A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The Letters of Colin Rowe: Five Decades of Correspondence Daniel Naegele (Editor) Artifice Press , September 2018 Hardcover | 7 x 10 inches | 560 pages | 14 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1908967534 | $49.95 Publisher's Description : Legendary architect, historian and critic, Colin Rowe taught Architecture and Urban Design at Liverpool University, the University of Texas at Austin, Cambridge University and for another 30 years at Cornell. From the late 1940s through to the early 1960s he wrote a uniquely perceptive series of articles on architecture that remains seminal to the discipline today. His books include The Mathematics of the Ideal villa and Other Essays , The Architecture of Good Intentions , the volume As I Was Saying , and most notably, Collage City , 1978, written with Fred Koetter. The recipient of the profession's highest honours, he was awarded the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education in 1985; and the Gold Medal of the Royal I...

Shape of Sound by Victoria Meyers , published by  Artifice Books on Architecture , 2014. Hardcover, 144 pages. ( Amazon ) On my first encounter with the title phrase "shape of sound" my thoughts did not go to, say, how the shape of a room makes sounds reverberate, or some other architectural thought. Instead I was reminded of a couple scenes from 1993's Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould , a great film about the Canadian pianist who died in 1982 at only 50 years old. The scenes – "Truck Stop" and "The Idea of North" – come back-to-back roughly in the middle of the film and are appropriately related to each other. In the first scene we see Gould enter a truck stop diner and selectively hear conversations within the noisy space; and in the second one he moves about a sound studio and gestures as if to conduct the recorded voices that overlap each other. In each scenario space is mundane yet important: The conversations surround Gould in the di...

Notations: Diagrams and Sequences by Bernard Tschumi, published by  Artifice Books on Architecture , 2014. Hardcover, 304 pages. ( Amazon ) Tschumi Parc de la Villette by Bernard Tschumi, published by  Artifice Books on Architecture , 2014. Paperback, 240 pages. ( Amazon ) This summer appears to be a busy time for 70-year-old architect Bernard Tschumi , at least in terms of exhibitions and publications. He has a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris ( closing July 28 ), an exhibition at the FRAC Centre ( until October 8 ), and no less than three books are being released, one of them from the Pompidou on the retrospective and two of them from the publisher Artifice Books on Architecture; the latter books are discussed here. [Page from Notations on The Manhattan Transcripts] In the preface to Notations , a collection of Tschumi's drawings on over 40 projects, the architect clearly states he never uses the word "sketch," only "notation....