A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The Culture Factory: Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum by Richard J. Williams Lund Humphries , January 2022 Paperback | 5-1/4 x 8 inches | 144 pages | 20 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848223974 | $34.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The Culture Factory: Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum explores the key battlegrounds in the design of the contemporary-art museum, describing the intersection of art, aesthetics and politics at the highest levels, and the commitment of states, cities and wealthy individuals to the display of art. Global in scope, the book examines key examples from Europe and the Americas to contemporary China. It describes museum building as the projection of political power, but also as a desire to acquire power. So it is a book about ambitious peripheries as much as the traditional centres: Dundee and Bilbao as well as New York and Paris. It is commonplace to assume that the contemporary-art museum has become ever more spectacular, and t...

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...

Mid-Rise Urban Living by Chris Johnson Lund Humphries , September 2021 Hardcover |  7-1/2 x 9-3/4  inches | 128 pages | 73 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848224643 | $79.99 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Many communities in cities around the world do not like the growing number of residential towers, but they also realise that the detached house is not a sustainable urban solution. Between these two extremes, there is a ‘missing middle’ of mid-rise apartment buildings that relate to the street and are within the height of trees. This book argues that the mid-rise way of urban living is an essential component of growing cities, demonstrating that the economics of this form of development are better than that of terrace houses or town houses. It begins by examining successful historic precedents of this housing type, such as the tenements of Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona and New York and successful mid-rise housing in London. The book then discusses reasons for the re...

Into the Light: The Art and Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli by Rebecca Siefert Lund Humphries , February 2021 Hardcover | 7-1/2 x 9-3/4 inches | 168 pages | 91 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848224124 | $79.99 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Into the Light: The Art and Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli centres on the interdisciplinary work of Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who inhabited a world of 'firsts': she was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (in 1974); she was among the first women hired to teach architecture studio courses at Columbia University (in 1978); and she was the first and only woman granted a solo exhibition at Peter Eisenman’s influential Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York (also 1978). Raised in northern Italy and educated at La Sapienza University in Rome during the tumultuous 1960s, Vinciarelli would b...

Architectural Tourism: Monumental Itineraries, Cultural Heritage, and Sites of Memory by Shelley Hornstein Lund Humphries , March 2021 Hardcover | 6-3/4 x 9-1/2 inches | 192 pages | 100 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848222274 | $89.99 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Since the era of pre-industrial religious pilgrimages, architecture has beckoned travellers. This book charts the relationship, and even the entanglement, between architecture and tourism. It reveals how architecture is always tied to its physical site, yet is transportable in our imagination – and into the virtual spheres of social media and armchair travel. Illustrated with a range of studies of key buildings from history and the present-day, including the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Bilbao Guggenheim, the book engagingly sheds light on topics such as the culture of ruins, the evolution of how tourists capture images of places, the rise of the designer museum, and architecture on te...

Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture Grace Ong Yan Lund Humphries , April 2021 Hardcover | 7-3/4 x 9-3/4 inches | 240 pages | 123 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848224070 | $69.99 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Between the Stock Market Crash and the Vietnam War, American corporations were responsible for the construction of thousands of headquarters across the United States. Over this time, the design of corporate headquarters evolved from Beaux-Arts façades to bold Modernist expressions. This book examines how clients and architects together crafted buildings to reflect their company’s brand, carefully considering consumers’ perception and their emotions towards the architecture and the messages they communicated. By focusing on four American corporate headquarters: the PSFS Building by George Howe and William Lescaze, the Johnson Wax Administration Building by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lever House by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the Röhm & Haas Building ...

The Architectural Association in the Postwar Years Patrick Zamarian Lund Humphries , November 2020 Hardcover | 7-1/2 x 9-3/4 inches | 208 pages | 115 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1848224063 | £45.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : In the period following the Second World War, the Architectural Association (AA) became the only British school of architecture of truly global renown. It was one of only two schools in the world which fully embraced and promoted the pedagogical ideals put forward by CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) — the other being Walter Gropius’s Harvard Graduate School of Design — and emerged as an admired example for architectural education in other countries. Many of the most famous British architects and critics of the past 60 years attended the AA, including Ahrends, Burton + Koralek, Alan Colquhoun and John Miller, Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, Frank Duffy, Eldred Evans, Kenneth Frampton, Bill Howell, John Killick, Robert Maguire, Cedri...