A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

"What is a case study?" you might be asking, or maybe, "Is it different than a monograph?" Although the word  monograph literally applies to any book devoted to any individual subject — be it a person, a place, a thing, or even an idea — in the realm of architecture books that one-word term is used more prevalently, if not strictly, in regards to individual architects and/or firms. A book on Le Corbusier is a monograph. A book on Villa Savoye is a case study. Although I opted to have two chapters in my book Buildings in Print  titled monographs — "Monographs (Architects)" and "Monographs (Buildings)" — I still prefer to call books devoted to buildings and other individual works (landscapes, artworks, books, etc.) as "case studies." I like how the phrase indicates that the subject, the case , is being analyzed in depth: it is being studied , not just presented. Ideally, a case study delves into the meaning and other aspects of a build...

Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People Jolanthe Kugler, Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, Meike Wolfschlag (Editors) Vitra Design Museum & Wüstenrot Foundation, May 2019 Hardcover | 10 x 12 inches | 400 pages | English | ISBN: 978-3945852316 | $85.00 Publisher Description : The 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Balkrishna Doshi is one of India's most influential architects, renowned for his harmonious designs that merge the formal language of classical modernism with Indian building traditions and local craft skills. Always designed with a sensitivity to the social, environmental and economic conditions of a given commission or site, Doshi’s architecture honors the past while at the same time accommodating the rapidly changing conditions and needs of modern India. Doshi has designed more than 100 buildings—educational and cultural institutions, public buildings, private residences and low-income housing projects among them—and has taught scores of students over the co...

The Vitra Campus: Architecture – Design – Industry edited by Mateo Kries, published by  Vitra Design Museum , 2014. Paperback, 200 pages. ( Amazon ) [Cover of German edition. All images are courtesy of Vitra Design Museum.] When I traveled for a couple weeks after the completion of a semester in Italy in 1995, the first stop was in Weil am Rhein, Germany, to visit the Vitra Campus . Nowhere else in Europe could the density of contemporary architecture be found, particularly with buildings by Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, and Zaha Hadid. Remember, this was in the days before Hadid won the Pritzker and had buildings opening at the rate of something like one per month. Yes, my friends and I missed the tour of the Fire Station literally by two minutes, but the experience of Gehry's Design Museum and Ando's Conference Center was enough to make the visit worthwhile. Just shy of 20 years later I was able to return to Weil am Rhein, and in the intervening years the campus of factor...

The year 2013 is a good one for architecture exhibitions, and a few of them are highlighted below through their companion books. Two of the exhibitions are on 20th-century masters, one is on contemporary architecture in a specific region, and one is on an artist who is greatly appreciated by architects. It's close to impossible to attend every architecture exhibition of worth, but these catalogs remind us that their impact extend beyond the short months (or years, depending on if they travel) the shows exist. James Turrell: A Retrospective By Michael Govan, Chrisine Y. Kim Prestel , 2013 Hardcover, 304 pages ( Amazon ) Fans of James Turrell are being treated this year with three major exhibition on the artist: “ James Turrell: A Retrospective ” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), “ James Turrell ” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and “ James Turrell: The Light Inside ” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. To accompany the show at LACMA, curator Michael ...