A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The recent publication of two books prompted me to ponder the future of cities and do a write-up of them together: Implementing Urban Design: Green, Civic, and Community Strategies  by Jonathan Barnett, published by  Routledge , June 2023 ( Amazon  /  Bookshop ) Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles  edited by James Sanders, published by  Rizzoli Electa , September 2023 ( Amazon  /  Bookshop ) Implementing Urban Design is the latest of many books about urban design and planning by Jonathan Barnett, whose career and CV span around fifty years. Over that time he has served as an architect, planner, educator, and an advisor to cities in and beyond the US, including Charleston, South Carolina, Omaha, and New York City, where he was Director of Urban Design in the Department of City Planning. When I received  Implementing Urban Design , one of the first things I did was scour my bookshelves for other books by B...

Of the numerous books publishers send me for review — be they requested by me, pitched by them, or arriving at my doorstep unsolicited — the highest percentage of them are monographs. This fact goes against the occasional sirens over the irrelevance and anachronistic nature of monographs in our digital age, with free access ( for now ) to voluminous amounts of information on buildings and architects readily available online. But books, in my opinion, are better archives than websites, offering architects a further level of control over the finished product compared to websites. It's not uncommon today to find architecture firms, no doubt driven by savvy marketing departments and PR firms, merging their brands across platforms, such that their monographs resemble their websites. But in five or ten years time, only the books will retain that expression, thereby making them important archives of architects' work and the means of presenting it. The four recently published monograph...

Analysing Architecture Simon Unwin Routledge , January 2014 (fourth edition) Paperback | Page Size inches | 336 pages | 816 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0415719162 | $75.95 Publisher's Description : Now in its fourth edition, Analysing Architecture has become internationally established as the best introduction to architecture. Aimed primarily at those wishing to become professional architects, it also offers those in disciplines related to architecture (from archaeology to stage design, garden design to installation art), a clear and accessible insight into the workings of this rich and fascinating subject. With copious illustrations from his own notebooks, the author dissects examples from around the world and all periods of history to explain underlying strategies in architectural design and show how drawing may be used as a medium for analysis. This new edition of Analysing Architecture is revised and expanded. Notably, the chapter on ‘Basic Elements of Arc...

Shadow: the architectural power of withholding light Simon Unwin Routledge , 2020 Paperback | Page Size inches | 184 pages | 386 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0367442583 | $25.95 Publisher's Description : Each of these Analysing Architecture Notebooks is devoted to a particular theme in understanding the rich and varied workings of architecture. They can be thought of as addenda to the foundation volume Analysing Architecture , which first appeared in 1997 and has subsequently been enlarged in three further editions. Examining these extra themes as a series of Notebooks, rather than as additional chapters in future editions, allows greater space for more detailed exploration of a wider variety of examples, whilst avoiding the risk of the original book becoming unwieldy. Shadows may be insubstantial but they are, nevertheless, an important element in architecture. In prehistoric times we sought shade as a refuge from the hot sun and chilling rain. Through history...

Digital Monuments: The Dreams and Abuses of Iconic Architecture Simone Brott Routledge , October 2019 Paperback | 5 x 7-1/4 inches | 196 pages | 49 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0367201128 | $44.95 Publisher's Description : Digital Monuments radically explodes "iconic architecture" of the new millennium and its hijacking of the public imagination via the digital image. Hallucinatory constructions such as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi are all introduced to the world by immortal digital imagery that floods the internet—yet comes to haunt the actualised buildings. Like holograms, these "digital monuments," which violently push physics and engineering to their limits, flicker eerily between the real and the unreal—invoking fantasies of omnipotence, immortality and utopian cities. But this experience of iconic architecture as a digital drea...

Architecture of Defeat Kengo Kuma Routledge , June 2019 Paperback | 6 x 9 inches | 176 pages | 76 illustrations | English (translated by Hiroshi Watanabe) | ISBN: 978-1138390843 | $39.95 Publisher's Description : Kengo Kuma, one of Japan’s leading architects, has been combining professional practice and academia for most of his career. In addition to creating many internationally recognized buildings all over the world, he has written extensively about the history and theory of architecture. Like his built work, his writings also reflect his profound personal philosophy. Architecture of Defeat is no exception. Now available in English for the first time, the book explores events and architectural trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in both Japan and beyond. It brings together a collection of essays which Kuma wrote after disasters such as the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11 and the earthquake and tsunami that obliterated mu...

New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City Julia Solis Routledge , November 2004 (2007 in paperback) Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11-1/2 inches | 252 pages | 210 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0415950138 | $47.95 Publisher Description : Did alligators ever really live in New York's sewers? What's it like to explore the old aqueducts beneath the city? How many levels are beneath Grand Central Station? And how exactly did the pneumatic tube system that New York's post offices used to employ work? In this richly illustrated historical tour of New York's vast underground systems, Julia Solis answers all these questions and much, much more. New York Underground takes readers through ingenious criminal escape routes, abandoned subway stations, and dark crypts beneath lower Manhattan to expose the city's basic anatomy. While the city is justly famous for what lies above ground, its underground passages are equally legendary and tell us just as much about how the c...