A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

In 1939, Otto Neurath's  Modern Man in the Making was released by Alfred A. Knopf. Neurath was director of the International Foundation of Visual Information and used the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) system to "teach through the eye."  A recent article describes Modern Man in the Making  as a "pictorial statistical history of human technological adaptation and social cooperation [that] addressed a modern audience searching for optimistic narratives amid an economically, politically, and socially volatile era." The book is a classic, and for someone like me who veers toward arguments made in a combination of words and images, it is a book I should probably have — at the very least, I should know more about it. Although it was released as a trade book, can be found cheaply in b/w reprints, and is freely available on the Internet Archive,  first editions of Modern Man in the Making  go for hundreds and thousands of dollars . Thi...

Of the numerous books publishers send me for review — be they requested by me, pitched by them, or arriving at my doorstep unsolicited — the highest percentage of them are monographs. This fact goes against the occasional sirens over the irrelevance and anachronistic nature of monographs in our digital age, with free access ( for now ) to voluminous amounts of information on buildings and architects readily available online. But books, in my opinion, are better archives than websites, offering architects a further level of control over the finished product compared to websites. It's not uncommon today to find architecture firms, no doubt driven by savvy marketing departments and PR firms, merging their brands across platforms, such that their monographs resemble their websites. But in five or ten years time, only the books will retain that expression, thereby making them important archives of architects' work and the means of presenting it. The four recently published monograph...

Vacant Spaces NY Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, MOS Actar Publishers , October 2021 Paperback | 6 x 9 inches | 608 pages | English | ISBN: 9781948765992 | $59.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This project began by walking around our neighborhood noticing empty storefronts. Once we saw them, they were everywhere. They followed us, appearing quietly throughout New York City. Many with no signage, no “for rent,” no “coming soon.” Usually empty, sometimes dusty, sometimes with brown paper covering the glass. Now, vacancy has only increased. In the densest city in the United States. During a housing crisis. Throughout a pandemic. The quantity of vacant spaces is anyone’s best guess. It’s only partially documented. They hide in plain sight. Vacant Spaces NY is organized from large to small, general to specific. It begins by looking at vacancy within the United States and continues down to each Manhattan neighborhood, where we zoom into specific vacant spaces, where we have provided as c...

MAD Dinner by MAD.exe office (Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano, Dang Qun); edited by Brendan McGetrick, Chen ShuYu Actar Publishers , July 2008 Paperback | 8 x 9-1/2 inches | 520 pages | English/Chinese | ISBN: 9788496954212 | $49.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : MAD DINNER is the first book by MAD office, Beijing-based architectural office. Organized around the metaphor of dinner table conversation, the book is a collection of ideas and opinions about topics ranging from politics to ecology to fame to the future. The dinner’s “guests” include people from all levels of Chinese society: a government official, hairdresser, migrant laborers, a doctor, a taxi driver, and a developer are all brought together to offer their views in an atmosphere of openness and exchange. MAD’s work is embedded in a series of extended conversations with international advisors, including the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, British writer Ian Buruma, filmmakers Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke, and the artist Ai We...

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope: A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Jeffrey S. Anderson Actar Publishers , July 2021 Hardcover | 7-3/4 x 10-1/4 inches | 464 pages | English | ISBN: 9781948765183 | $59.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : While the façade is one of the most thoroughly theorized elements of architecture, it is also one of the most questioned since the end of the 19th century. Within the discipline of architecture, the traditional understanding of the façade focuses primarily on semiotic and compositional operations (such as proportional laws and linguistic codes), which are deployed on the building’s surface. In contrast to this, our material and environmental theory of the envelope proposes that the exponential development of building technologies since the mid-19th century, coupled with new techniques of management and regulation, have diminished the compositional and ornamental capacities of the envelope in favo...

Mute Icons — and Other Dichotomies on the Real in Architecture by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich with Constance Vale Actar Publishers , July 2021 Hardcover | 6-1/2 x 9-1/4 inches | 335 pages | English | ISBN: 9781945150869 | $49.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Interrogating historical, contemporary, and — more importantly— speculative images, Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture  aims to construct a viable alternative to the icon’s cliché and exhausted form of communication, positing one that is decidedly introverted and withdrawn. Developing a language and a sensibility for discovering simultaneous, contradictory, and even unexpected readings of architectural form, Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich / PATTERNS’s new book Mute Icons, aims to carve out a niche in contemporary culture and history by suggesting that far from being a crowd-pleaser, architecture can persist within society as a constructive cultural and social irritant.  No longer c...