A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Living the City: Of Cities, People and Stories by Lukas Feireiss, Tatjana Schneider, TheGreenEyl Spector Books , September 2020 Paperback | 8 x 11 inches | 340 pages | English | ISBN: 9783959054171 | 24.00€ PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Cities are full of stories—running in parallel, contradictory, overlapping and inseparably linked. Such stories are told in Living the City by referencing various projects from architecture, art, and urban planning. The book aims to show processes and possibilities for action in cities based on more than fifty projects from all over Europe. The publication first looks at urbanites before expanding into emotionally and poetically charged stories that consider very basic activities such as loving, living, moving, working, learning, playing, dreaming, and participating in the city. The book is being published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the former airport in Tempelhof, Berlin, which runs from September to November 2020. With ...

Frei Otto, Carlfried Mutschler, Multihalle Georg Vrachliotis Spector Books , November 2018 Paperback | 8-1/2 x 13 inches | 255 pages | 192 illustrations | German/English | ISBN: 978-3959051927 | $45.00 Publisher's Description : The temporary multipurpose hall built by Frei Otto and Carlfried Mutschler for the 1975 Federal Horticultural Show in Mannheim ranks as the world’s largest wooden grid shell construction. Although it was actually put under a preservation order in 1998, an international debate is now underway to discuss whether to demolish or maintain this structure. Working by and large without any digital computation technology, Frei Otto used a delicate suspended model to design the complex roof: modelling, drawing, and measurement techniques formed the basis for a creative culture of experimentation that involved an ongoing calibration of hand and eye, of scientific observation and technical skill—a form of manual and intellectual self-alignment, in which the pr...