A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

A portion of the paperback wrapper of A Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. , published by the Washington Metropolitan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1965.   Are guidebooks still a valid and useful subgenre of architecture books? Do architects consult them when they visit a city? Do they walk around neighborhoods with them? Do publishers therefore still feel the need to put them out? The two titles featured in this post attest that they are still being published, but there certainly aren't as many coming out now as in the past. The days of the Pevsner guides and G.E. Kidder Smith volumes — when a single author or small team could spend years researching and documenting the architecture of a city or even a country — are long gone. Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing guidebooks produced this century being reissued decades from now, akin to Ian Nairn's books on London and Paris  (though I haven't seen any of them, Owen Hatherley's alternat...

Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture by Robert A. M. Stern, with Leopoldo Villardi The Monacelli Press , March 2022 Hardcover | 7-1/2 x 10 inches | 520 pages | English | ISBN: 9781580935890 | $60.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : For more than fifty years, Robert A. M. Stern has designed extraordinary buildings around the world. Founding partner of Robert A. M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), Stern was once described as “the brightest young man I have ever met in my entire teaching career” by Philip Johnson and recently called “New York City’s most valuable architect” by Bloomberg.   Encompassing autobiography, institutional history, and lively, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture surveys the world of architecture from the 1960s to the present and Robert A. M. Stern’s critical role in it. The book chronicles Stern’s formative years, architectural education, and half-century of architectural practice, touching on a...

Santa Fe Modern: Contemporary Design in the High Desert by Helen Thompson, photographs by Casey Dunn The Monacelli Press , November 2021 Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 240 pages | English | ISBN: 9781580935616 | $50.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Santa Fe Modern reveals the high desert landscape as an ideal setting for bold, abstracted forms of modernist houses. Wide swaths of glass, deep-set portals, long porches, and courtyards allow vistas, color, and light to become integral parts of the very being of a house, emboldening a way to experience a personal connection to the desert landscape. The architects featured draw from the New Mexican architectural heritage–they use ancient materials such as adobe in combination with steel and glass, and they apply this language to the proportions and demands exacted by today’s world. The houses they have designed are confident examples of architecture that is particular to the New Mexico landscape and climate, and yet simultaneously evoke t...

Breuer’s Bohemia:  The Architect, His Circle, and Midcentury Houses in New England by James Crump The Monacelli Press , September 2021 Hardcover | 8-3/4 x 11 inches | 248 pages | English | ISBN: 9781580935784 | $60.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which is often overshadowed by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his large-scale projects. Breuer’s Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in Connecticut and Massachusetts from the 1950s through the ’70s, many of which were commissioned by a few culturally progressive clients—chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin—who coalesced around him into a dynamic social circle. Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder,   Arthur Miller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Philip Roth, and William Styron, and more, marking a unique intersection of postwar architecture, ar...

Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman's Life Piet Oudolf, Noel Kingsbury The Monacelli Press , March 2021 (Expanded edition) Paperback | 6-3/4 x 9 inches | 432 pages | English | ISBN: 9781580935708 | $40.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : An intimate look at the personal garden of the Dutch landscape designer renowned for his plantings at the High Line in New York City, and Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park. Hummelo—near the village of the same name in Gelderland in the eastern Netherlands—is visited by thousands of gardeners seeking inspiration each year. It is Piet Oudolf’s home, his personal garden laboratory, a former nursery run by his wife Anja, and the place where he first tested new designs and created the new varieties of perennials that are now widely available. A follow-up to Oudolf’s successful Landscapes in Landscapes—Hummelo tells the story of how the garden has evolved over the past three decades since Oudolf, Anja, and their two young sons moved onto the ...

Wayne Thom: Photographing the Late Modern Emily Bills The Monacelli Press , December 2020 Hardcover | 9 x 11 inches | 248 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1580935579 | $60.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : A key primer to late-twentieth century Modernism, this monograph devoted to Wayne Thom chronicles his photographic practice and the architectural and urban environment in which he worked. An innovative chronicler of the booming West Coast urbanism of the 1960s and 70s, Thom’s photographs of key projects by path-breaking architecture firms such as William Pereira & Associates, Edward Durell Stone, SOM, Gio Ponti, John Portman, I. M. Pei, and A. Quincy Jones helped establish the idea of cool architectural glamour of the era. Raised in Hong Kong, Thom moved to California in the mid-1960s and trained in the technical craftsmanship of photography, adept at harnessing natural light for both interior and exterior compositions. He soon began working with the figures who would become his c...