A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The recent receipt of two review books got me thinking about the past and the future of architecture books. The first one is  This is Architecture: Writing on Buildings , a collection of excerpted texts about buildings, spanning from the mid-1800s to the 2010s.  This is Architecture: Writing on Buildings  edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, published by  Unicorn Publishing Group , October 2022 ( Amazon  /  Bookshop ) Edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, respectively chair and executive director of the UK's Royal Fine Art Commission Trust , This Is Architecture is billed as "different" from the typical "writing on building by architects [that] is limited to exculpatory manifestos or technical sermonizing to a captive congregation of converts." They describe the nearly 100 excerpted texts as "exceptional examples of writing on buildings by writers  which merit inclusion on the quality of the writing alone" (emphasis in original). So read...

Binational Urbanism: On the Road to Paradise by Bernd Upmeyer, published by Valiz/Trancity, 2015. Paperback, 224 pages. ( Amazon ) Reviewed by Matas Šiupšinskas Split Identities Mass migration is not a modern phenomenon. From crusades to slave trade, people have been displaced or have been displacing themselves in order to reach new territories of opportunity. Even if migration has recently become a huge problem and is seen only negatively, some voices express different kinds of opinion. In a contemporary global economy migration does not always end up with permanent displacement, and because of that it becomes possible to look into migrants differently. So what kind of new perspective opens up by this twist of perception? Bernd Upmeyer argues that in the recent decades a new phenomenon appeared: binational urbanism. A binational urbanist is constantly living between two different cultures and two different sets of urban landscapes. He is not a migrant, but an ultimat...