A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

MAD Dinner by MAD.exe office (Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano, Dang Qun); edited by Brendan McGetrick, Chen ShuYu Actar Publishers , July 2008 Paperback | 8 x 9-1/2 inches | 520 pages | English/Chinese | ISBN: 9788496954212 | $49.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : MAD DINNER is the first book by MAD office, Beijing-based architectural office. Organized around the metaphor of dinner table conversation, the book is a collection of ideas and opinions about topics ranging from politics to ecology to fame to the future. The dinner’s “guests” include people from all levels of Chinese society: a government official, hairdresser, migrant laborers, a doctor, a taxi driver, and a developer are all brought together to offer their views in an atmosphere of openness and exchange. MAD’s work is embedded in a series of extended conversations with international advisors, including the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, British writer Ian Buruma, filmmakers Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke, and the artist Ai We...

Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design by Albena Yaneva 010 Publishers , December 2009 Hardcover | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches | 128 pages | 30 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9789064507144 | €19.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The book presents an ethnographic account of the design rhythm in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Written as a collection of short stories, it draws on the mundane trajectories of models and architects at the OMA and shows how innovation permeates design practice, how everyday techniques and workaday choices set new standards for buildings and urban phenomena. In these stories of invention the "Eureka!" moments are missing. They are replaced by routine gestures of model making, recycling, assembling, recollecting, rescaling. This enquiry on architecture-in-the-making is based on participant observation in the office of Rem Koolhaas, extensive interviews with architects, and photo documentation on various pro...

Theoretical Practice by David Chipperfield Artemis London Limited, 1994 Hardcover | 6 x 8-1/4 inches | 191 pages | English | ISBN: 9783760884233 | $45.00 FROM THE FLAPS : "As architects we are privileged to work with the physical world — with materials, brick, stone, wood, glass, metal, with forms and with light. We do not deal in speculation about or observation of the physical world but with the very stuff itself. Poets, painters and politicians should be jealous of our advantage." In this book, David Chipperfield sets out a theory of design that rejects centralised ideologies and acknowledges the importance of both intuition and intellect. For Chipperfield, all design is an intellectual craft, involving the reconciliation of ideas as well as responding to the influence of process and materials. Images from built projects reinforce his themes while the central body of the book emphasises the experimentation carried out in projects for buildings in England, Japan, and G...

Palladio by James S. Ackerman Penguin Books, 1976 (2nd edition) Paperback | 5 x 7 inches | 196 pages | 96 illustrations | English | ISBN: 0140208453 | $6.95 BACK COVER DESCRIPTION : Palladio is the most imitated architect in history. His buildings have been copied all over the Western world – from Leningrad to Philadelphia – and his ideas on proportion are still current nearly four hundred years after his death. In this, the first full account of his career to be published in English, Professor James Ackerman investigates the reasons for his enormous and enduring success. He presents him in his historical setting but is constantly alert to his relevance for us today. The Architect and Society  – The aim of this series, specially written for Penguin Books, is to present the great architects of the world in their social and cultural environments. James S. Ackerman was born in San Francisco in 1919 and studied at Yale and New York University. Professor Ackerman lived several yea...

You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore Edited by Kevin Keim The MIT Press , 2001 Paperback | 7 x 9 inches | 426 pages | 157 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780262633017 | $55.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Architect Charles Moore (1925-1993) was not only celebrated for his designs; he was also an admired writer and teacher. Though he wrote clearly and passionately about places, he was perhaps unique in avoiding the tone and stance of the personal manifesto. Through his buildings, books, and travels, Moore consistently sought insights into the questions that always underlie architecture and design: What does it mean to make a place, and how do we inhabit those places? How do we continue to build upon but respect the landscape? How do we reconcile democracy and private land ownership? What is original? What is taste? What is the relationship between past and present? How do we involve inhabitants in making places? Finally, what is public life? As t...

Where Are the Women Architects? by Despina Stratigakos Princeton University Press , April 2016 Paperback | 5 x 8 inches | 128 pages | 15 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780691170138 | $19.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : For a century and a half, women have been proving their passion and talent for building and, in recent decades, their enrollment in architecture schools has soared. Yet the number of women working as architects remains stubbornly low, and the higher one looks in the profession, the scarcer women become. Law and medicine, two equally demanding and traditionally male professions, have been much more successful in retaining and integrating women. So why do women still struggle to keep a toehold in architecture? Where Are the Women Architects? tells the story of women’s stagnating numbers in a profession that remains a male citadel, and explores how a new generation of activists is fighting back, grabbing headlines, and building coalitions that promise to bring about...

Leaves of Iron: Glenn Murcutt, Pioneer of an Australian Architectural Form by Philip Drew Angus&Robertson, 1991 (first published in Australia in 1985 by The Law Book Company Limited) Paperback | 10-1/2 x 11 inches | 148 pages | English | ISBN: 9780207173271 | AUST $39.95 DESCRIPTION FROM BACK COVER : For over 200 years, Australia has been searching for its identity. Often, this has led to the imposition of inappropriate European cultural values on a very different, very harsh, southern continent. In architecture, most of all, the manifest error of implanting old world styles in this new world landscape has led to a desperate need for an open, independent architecture. That need is answered by Glenn Murcutt and his development of a strong and attractive, yet practical, architectural form. He has achieved this through a close scrutiny of, and a great sensitivity for, Australian landscape and climate. In Leaves of Iron , Philip Drew has produced a work which, in its sensitivity an...

Imagining Ground Zero: Official and Unofficial Proposals for the World Trade Center Site by Suzanne Stephens, with Ian Luna and Ron Broadhurst Rizzoli /Architectural Record, October 2004 Hardcover | 9-1/4 x 12-1/4 inches | 252 pages | English | ISBN: 9780847826575 | $60.00 FROM THE FLAPS : The most important building competition in the world today, and the most important one since the international design competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922, is for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. It has inspired a multitude of designs and has engaged architects on a global scale in the re-imagining of the twin towers' vacant sixteen-acre site. Published in conjunction with Architectural Record , the preeminent architecture journal in the United States, Imagining Ground Zero: Official and Unofficial Proposals for the World Trade Center Site  documents not only the master plan competition, won by Studio Daniel Libeskind and sponsored by the Low...