A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

It was 15 years ago this month that I started the website A Weekly Dose of Architecture . On January 18, 1999, I posted a feature on Louis I. Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the first of many weekly "doses." Actually, if I would have strictly kept to the weekly calendar this website would have 780 projects and about 500 book reviews (those didn't start until 2003), but given my sometimes sporadic posting the actual number is a bit less but still sizable considering it's just been me the whole time. So with the website turning 15 years old, it seems like a good time to retire the site. This may sound like the end of something, yet I'll still be posting at A Daily Dose of Architecture, including the occasional project and book review. So why retire the weekly doses? Well: Websites like ArchDaily cover projects at such a great (visual) depth and quantity to make this website superfluous, especially if I don't take the effort to...

WMS Boathouse at Clark Park in Chicago, Illinois, by Studio Gang Architects, 2013 Jeanne Gang and Studio Gang Architects (SGA) have been infatuated with water for some time now – metaphorically, in the rippling facade of the Aqua Tower; directly, in landscape projects like the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo ; or on the large scale, in projects like Reverse Effect , which proposes re-reversing the Chicago River, among other tactics, to improve the ecosystem of Lake Michigan. A recent addition to the above water-related projects in their hometown of Chicago is the WMS Boathouse at Clark Park, situated along the Chicago River about eight miles north and west of the Loop. Like Reverse Effect , the boathouse is envisioned as a means of remediating one of Chicago's waterways. As SGA describes it: "By creating a key public access point along the river’s edge, it supports the larger movement toward an ecological and recreational revival of the Chicago River....

Höhenrausch.3 in Linz, Austria, by Various Architects and Artists, 2013 The first time I heard about some of the rooftop structures atop the Im OÖ Kulturquartier (Im OÖ) in Linz, Austria, was in reading a monograph on Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow. The Linz Super Branch allowed visitors to traverse the rooftops of the buildings and gain a unique perspective on the city. Turns out that the rooftop has been updated annually since Atelier Bow-Wow's 2009 installation, per its inclusion in the catalog S AM 11 / Lookout , which accompanies an exhibition at Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, Switzerland. The catalog attributes the concept to Raoul Bunschoten, while Im OÖ attributes the urban/artistic consultancy to him and his firm CHORA . Whatever the case, the most recent additions go vertical, adding a contemporary twist to the historical skyline. Most visible from the surrounding streets, especially at night when it's awash in color, is Wen-Chih Wang's ...

Vaulted Cork Pavilion in Porto, Portugal, by Pedro de Azambuja Varela, Maria João de Oliveira and Emmanuel Novo, 2013 The following text and images are courtesy of Joao Morgado and the architects. The Vaulted Cork Pavilion was built for Amorim Isolamentos Lda., to demonstrate its cork building materials at Concreta 2013 , a biennial building fair held at Exponor, Porto. This architecture and research project was developed by Pedro de Azambuja Varela, Maria João de Oliveira and Emmanuel Novo, while studying in the Digital Architecture Advanced Studies Course (CEAAD), a joint venture between ISCTE-IULisboa and FAUPorto. All the fabrication was carried out at VFABLAB-IUL, and the coordination was carried out by Professors Alexandra Paio and José Pedro Sousa. This construction started out as challenge to materialize concepts and investigation developed within CEAAD during 2012 and 2013, all related with expanded cork agglomerate. These concepts are: the possibility to span vault...

A House for Pink Floyd by arqbauraum, 2013 The following text and images are courtesy of Susana dos Santos, José Pedro Azevedo and Nuno Cabanal ( arqbauraum ) for  their entry in the ICARCH Competition " A House for Pink Floyd ." “How would the painter or poet express anything other than his encounter with the world” - Maurice Merleau Ponty “Much of the modern movement has drawn the intellect and the sight, but left aside the human body and its sensations […] – but also left the memories and the dreams dislodged.” - Juhani Pallasmaa The work is based on Man meeting with himself and does so through the senses. Actual architecture has the ease of technological advances that everyday flood the offices with new materials. However all these amenities have achieved are for buildings to be deprived of presence, making them the fruit of unbridled consumption, of the ostentation and many times from the creator's Ego. Today architecture is endowed with a star syst...

V' House in Maastricht, Netherlands, by Wiel Arets Architects, 2013 The following text and images are courtesy of Wiel Arets Architects (WAA). V’ House was constructed for a couple that collects vintage cars, and is stitched within the medieval tapestry of Maastricht. The city dictates all new structures remain within the envelope of pre-existing buildings, and so a cut was created in the house’s front façade to generate a triangulated surface, which leads from one neighbor’s sloped roof to the opposite neighbor’s vertical bearing wall. As the house’s site is long and narrow, voids were cut into the maximum permitted volume to ensure that natural light spills throughout the interior. The ground floor is both open to the exterior elements and sunken to the rear of the site, which makes possible the maximum two-story height allowance. A covered portion of this exterior space serves as an outdoor parking garage for the owners’ collection of Aston Martins. As the house finds r...