A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Miró Rivera Architects:  Building a New Arcadia Juan Miró, Miguel Rivera University of Texas Press , November 2020 Hardcover | 9 x 12 inches | 448 pages | 326 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1477321409 | $65.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Over the course of twenty years, acclaimed studio Miró Rivera Architects has produced an innovative, refined, and imaginative body of work—both modern and respectful of time-honored building traditions—that embodies the particularities of place and blurs the line between art and architecture. The firm’s diverse practice weaves together a commitment to craftsmanship with a honed sense of materiality and space to create structures at once elegant, controlled, and pleasant to inhabit. In all, Miró Rivera Architects has won more than one hundred design awards and represented American architecture at exhibitions worldwide. The first from the firm, this volume provides critical insight into the studio’s creative process through texts, 95 drawings...

Lake|Flato: Nature | Place  |  Craft  |  Restraint   Lake|Flato Architects University of Texas Press , November 2020 Hardcover | 9-1/2 x 12 inches | 256 pages | 422 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1477321416 | $45.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Few design firms are as celebrated as San Antonio–based Lake|Flato Architects, the winners of more than three hundred international, national, and regional awards, including the American Institute of Architects’ Firm of the Year Award. This book features the firm’s large-scale pursuits: arresting, airy, and sustainable public buildings. Featuring more than three hundred stunning color photographs, Lake|Flato explores sixteen recent projects from across the United States. The images—of Mississippi’s rustic-modern and ecologically resilient Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, the crystalline Witte Museum, the sinuous Confluence Park structures in San Antonio, and other spaces—are grouped by themes reflecting the designers...

O'Neil Ford on Architecture Kathryn E. O'Rourke (Editor) University of Texas Press , April 2019 Hardcover | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches | 280 pages | 20 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1477316382 | $29.95 Publisher Description : Acclaimed for his designs of the Trinity University campus, the Little Chapel in the Woods, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Components Division Building, and numerous private houses, O’Neil Ford (1905–1982) was an important twentieth-century architect and a pioneer of modernism in Texas. Collaborating with artists, landscape architects, and engineers, Ford created diverse and enduringly rich works that embodied and informed international developments in modern architecture. His buildings, lectures, and teaching influenced a generation of Texas architects. O’Neil Ford on Architecture brings together Ford’s major professional writings and speeches for the first time. Revealing the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of his distinctive...

The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture Kathryn E. Holliday (Editor) University of Texas Press , May 2019 Hardcover | 6 x 9 inches | 448 pages | 62 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1477317617 | $29.95 Publisher Description : In 1980, David Dillon launched his career as an architectural critic with a provocative article that asked “Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?” Over the next quarter century, he offered readers of the Dallas Morning News a vision of how good architecture and planning could improve quality of life, combatting the negative effects of urban sprawl, civic fragmentation, and rapacious real estate development typical in Texas cities. The Open-Ended City gathers more than sixty key articles that helped establish Dillon’s national reputation as a witty and acerbic critic, showing readers why architecture matters and how it can enrich their lives. Kathryn E. Holliday discusses how Dillon connected culture, commerce, history, and public life...

São Paulo: A Graphic Biography Felipe Correa University of Texas Press , October 2018 Hardcover | 9-1/4 x 11-3/4 inches | 348 pages | 420 illustrations | English/Portuguese | ISBN: 978-1477316276 | $65.00 Publisher Description : While the history of São Paulo dates back more than 450 years, most of its growth took place after World War II as the city’s major economic engine shifted from agriculture to industry. Today, as São Paulo evolves into a service economy hub, Felipe Correa argues, the city must carefully examine how to better integrate its extensive inner city post-industrial land into contemporary urban uses. In São Paulo: A Graphic Biography , Correa presents a comprehensive portrait of Brazil’s largest city, narrating its fast-paced growth through archival material, photography, original drawings, and text. Additional essays from scholars in fields such as landscape architecture, ecology, governance, and public health offer a series of interdisciplinary perspectives...

The American Idea of Home: Conversations About Architecture and Design by Bernard Friedman, published by  University of Texas Press , 2017. Hardcover, 228 pages. ( Amazon ) In 2012 Bernard Friedman put out American Homes , billed as "1800 years of American residential architecture in 11 minutes." Started in 2006, the short film owed much to the work of Lester Walker, particularly his book American Homes: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Domestic Architecture , as well as a bevy of architects that he interviewed "to give the audience a glimpse into the many decisions that go into designing a home," per the introduction to his new book on the subject. I was not familiar with the documentary (its trailer is below), but the interview transcripts assembled in The American Idea of Home  make clear that Friedman's film had to leave out much of what he learned from Walker, Richard Meier, Kenneth Frampton, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Tracy Kidder, Paul Go...

Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia by Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luiz Lara, published by  University of Texas Press , 2015. Paperback, 406 pages. ( Amazon ) Like many people in the northern hemisphere, I have a big hole in my architectural education when it comes to Latin America. From recollection, history classes in undergraduate architecture school focused on the work of European architects, such as Le Corbusier, developing plans for the South American continent and Brasilia, which was presented as a playground of architectural forms but an urban planning nightmare. Grad school a decade later changed things for me, since I spent two semesters with my classmates on a project located in Ecuador, with a one-week trip that was my first to visit to the continent. Since then I've tried to fill this void as much as possible, something that isn't so hard given websites like ArchDaily promoting South American contemporary architecture, and sho...

On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture by Setha M. Low, published by University of Texas Press , 2000. ( Amazon ) The construction of public spaces involves politics as much, or even more than, design. This assertion is central to Setha Low's 25-year ethnographic/historical study of two plazas in San José, Costa Rica: Parque Central and Plaza de la Cultura, the former dating back over 200 years and the latter constructed in the 1970s and 80s. The choice of these two plazas highlights their obvious differences in design, demographics, and use, while also allowing the reader to see the similarities in terms of their political construction and renovations over time. The ordering of Low's book is an ...