A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The most recent numbered 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, was #48, back in December . I wasn't planning on continuing the series this year-of-doing-things-differently ( or so I thought ), but a couple of weeks ago I brought back the "Briefs"  to play around with ChatGPT , which I had been hesitant to dive into but was told by numerous people that I MUST try it. At that time I also mentioned an in-progress "Brief" with eight books — here they are. Concrete in Switzerland: Histories from the Recent Past  edited by Salvatore Aprea, Nicola Navone, Laurent Stalder and Sarah Nichols, published by EPFL Press in May 2022 ( Amazon / Bookshop ) Concrete in Switzerland is a companion publication to Beton , the exhibition held at S AM (Swiss Architecture Museum) in Basel from November 2021 to April 2022. ...

Last week I cobbled together eight books, some of which publishers had sent me more than a year ago, in an effort to write a "Better Late Than Never" installment of  "Book Briefs,"   something I had done back in April 2018 with Book Briefs #35 . But, sensing I would not be able to absorb the books quickly enough to get the post done in less than a week, I thought that revisiting that five-year-old post would be a great way of (finally) dipping into the timesaver that is AI, asking OpenAI's ChatGPT to write similar one-paragraph reviews and see what it came up with. So that's what I did. Specifically, I told ChatGPT to "Give a short, one-paragraph review of 'X Book' by Y author." Its output is featured below, in four of the six books that were part of Book Briefs #35, accompanied by my own "briefs" from 2018 and blurbs from the publishers.  How do the reviews compare, my own vs. OpenAI? My takes are certainly more personal, with f...

This latest 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 — features six books in three pairs. 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. Two "Green" Books: Green Reconstruction: A Curricular Toolkit for the Built Environment  edited by Reinhold Martin, Jacob R. Moore, Jordan Steingard | Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture | September 2022 | 7-1/4 x 10-1/2 inches | 266 pages | $0 ( available as a PDF ) The Buell Center describes Green Reconstruction  as "an outline, an open work, for the repair of a world ravaged by three intersecting crises — of mutual care, of racial oppression, and of climate, all intersecting in turn with economic inequality." As the subtitle of the book mak...

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. This installment features three books put out by Altrim Publishers : one case study and two travel guides. Hāthigaon: A Settlement of Elephants and Mahouts  by Sanjeev Vidyarthi, Megha Bhatnagar, Gaurav Bhatnagar and Rajan Bhatt | Altrim Publishers | 2022 | 10 x 10 inches | 124 pages | €32 | Amazon A couple of years ago I learned about RMA Architects' Hāthigaon Housing in Working in Mumbai , the 2020 monograph on Rahul Mehrotra's firm. In that book the housing project for elephants and their caretakers ( mahouts ) near Jaipur, India, is documented across fourteen pages. While that length is sufficient for conveyin...

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. Ambiguous Territory:  Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural edited by Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, David Salomon, Kathy Velikov | Actar Publishers | August 2022 | 6-1/2 x 10 inches | 320 pages | $39.95 |  Amazon  /  Bookshop Ambiguous Territory began as a symposium and exhibition at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning in fall 2017, with the exhibition traveling to three other schools of architecture in Virginia and New York over the next two years. The Ambiguous Territory  book features the 40-plus projects from the exhibition as well as close to...

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. This installment features four recently published monographs in two pairs: two small ones (for architecture books) followed by two big ones. Verify in Field: Projects and Coversations Höweler Yoon  by Eric Höweler and J. Meejin Yoon | Park Books | May 2022 | 7-3/4 x 9-1/4 inches | 360 pages | $50 |  Amazon  /  Bookshop Verify in Field , the second monograph on Boston's Höweler + Yoon , comes about a dozen years after their first book, Expanded Practice , and as the studio moves forward in its third decade of existence. In 2009, at the release of the first monograph, their most famous project was mos...