A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Radical Logic: On the Work of Ensamble Studio Iker Gil (Editor), James Florio (Photographer) MAS Context , April 2021 Hardcover | 9 x 11-1/4 inches | 328 pages | English | ISBN: 9781736743607 | $70.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Radical Logic reflects on the work of the architecture office Ensamble Studio. The book documents the first twenty years of the Boston- and Madrid-based office at a key moment in their career. After having designed and built a series of remarkable structures, such as the Hemeroscopium House in Madrid, the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, The Truffle in Costa da Morte, and Structures of Landscape for Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, their Ca’n Terra House and Ensamble Fabrica projects mark the next phase of the office. Through specially commissioned interviews with the architects, essays, and photographic documentation of their work by photographer James Florio, the book provides unique insight into the ideas that drive the studio, the am...

MAS Context 32: Character Design With Company (Editor) MAS Context , 2020 Paperback | 6 x 9 inches | 418 pages | English | ISSN: 2332-5046 | $30.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Welcome to the Character issue. In this issue we explore the opportunities of conjuring fictional characters as a device to demonstrate how a building is experienced, what makes a building have or become a character, and why architects formulate their own persona as a quasi-fictional character. Join us as we consider architecture in literary terms in order to reimagine how buildings can communicate with audiences through form, expression, structure, type, decoration, experience, narrative, and metaphor. Contributions by Ellie Abrons, Joseph Altshuler, Jon Astbury, Gem Barton, T.E. Cames, Jimmy Carter, Design With Company, elii, Grant Gibson, Iker Gil, Joanna Grant, Jason Griffiths, Brian Guido, Stewart Hicks, Andrew Holder, Sam Jacob, Julia Jamrozik, Max Jarosz, Ania Jaworska, María Jerez, Coryn Kempster, J...

MAS Context 30-31: Bilbao Edited by Iker Gil Spring 2017, 456 pages The year 2017 marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Frank Gehry's contribution to the Bilbao effect.  Contribution  is an important word here, since all too often the Bilbao effect is defined solely as the outcome of the architectural icon, ignoring the wider infrastructural improvements and other pieces of architecture added to the Basque city before and since. Even twenty years later, this is the case: Bilbao = Gehry's Guggenheim. This double issue of MAS Context is then a welcome publication on the city, coming at a time when the impact of the building and other urban developments can be gauged. The two issues that fit together side by side to create the double issue are hinged about the year of the museum's opening: one is devoted to what came before and the other to what has followed. This split acknowledges the importance of the museum but shifts the focu...

Log 37: cataLog Spring/Summer 2016 Paperback, 240 pages ( Amazon ) MAS Context 27: Debate Fall 2015 Paperback/ PDF , 288 pages Log 37 In June 2015, the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, with curators Cynthia Davidson and Monica Ponce de Leon, were selected to organize the U.S. Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Ponce de Leon was dean of Taubman at the time (now she's dean at Princeton ) and Davidson is best known as the director of the Anyone Corporation , which hosted and published the ANY symposia and books back in the 1990s, and now publishes Log . Therefore it's not surprising that the official catalog of the U.S. Pavilion is published by Anycorp and playfully worded as  cataLog . In addition to presentations of the twelve projects that make up "The Architectural Imagination" – the pavilion's attempt at sparking debate around the future of Detroit through speculative architectural projec...

A week ago I attended a panel discussion at the Syracuse University Fisher Center in New York City. The evening was billed as a book launch for Matthew Stadler's Deventer , one of my favorite books from last year, but it was really a discussion on narrative and architecture through the guise of three books: Deventer , which documents two projects by Dutch architect Matthijs Bouw's One Architecture , Jimenez Lai's graphic novel Citizens of No Place , and Bjarke Ingels's comic monograph Yes Is More . While Mr. BIG was not in attendance, Lai and Bouw were joined by moderator Michael Speaks, Dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, with Stadler participating from Europe via Skype. Following some introductory remarks from Speaks, Stadler read a chapter from his book, a great one on the Seattle Public Library competition. Stadler served on the jury and recounted in the chapter how the library created a situation (having to do with paper and an overhead p...