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. Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change  edited by Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Daniel A. Barber, Anton Vidokle | e-flux Architecture | February 2022 | 7 x 10 inches | 272 pages | $30 |  Amazon  /  Bookshop The old saying goes that if you want to know the weather just stick your head out the window. But what about climate? If you want to understand climate and how it has changed over time, "media is necessary," the editors of this volume of 22 essays contend. Usually such media takes the form of charts, graphs, maps, and other visualizations of data, showing how climatic...

Post-pandemic Urbanism Edited by Doris Kleilein, Friederike Meyer Jovis , December 2021 Paperback | 5-3/4 x 8-1/4 inches | 192 pages | 50 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783868597103 | $28.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Working from home, online shopping, undertourism: the disruptive upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic challenge architecture and urban planning. New spaces for action are opening up, but are they being utilized? From dividing traffic space fairly to urban food policies, from new places for work and recreation to the question on how communities can be oriented towards the common good: Post-pandemic Urbanism envisions a near future and discusses how cities and their transformative power can help to handle this current crisis and those to come. REFERRAL LINKS :       REVIEW : It was November of last year when Jovis sent me a copy of Post-pandemic Urbanism , arriving when Covid cases worldwide were averaging around a half-million every day but w...

In lieu of a new review this week (I have deadlines keeping me from doing one), below are links to three book reviews I wrote this year for World-Architects. Click the titles to read the separate reviews. Celebrating Public Architecture: Buildings from the Open Call in Flanders 2000–21  edited by Florian Heilmeyer (Jovis, 2021) Interventions and Adaptive Reuse: A Decade of Responsible Practice  edited by Liliane Wong and Markus Berger (Birkhäuser, 2021) Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Things  by Winka Dubbeldam / Archi-Tectonics, edited by Julia van den Hout / Original Copy (Actar, 2021)

Hutong Metabolism: ZAO/standardarchitecture With contributions by Farrokh Derakhshani, Mohsen Mostafavi, Kenneth Frampton, Martino Stierli, Nondita Correa Mehrotra, Zhang Ke, Kristin Feireiss, Hans-Jürgen Commerell, Amanda Ju Aga Khan Award for Architecture / ArchiTangle , September 2021 Hardcover | 6-3/4 x 9-1/2 inches | 288 pages | 150 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783966800150 |  € 38 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Small stone hutongs, built within a courtyard-and-alley system, are emblematic of Beijing’s traditional inner-city architecture which still contends with modern, cooperate redevelopments to shape the character of the city. In one of the oldest cities in China, the important tasks of preservation and revitalization require particular sensitivity. Captured at the centre of the battlefield between development, conservation and renovation, the hutongs, on the verge of erasure, call into question the paradoxical nature of these paradigms. The Micro Hutong Renewal serie...