On Guidebooks

A portion of the paperback wrapper of A Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C., published by the Washington Metropolitan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1965. 

Are guidebooks still a valid and useful subgenre of architecture books? Do architects consult them when they visit a city? Do they walk around neighborhoods with them? Do publishers therefore still feel the need to put them out? The two titles featured in this post attest that they are still being published, but there certainly aren't as many coming out now as in the past. The days of the Pevsner guides and G.E. Kidder Smith volumes — when a single author or small team could spend years researching and documenting the architecture of a city or even a country — are long gone. Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing guidebooks produced this century being reissued decades from now, akin to Ian Nairn's books on London and Paris (though I haven't seen any of them, Owen Hatherley's alternative guides to Britain sound like they might be contenders for such).

Change has been evident in just the last decade and a half. In the middle of 2009 I reviewed two New York City guidebooks published by W. W. Norton, which immediately led to a book deal with them to write my first book, Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture, which came out at the end of 2011. In the years since then I've continued to amass new architectural guidebooks in my library, but aside from Berlin's DOM Publishers, which puts out guidebooks at a pace that cannot be matched, most publishers of architecture books seem to have stopped publishing them entirely or just pared them down to the occasional title. Of the seven books to my name, three of them are guidebooks (the rest are surveys, a topic for another blog post), all of them done by a different publisher: W. W. Norton, Prestel, and the University of Illinois Press. Except for the last's fourth edition of the AIA Guide to Chicago, which came out the same month as my Guide to Chicago's Twenty-First-Century Architecture, I'm not aware of other guides from these publishers — hardly an exhaustive survey but indicative of the state of affairs today.

If print guidebooks have slowed to a trickle (setting aside the DOM guides, many of which I've reviewed), what about digital guides? Not long after the release of my NYC guide, I explored the possibility of making it into a "guidebook app," working with a friend from college to devise the layout, interactivity, and other factors. The project eventually sputtered out, as did another app guide I was hired to write parts of a few years later. Then there was MIMOA, the helpful user-generated website that gathered modern architectural sights around the world and enabled users to craft itineraries they could share with others; the site tried to jump into app form in 2018 but failed to generate enough money in a Kickstarter campaign, leading the people involved to pull the plug on the website in 2019. The app heyday of the 2010s led to some promising presentations, such as 29GPS Architecture, and seemed to point toward "digital guidebooks" eventually supplanting printed guidebooks. That shift, alas, never happened. 

So, how do architects and fans of architecture today find out what buildings to visit in a particular locale? Speaking from my own experience, I use books and digital content (architecture websites, mainly), the first working better for older buildings and the second more ideal for newer buildings. I learned firsthand that guidebooks, like other illustrated books, require up to one year from manuscript submission to book release, making ones focused on contemporary architecture quickly out of date. Websites obviously don't have such a time lag between creation and dissemination; they are instantaneous by comparison, if not literally so. This situation would seem to hinder guidebooks, but I find the archival aspects of them appealing, in that they are a snapshot of a city's, country's or region's architecture at one particular moment; by making judgements in what to include, they also convey what is considered important in the realm of architecture at the time of publication. 

The problems with websites, on the other hand, are numerous, though two come to the fore: They are not very good at replicating the usability of printed guidebooks, which can pack a lot of information — practical and otherwise — in small packages. And most websites (I won't name names) are at the mercy of Google search algorithms that push SEO-trained posts to the top: posts that are often superficial regurgitations of well-known buildings in well-trodden places. Ideally, guides offer expertise and a unique point of view or slant on places, in packages that are clear and easy to use.

As a true believer in the relevance of architectural guidebooks, I was pleased to learn about and receive two guides released in 2022:

• AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, DC by G. Martin Moeller, Jr., Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022 (Sixth Edition) (Buy from Amazon or Bookshop)
• Fifth Avenue: From Washington Square to Marcus Garvey Park by William J. Hennessey, The Monacelli Press, 2022 (Buy from Amazon or Bookshop)

In terms of architectural guides to cities in the United States, the books put out by chapters of the American Institute for Architects (AIA) are the most comprehensive and the most regularly updated; some of the new editions coincide with cities hosting the AIA Conference on Architecture, formerly known as the AIA Convention. The most famous AIA guide is the one for New York City written by Norval White and Elliot Willensky for the AIA Convention there in 1967; it is now in its fifth edition. While it is pithy, humorous and biting at times, other AIA guides are different, exhibiting the styles of their authors and reflecting the concerns of the respective AIA chapters. What unites the AIA guides is the inclusion of buildings both historical and contemporary, as well as thorough backgrounds on the places and the neighborhoods that tend to organize the guides' chapters. The AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, DC fits this mold.

The DC guide was first published in 1965 (photo at top) to accompany the AIA Convention held in the District of Columbia that June, putting it a couple of years before NYC and making it one of the oldest guides bearing the AIA name. The editorial board was chaired by Hugh Newell Jacobsen, the great residential architect who lived in Georgetown for much of his life and died in March 2021, when G. Martin Moeller, Jr. was likely wrapping up work on the guide's sixth edition. One cannot expect a strict allegiance to the original after more than fifty years, but the basic structure of lettered tours has been retained, starting with "Tour A" at, appropriately, the Capitol. The tours in the first edition are explicit, with routes traced on the maps, but the sixth edition eschews the routes in favor of numbers simply locating the buildings on maps at the start of each chapter. As such, the "order of entries within each tour suggests one possible path," as Moeller states in the "Notes to the Reader" at the beginning of the book, "but is not intended to be prescriptive." Either scenario works in my (figurative) book, though both exhibit one of the most important practical considerations for portable guidebooks: a structure based on what a person can traverse in one afternoon or some other manageable timeframe.

The biggest difference between the first and sixth editions of the DC guide (I haven't seen the other editions) is the length of the entries: Descriptions in the first are just a few lines, if at all (some buildings are documented solely with photos), while Moeller's descriptions in the latest are often lengthy, with plenty of background information on the formal aspects of the buildings, their architects, and the historical contexts; the longer entries on many of DC's important and prominent buildings make the book a fitting armchair guidebook as well. The introduction by Moeller, editor of ArchitectureDC since 2008, is particularly helpful, tracing the place's evolution from 1791 to the present in just twenty pages. What does the guide do right? One thing (among many) is including at least one photograph for each entry; this is a model every architectural guidebook should follow. What does it get wrong? I got frustrated with the lack of lists of buildings accompanying the numbers on the maps at the start of each chapter; the omission forced back-and-forth page turning, something guides should try to minimize. The book is successful overall, mainly in spurring me to return to DC and use it both to plan ahead of time and take along as a companion.

The second guidebook highlighted here, Fifth Avenue: From Washington Square to Marcus Garvey Park, is also the second walking guide by art historian William J. Hennessey that is devoted to a north-south thoroughfare in New York City: It arrived two years after Walking Broadway: Thirteen Miles of Architecture and History. Guides devoted to New York City, architectural and otherwise, are numerous, finding all sorts of niches throughout Manhattan and the other boroughs to explore, so no wonder that both Broadway and Fifth Avenue have been written about already at length, both literally and figuratively: David Dunlap's On Broadway and Fran Leadon's Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles, for instance, plus On Fifth Avenue: Highlights of Architecture and Cultural History by Charles Ziga and Robin Langley Sommer and Fifth Avenue, 1911, from Start to Finish in Historic Block-by-Block Photographs. 

Both of Hennessey's guides, like the DC guide, are arranged in chapters of manageable length, with Fifth Avenue providing six tours from its southern tip at Washington Square to its northern terminus at the Harlem River. Previously I've given my own architectural walking tour of one mile of Fifth — the iconic, fashionable section from Bryant Park to Central Park — so I gravitated to the corresponding third chapter in the book. Following a brief contextual introduction, the chapter presents 40 numbered buildings and landscapes, plus three "detours" set off by lettered entries and a separate color scheme. My own tour sticks exclusively to building fronting Fifth Avenue, but it's hard for walking tours to not venture down some of the east-west streets that offer other architectural treasures (other NYC guidebooks in my library do the same). Hennessey does so at West 44th Street, home to a bevy of old hotels and university clubs, then later looking at the houses and apartments of the Rockefellers along West 54th Street, and finally at a few more old houses on West 56th Street. MoMA on West 53rd Street is only mentioned in passing, and although Paley Park, just east of Fifth on 53rd Street, is one of the numbered entries, Raimund Abraham's Austrian Cultural Forum New York is nowhere to be found. Clearly Hennessey is enamored with historic architecture rather than contemporary buildings, even though his miles-spanning book spans centuries: The third chapter includes the five-year-old Nike House of Innovation and a rendering of OMA's transformation of Tiffany's at 57th and Fifth.

At this point, I should probably return to the main question at the start of this post: Do these two guidebooks sufficiently inform as to the validity and usefulness of architectural guidebooks today? This pair might not be the most diverse selection for addressing the state of architectural guidebooks (the authors' texts are dry compared to Nairn, for instance, whose out-of-date guides are a joy to read for their language and perspective), but they do provide two templates for creating architectural guidebooks: a comprehensive urban guide and an urban fragment. In both cases, the structures of the books allow people to use the books to tour smaller areas over the course of a few hours. That's hardly new, or news, but it reveals how the chapters of a book work in the favor of usability, even better if the book is portable (sorry, AIA Guide to New York City). I'm biased, obviously, but a well-made guidebook makes experiencing cities much more educational and entertaining.