia. It also casts predictions about how the future built landscape will look as it continues to adapt to patterns of human movement. Daniel Kaven is an architect and artist in Portland, Oregon. He is a founding partner in the office of William / Kaven Architecture. REFERRAL LINKS :       REVIEW : On page 244 of Architecture of Normal , in a chapter devoted to cars, architect and artist Daniel Kaven asserts, "Derivatecture had fully arrived....