A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Post-pandemic Urbanism Edited by Doris Kleilein, Friederike Meyer Jovis , December 2021 Paperback | 5-3/4 x 8-1/4 inches | 192 pages | 50 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783868597103 | $28.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Working from home, online shopping, undertourism: the disruptive upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic challenge architecture and urban planning. New spaces for action are opening up, but are they being utilized? From dividing traffic space fairly to urban food policies, from new places for work and recreation to the question on how communities can be oriented towards the common good: Post-pandemic Urbanism envisions a near future and discusses how cities and their transformative power can help to handle this current crisis and those to come. REFERRAL LINKS :       REVIEW : It was November of last year when Jovis sent me a copy of Post-pandemic Urbanism , arriving when Covid cases worldwide were averaging around a half-million every day but w...

All the Queens Houses: An Architectural Portrait of New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough by Rafael Herrin-Ferri Jovis , October 2021 Paperback | 4-3/4 x 7 inches | 272 pages | 244 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783868596564 | €22.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The borough of Queens has long been celebrated as the melting pot of America. It was the birthplace of North American religious freedom in the seventeenth century, hosted two World’s Fairs in the twentieth, and is currently home to over a million foreign-born residents participating in the American experience. In 2013, Spanish-born artist and architect Rafael Herrin-Ferri began to paint a portrait of the “World’s Borough”—not with images of its diverse population, or its celebrated international food scene, but with photographs of its highly idiosyncratic housing stock. While All the Queens Houses is mainly a photography book celebrating the broad range of housing styles in New York City’s largest and most diverse...

GAM.17: Wood. Rethinking Material Edited by Tom Kaden Jovis , May 2021 Paperback | 9 x 11 inches | 296 pages | German/English | ISBN: 9783868596632 | 19.95€ PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : As an organic building material, wood is held in particularly high esteem in this age of climate crisis. A component of environmentally friendly resource cycles, wood demonstrates its innovative potential when used in new technological developments and hybrid applications that are suited to complex, modern architectural tasks. We have only just started reimagining wood as a cutting-edge, versatile building material of the future. GAM. 17 takes a new look at wood—at its multi-faceted nature and architectural possibilities— and proposes building and design concepts that fully utilize the material’s potential for a more climate-friendly construction industry. This is further complemented by a look back at the history of building with wood and the ideological entanglements that have long stood in the w...

Adaptive Re-Use: Strategies for Post-War Modernist Housing Maren Harnack, Natalie Heger, Matthias Brunner (Editors) Jovis , April 2021 Paperback | 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches | 144 pages | 60 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783868596113 | 29.80€ PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : In prosperous regions, housing markets are under significant pressure. With the focus on preserving land and developing brownfield sites, post-war housing estates are being earmarked for densification, as their density is perceived as rather low and the ownership is often concentrated in the hands of only a few publicly owned housing associations. In this setting, post-war estates are in danger of losing their characteristic spatial structures and landscaping. Adaptive Re-Use discusses strategies for the development of post-war housing by referring to European case studies from the period of 1945 to 1975. The contributions in this edited volume show how housing estates from different European countries are listed an...

Lighting Design & Process by Office for Visual Interaction, published by  Jovis , 2014. Hardcover, 216 pages. ( Amazon ) I'll admit that when it comes to light, I veer toward books that focus on natural light, such as titles like Henry Plummer's Nordic Light and Mary Ann Steane's The Architecture of Light . As an architect I understand the important of artificial lighting for interiors and exteriors, even though I believe the best buildings exploit natural light's qualities to their fullest. People cannot exist today without artificial lighting, and therefore it should be an integral part of the design process. One problem for me is that books on lighting design, rather than those on natural light, tend to be overly technical, with an emphasis on general conditions rather that specific applications. This is the case with a book by ERCO I featured five years ago , but a book by Herve Descottes of L'Observatoire International, which I briefly reviewed three ...