A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Peter Salter – Walmer Yard Peter Salter, et. al. Circa Press , July 2019 Hardcover | 11-3/4 x 10-1/4 inches | 156 pages | 140 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1911422075 | $60.00 Publisher's Description : Peter Salter is an architect and teacher whose work has influenced several generations of students. The culmination of ten years of planning, Walmer Yard, in Notting Hill, is his first residential project in the UK and one of only a small number of buildings he has completed worldwide. Although modest in scale, the project is extraordinary in many ways. On an irregularly shaped site, Salter’s design brings four houses into a complex relationship with each other that is half formal, half familiar, interdependent, yet solitary. Similarly, the relationships between the core team members are more nuanced than in most architectural projects, since they all met at the Architectural Association in Peter’s unit, where Crispin Kelly (the client) and Fenella Collingridge (Peter’s...

What Is Architecture? An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines by Paul Shepheard, published by  MIT Press , 1994. Paperback, 132 pages. ( Amazon ) Buildings: Between Living Time and Rocky Space by Paul Shepheard, published by  Circa Press , 2016. Hardcover, 180 pages. ( Amazon ) "There is a scale of things all to do with the land , at on end of which are the forces of nature, the perception of which, at any given place, I would call landscape . At the other end of the scale are the local difficulties solved, and the opportunities opened, by our use of machines — and somewhere in between are the buildings, which, if conceived grandly and accurately enough, can extend outward to embrace each end of the scale. Landscapes, buildings, and machines." This quote falls on page 41 of What Is Architecture? and it serves as a decent encapsulation of the three subjects Paul Shepheard tackles in the popular book. The book came out in 1994, when I was in the middl...