A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Ian Nairn: Words in Place by Gillian Darley and David McKie Five Leaves Publications, November 2013 Hardcover | 6 x 9 inches | 160 pages | 21 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781907869877 | £10.99 | "Ian Nairn taught a generation to look, and another one to write." ( click here for publisher's description and author bio ) REFERRAL LINKS :       Reyner Banham Revisited by Richard J. Williams Reaktion Books , July 2021 Hardcover | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches | 304 pages | 55 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781789144178 | $35.00 | "Banham’s obsession with technology, and his talent for thinking the unthinkable, mean his work still resonates now, more than thirty years after his death." ( click here for publisher's description and author bio ) REFERRAL LINKS :       REVIEW : Of the 100 books surveyed in my latest book, Buildings in Print , there are very few architects/authors with multiple titles. Both Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas have four titles — not surpr...

The Inspired Landscape: Twenty-One Leading Landscape Architects Explore the Creative Process by Susan Cohen, published by Timber Press , 2015. Hardcover, 268 pages. ( Amazon ) The Making of Place: Modern and Contemporary Gardens by John Dixon Hunt, published by  Reaktion Books , 2015. Hardcover, 288 pages. ( Amazon ) Recently I received review copies of a couple books on landscape architecture: one geared to contemporary practices and the other an overview of modern and contemporary gardens. It seems appropriate to review these together, though I can't place one above the other – both are highly recommended. Susan Cohen is a landscape architect based in Greenwich, Connecticut, and coordinator of the Landscape Design Program at the New York Botanical Garden; the former has given her firsthand experience with the process of designing and realizing landscape designs, while the latter has exposed her to many of the biggest names in the profession. Both inform her b...

Travels in the History of Architecture by Robert Harbison, published by  Reaktion Books , 2010. Hardcover, 288 pages. ( Amazon ) Histories of architecture are quite a particular bunch. Known by their authors -- Trachtenberg and Hyman , Sir Banister Fletcher -- the large-format and heavily illustrated books chronologically trace major buildings in Western history, from Egypt to Post-Modernism. Geared primarily to architecture students, these and other textbook-like histories take an art-historical approach to cataloging and describing buildings based on aesthetic and formal grounds. So Greek architecture is looked at in terms of the orders and proportions; Roman architecture, the arch; Gothic architecture, groin vaults and flying buttresses, and so forth. These are incomplete histories that ignore that developments are not always linear, skipping decades or more. They also play down the social, economic, political (minus important leaders and clients), and other contextu...

USA: Modern Architectures in History by Gwendolyn Wright, published by  Reaktion Books , 2007. Paperback, 272 pages. ( Amazon ) Tackling the history of modern architecture in America -- over 140 years of it -- in under 300 pages is no easy task. Yet it is one that architecture professor and TV personality Gwendolyn Wright pulls off extremely well in this thorough, concise and often critical look at buildings and their architects from the reconstruction to today.   Wright realizes that history is not what it used to be, especially in terms of architecture. It is not a collection of buildings cut off from their context, only illustrated by dates and formal attributes; it is an ongoing project that...