A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde by Joseph Giovannini Rizzoli , November 2021 Hardcover | 9 x 11 inches | 876 pages | 698 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780847858798 | $50.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : In Architecture Unbound , noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the 1960s, social unrest and cultural disruption opened the way for investigations into an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture. Explorations emerged in the 1970s, and built projects surfaced in the 1980s, taking digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale projects finally landing on the far side of the millennium.   Architecture Unbound traces all of these developments and influences, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history not only of the sources of contemporary currents in architecture bu...

Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing Edited by Michael Merrill Lars Müller Publishers , October 2021 Hardcover | 9-1/2 x 11-3/4 inches | 512 pages | 919 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783037786444 | $85.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : "The importance of a drawing is immense, because it’s the architect’s language." — Louis Kahn to his masterclass, 1967 Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) was one of the most significant architects of the twentieth century and his influence is present today in ways both profound and subtle. Unlike previous publications on Kahn, which have focused on his built work and which considered the drawings foremost as illustrations of these, this is the first in-depth study of drawings as primary sources of insight into Kahn’s architecture and creative imagination. By offering a spectrum of close readings of drawings by Kahn and his associates in a series of incisive and richly illustrated essays, this book is at once an intimate artistic portrait of thi...

The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad:  The "Miniature Boom" of Mid-Century Modernism by Teresa Fankhänel Bloomsbury Visual Arts , July 2021 Paperback | 7 x 9 inches | 224 pages | 150 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781350152830 | $37.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Based on the recent discovery of his fully-preserved private archive-models, photos, letters, business files, and drawings-this book tells the story of Theodore Conrad (1910-1994), the most prominent and prolific architectural model-maker of the 20th century. Conrad's innovative models were instrumental in the design and realization of many icons of American Modernism-from the Rockefeller Center to Lever House and the Seagram Building. He revolutionized the production of architectural models and became a model-making entrepreneur in his own right. Yet, despite his success and the well-known buildings he helped to create, until now little has been known about Conrad's work and his impact on 20th...

Building Bad: How Architectural Utility is Constrained by Politics and Damaged by Expression by Jonathan Ochshorn Lund Humphries , September 2021 Hardcover | 6-3/4 x 9-1/2 inches | 232 pages | 34 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848224667 | £45.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : In this book, the author argues that architectural functionality is often constrained by political and economic forces, while it is also effectively undermined by modes of expression. Utilitarian building elements—for example, windows or skylights intended to bring daylight into offices or factories—may be subject to excessive heat gain, thereby coming into conflict with an evolving politics of energy conservation and global warming mitigation. Yet at the other extreme they may be deployed as part of expressive systems whose value, understood in terms of symbol and metaphor, can overwhelm these utilitarian considerations. Politics and economics, in other words, establish lower and upper bounds for all uti...

Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency by Barnabas Calder Pelican Books, October 2021 Hardcover | 5-1/2 x 8-3/4 inches | 576 pages | English | ISBN: 9780241396735 | £20.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The story of architecture is the story of humanity. The buildings we live in, from the humblest pre-historic huts to today's skyscrapers, reveal our priorities and ambitions, our family structures and power structures. And to an extent never explored until now, architecture has been shaped in every era by our access to energy, from fire to farming to fossil fuels. In this ground-breaking history of world architecture, Barnabas Calder takes us on a dazzling tour of some of the most astonishing buildings of the past fifteen thousand years, from Uruk, via Ancient Rome and Victorian Liverpool, to China's booming megacities. He reveals how every building - from the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Damascus to a typical Georgian house - was influenced by the energy av...

Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture Edited by Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka Bloomsbury Visual Arts , June 2018 Hardcover | 6 x 9 inches | 280 pages | 38 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781350170032 | $39.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Mediated Messages presents a collection of original writing exploring the role played by the media in the development of postmodern architecture in the 1970s and 80s. The book's twelve chapters and case-studies examine a range of contemporary periodicals and exhibitions to explore their role in the postmodern. This focus on mediation as a key feature of architectural post-modernism, and the recognition that post-modernism grew out of developments in the media, opens up the possibility of an important new account of post-modernism distinct from existing narratives. Accompanied by a contextualizing introduction, the essays are arranged across four thematic sections (covering: image...