A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Herzog & de Meuron, 1978-2002 Nobuyuki Yoshida (Editor) A+U , February 2002 Paperback | 8-1/2 x 11-1/2 inches | 326 pages | Japanese/English | ISBN: 978-4900211551 | ¥5,800 Publisher Description : February 2002 special edition of Architecture and Urbanism (A+U). dDAB Commentary : Reviewing a book on Philipp Schaerer's Bildbauten series a couple days ago prompted me to pull of my shelf a copy of this monograph on Herzog & de Meuron by Japan's A+U. It was published in early 2002, less than 12 months after the Swiss duo of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the Pritzker Architecture Prize . Schaerer, an architect known for his imagery that blurs the line between photos and renderings, reality and digital realms, worked at Herzog & de Meuron as "knowledge manager" from 2000 to 2006, overlapping with the Pritzker, this A+U, and Archaeology of the Mind , a 2002 exhibition at the CCA that had an accompanying catalog called Natural History . Schae...

Light in Japanese Architecture by Henry Plummer, published by  A+U , 2003. Paperback, 399 pages. ( Amazon ) Plummer's long-form essay on Japanese architecture is half visual and half text, the latter serving to frame the former into twelve chapters on different types of light. From "Moonlit Gray" to "Streams of Sun", the images eloquently convey both historical and contemporary ways of responding and manipulating light. Each chapter prefaces the full-color photographs with text that attempts to poetically convey the qualities of light, though the words are most effective when describing a specific building. Naturally, temples and residences of Kyoto predominate, their relationships to nature, use of materials and colors influencing contemporary building in Japan. While this may not seem evident with the distinct break from traditional forms that occurred in the last two centuries, it comes across in Plummer's photographs, via...