A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Instead of digesting a new book or diving into a novel, something others do often but I do rarely, I spent my holiday break reading a five-year-old book about a trio of intertwined topics I'm particularly fond of: drawings, exhibitions, and New York City. Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970-1990  by Jordan Kauffman, published by The MIT Press , 2018 ( Amazon  /  AbeBooks ) As the book's subtitle indicates, Drawing Architecture  covers a two-decade period — the 1970s and 80s — when architectural drawings produced by contemporary architects increased in popularity: with architects, with museums, and with the wider art market. These decades, especially the 70s, are known for its so-called "Paper Architecture," which arose due to architects encountering a glut of commissions and offsetting it through theorizing and exploring ideas on paper. Although Jordan Kauffman, a researcher at MIT when he wrote the book and now an assistant professor at the University...

Sandfuture by Justin Beal The MIT Press , September 2021 Paperback | 5-1/2 x 8-3/4 inches | 257 pages | 22 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780262543095 | $24.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki's most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture's role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki's life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in...

You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore Edited by Kevin Keim The MIT Press , 2001 Paperback | 7 x 9 inches | 426 pages | 157 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780262633017 | $55.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Architect Charles Moore (1925-1993) was not only celebrated for his designs; he was also an admired writer and teacher. Though he wrote clearly and passionately about places, he was perhaps unique in avoiding the tone and stance of the personal manifesto. Through his buildings, books, and travels, Moore consistently sought insights into the questions that always underlie architecture and design: What does it mean to make a place, and how do we inhabit those places? How do we continue to build upon but respect the landscape? How do we reconcile democracy and private land ownership? What is original? What is taste? What is the relationship between past and present? How do we involve inhabitants in making places? Finally, what is public life? As t...

The Architecture of Bathing: Body, Landscape, Art Christie Pearson The MIT Press , October 2020 Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 424 pages | 266 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780262044219 | $49.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : We enter the public pool, the sauna, or the beach with a heightened awareness of our bodies and the bodies of others. The phenomenology of bathing opens all of our senses toward the physical world entwined with the social, while the history of bathing is one of shared space, in both natural and built environments. In The Architecture of Bathing , Christie Pearson offers a unique examination of communal bathing and its history from the perspective of architecture and landscape. Engagingly written, with more than 260 illustrations, many in color, The Architecture of Bathing offers a celebration of spaces in which public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, pure and impure, nature and culture commingle. Pearson takes a wide-ranging view of her s...

The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream Stefan Al The MIT Press , March 2017 Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 272 pages | 72 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780262035743 | $34.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offe...

Stone Shelters Edward Allen The MIT Press , June 1969 Hardcover | 7 x 10 inches | 213 pages | English | ISBN: 978-0262010276 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Numerous photographs, scaled maps, and drawings trace the development of this vernacular architecture from the Stone Age to the present. Professor Edward Allen was a faculty member in the MIT Department of Architecture from 1968 to 1983. REFERRAL LINKS :     dDAB COMMENTARY : Although it wasn't picked up in architectural journals until this week , longtime MIT professor Edward Allen died on July 7 at the age of 81 . Allen was best known for authoring or co-authoring ten architecture books, most of them on the technical aspects of building materials and construction and geared to architecture students. I don't own any of these seminal books, such as Fundamentals of Building Construction , which is now in its seventh edition, but I do have a copy of his first book, Stone Shelters , which came out of a Fulbright researc...

The World as an Architectural Project Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio with Gabriel Kozlowski The MIT Press , March 2020 Paperback | 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches | 576 pages | 280 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0262043960 | $50.00 Publisher's Description : The world's growing vulnerability to planet-sized risks invites action on a global scale.  The World as an Architectural Project  shows how for more than a century architects have imagined the future of the planet through world-scale projects. With fifty speculative projects by Patrick Geddes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Kiyonori Kikutake, Saverio Muratori, Takis Zenetos, Sergio Bernardes, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Luc Deleu, and many others, documented in text and images, this ambitious and wide-ranging book is the first compilation of its kind. Interestingly, architects begin to address the world as a project long before the advent of contemporary globalism and its assorted anxieties. The Spanish urban theorist and e...