A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Robin Boyd: Late Works by Peter Raisbeck and Christine Phillips Uro Publications , January 2020 Paperback | 8-3/4 x 12 inches | 108 pages | English | ISBN: 9780648435594 | $49.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Robin Boyd: Late Works unveils the urban and public architectural projects designed by Robin Boyd, one of Australia’s most iconic mid-century modernists, in the final decade before his untimely death in 1971. One of the few architects in Australia’s history to have become a household name, Boyd rose to prominence as a public intellectual after the release of his book The Australian Ugliness in 1960, a biting attack on what he saw as the debased quality of Australia’s cities and design culture. Upon its release, the book drew both condemnation and praise in Australia’s media, but in the process gave Boyd a national platform from which to campaign throughout the 1960s for the betterment of Australia’s built environment. Concomitant with his public pronouncements during this ti...

Planet City by Liam Young Uro Publications , January 2020 Paperback | 4-1/4 x 7 inches | 408 pages | English | ISBN: 9780648685821 | $48.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Planet City is a project by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, exploring the productive potential of extreme densification, in a speculative future where ten billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. It imagines a radical reversal of planetary sprawl, where the world’s population retreats from our vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of the earth. It is a vision of the future that runs counter to our current world, where humans dominate the planet. Where centuries of colonization, globalization and never-ending economic extraction and expansionism has remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fa...