A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges June Williamson, Ellen Dunham-Jones Wiley , January 2021 Hardcover | 8-1/4 x 10-1/4 inches | 272 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1119149170 | $65.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This amply-illustrated book, second in a series, documents how defunct shopping malls, parking lots, and the past century’s other obsolete suburban development patterns are being retrofitted to address current urgent challenges they weren’t designed for: improving public health, increasing resilience in the face of climate change, leveraging social capital for equity, supporting an aging society, competing for jobs, and disrupting automobile dependence. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges provides summaries, data, and references on how these challenges manifest in suburbia and discussion of successful urban design strategies to address them in Part I. Part II documents how inn...

Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm: The People, Stories, and Strategies Behind HOK Patrick MacLeamy Wiley , April 2020 Hardcover | 7-1/4 x 9-1/4 inches | 288 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1119685302 | $75.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Designing a World Class Architecture Firm: The People, Stories and Strategies Behind HOK tells the history of one of the largest design firms in the world and draws lessons from it that can help other architects, interior designers, urban planners and creative services professionals grow bigger or better. Former HOK CEO Patrick MacLeamy shares the revolutionary strategies HOK’s founders deployed to create a brand-new type of architecture firm. He pulls no punches, revealing the triple crisis that almost bankrupted HOK and describes how any firm can survive and thrive. Designing a World Class Architecture Firm tells the inside story of many of HOK’s most iconic buildings, including the National Air and Space Museum, Moscone Convention Center...

Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future Douglas Farr Wiley , April 2018 Hardcover | 8-3/4 x 11 inches | 400 pages | English | ISBN: 978-0470537176 | $80.00 Publisher Description : As a follow up to his widely acclaimed Sustainable Urbanism , this new book from author Douglas Farr embraces the idea that the humanitarian, population, and climate crises are three facets of one interrelated human existential challenge, one with impossibly short deadlines. The vision of Sustainable Nation is to accelerate the pace of progress of human civilization to create an equitable and sustainable world. The core strategy of Sustainable Nation is the perfection of the design and governance of all neighborhoods to make them unique exemplars of community and sustainability. The tools to achieve this vision are more than 70 patterns for rebellious change written by industry leaders of thought and practice. Each pattern represents an aspirational, future-oriented...

Forty Ways to Think About Architecture: Architectural history and theory today edited by Iaian Borden, Murray Fraser and Barbara Penner, published by  Wiley , 2014. Paperback, 280 pages. ( Amazon ) What at first glance appears to be a collection of forty essays on architectural history and theory is actually more focused, since the "Forty" in the title also refers to Adrian Forty, Emeritus Professor of the History of Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). Called "the UK's leading academic in the discipline," I'm ashamed to admit I have not read one of Forty's books. Of course, this may be excusable given that he's only written three books since 1986, when Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750-1980 was released: Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture , his most popular book, published in 2000, and 2012's Concrete and Culture: A Material History . The forty contributors – a...

February is Book Month on A Daily Dose of Architecture. The " 28 in 28 " series features a different book every day of the month. BIM in Small-Scale Sustainable Design by François Lévy, published by  Wiley , 2011. Hardcover, 312 pages. ( Amazon ) At its core BIM (Building Information Modeling) is a pretty simple idea: A 3-dimensional virtual model is embodied with data that can be used to generate drawings, spreadsheets, and other relevant output. But the complexities are many, partially due to the fact that the shift from CAD to BIM is a much greater one than the shift from hand drafting to CAD. The earlier transition from paper to digital still involved the drawing of plans, sections, elevations, and so forth via lines, but BIM dispenses with drawing (for the most part, at least) in favor of the modeling of systems (walls, windows, doors, roofs, etc.). On top of that fact is learning BIM software, determining how to integrate BIM into an office's and project...

Precedents in Architecture: Analytic Diagrams, Formative Ideas, and Partis (Fourth Edition) by Roger H. Clark and Michael Pause, published by  Wiley , 2012. Paperback, 352 pages. ( Amazon ) My first exposure to Clark and Pause's Precedents in Architecture was during a semester in Italy in the mid-1990s, where studio was a mix of analysis and design. An earlier edition of the book was in the small but quality library at the study center, and in its pages was the church we were analyzing. Like any student, I copied the diagrams into my sketchbook and showed them later to my professor, only to be berated for going that route, of making the analysis too simplistic. For him, analysis was not just diagramming circulation, hierarchy, symmetry, geometry, and so forth; it was a creative process, like design, that resulted in each student having his or her own take on the building. In other words, Precedents in Architecture was objective analysis and our work was subjective. A ...

The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture by Charles Jencks, published by  Wiley , 2011. Paperback, 272 pages. ( Amazon ) Charles Jencks is attributed with marking the death of Modernism with the precise time of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis in 1972. Yes, Jencks did say as much in his influential book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture , though he admits in his latest book on Post-Modern architecture that the time was a fabrication (to lend it a Modern precision) and that the repeated quotings turned the event into a social fact. Yet Modernism didn't so much die then as be transformed or displaced. Post-Modernism (or Postmodernism, or whatever other spelling; I'll use Jenck's preferred hyphenation here) prevailed, and architecture looked back to history and recompiled architectural elements in new and ironic ways. Or such is the oversimplified version that we learn ...

The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture by Juhani Pallasmaa, published by  Wiley , 2011. Hardcover or paperback, 152 pages. ( Amazon ) Thinking About Architecture: An Introduction to Architectural Theory by Colin Davies, published by  Laurence King Publishing , 2011. Paperback, 160 pages. ( Amazon ) The Embodied Image is Finnish architect, educator, and writer Juhani Pallasmaa 's third and final installment in his "study on the role of the senses, embodiment and imagination in architectural and artistic perception, thought and making."  It follows The Eyes of the Skin and The Thinking Hand , both also highly recommended titles. Those familiar with these and other titles by Pallasmaa will find Pallasmaa treading familiar ground: valuing architectural experience over intellectual conceit; seeing image as metaphor for structuring our lives over the aestheticizing of fetish forms and objects; and embracing art and architecture a...

Urban Design Since 1945: A Global Perspective by David Grahame Shane, published by  Wiley , 2011. Paperback, 360 pages. ( Amazon ) In David Grahame Shane 's previous book, Recombinant Urbanism , the reader learns about the three constituent elements of urban design: enclaves, armatures, and heterotopias. To put it basically, in a city enclaves are buildings (or groups of buildings, in the case of places like Rockefeller Center), armatures are streets, and heterotopias are places of difference that change the city over time. These three elements are also found in Shane's more expansive follow-up, a history of urban design since World War II that looks towards the future and how urban designers today can tackle the ever-expanding urban realm. Yet while these elements rose to the top of the Recombinant Urbanism , here it is Shane's four models of the city in the last 60 years that prevail: the Metropolis, the Megalopolis, the Fractured Metropolis, and th...

The Post-Modern Reader edited by Charles Jencks, published by  Wiley , 2nd Edition, 2011. Paperback, 352 pages. ( Amazon ) The third title in Wiley's AD Reader series* is the second edition of 1992's The Post-Modern Reader , edited by Charles Jencks , a writer and landscape designer living in Scotland. Jencks is known most for articulating post-modernism in architecture through his books, penning or editing a few titles on the topic since 1977's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture . An essay from the seventh edition of that book can be found in this reader covering the post-modern in various arenas: architecture, literature, sociology, economics, feminism, and science. It is obvious from the selection of essays, excerpts, and new writings that the permeation of post-modernism across just about all areas of culture is the focus here, not just the formal appropriation of it in architecture. A new essay by Jencks, "What Then Is Post-Modernism?,...

The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture by Juhani Pallasmaa, published by  Wiley , 2009. Paperback, 160 pages. ( Amazon ) Finnish architect and professor Juhani Pallasmaa is a prolific writer, probably known more for his words than his designs. His pint-sized book The Eyes of the Skin is considered a classic, a call for architecture to go beyond the visual and consider the haptic, the sense of touch that is the root of all senses. The Architecture of Image studies five pieces of cinema to see how they reflect "the inherent ephemeral architecture of the human mind, thought and emotion." Constant throughout his writings -- even including one- or two-page contributions like his afterword to Hands On -- is an emphasis on experience in body and mind, two interconnected entities that make up our being in the world, our existential predicament. This latest book by Pallasmaa compiles ideas from lectures given ov...

Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment: Architectural Design edited by David Gissen, published by  Wiley , 2010. Paperback, 136 pages. ( Amazon )   Last year's Subnature by David Gissen asked architects to broaden how they see and react to nature, acknowledging environmental forces like dust, smoke, debris, and others that arise from interactions with our surroundings. He presented projects by contemporary architects embodying his ideas, and he does the same here as guest editor of an issue of AD. But Gissen's nuanced approach to human-nature interaction is different here: Territory looks at projects that simultaneously produce "architectural objects and the environment surrounding them." Granted, all buildings come close to this production -- impacting their surroundings through the creation of micro-climates influenced wind currents, heat given off from materials and systems, and the reflection of the sun, to name a few -...

New Directions in Contemporary Architecture: Evolutions and Revolutions in Building Design Since 1988 by Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, published by  Wiley , 2008. Paperback, 240 pages. ( Amazon ) The year 1988 marks the beginning of Italian writer and critic Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi ’s exploration of architecture in the last two decades. This date at first glance seems questionable, arbitrarily based on the book’s publication date, but it coincides with the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. That show compiled primarily unbuilt work by the now household names Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi. Like Johnson’s much earlier International Style exhibition at the same venue, Deconstructivist Architecture was style over substance, image masquerading as shared values. Nevertheless it denotes a shift from postmodern arc...

Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, published by  Wiley , 2008. Hardcover, 272 pages. ( Amazon ) Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature by Douglas Farr, published by  Wiley , 2007. Hardcover, 256 pages. ( Amazon ) Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon and Oliver Gillham, published by  Wiley , 2009. Hardcover, 304 pages. ( Amazon ) President Obama's nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package promised to spark a building boom, but one focused primarily on the construction and repair of highways, bridges, and other pieces of aging infrastructure that admittedly require attention. These short-term band-aids in the name of job creation raise questions about how the first urban president since Kennedy will address the direction of our cities and suburbs, specifically their unsustainable trends. Where few arguments...

The Neighborhoods of Queens by Claudia Gryvatz Copquin, published by  Yale University Press , 2008. Paperback, 300 pages. ( Amazon ) Guide to New York City Landmarks by New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, published by  Wiley , 2008. Paperback, 464 pages. ( Amazon ) Published in edited form in The Architect's Newspaper In the Citizens Committee for New York City’s annual quality of life survey, residents of Queens were found to be the most satisfied with their neighborhoods. The survey's low sampling (4,400 residents across the five boroughs) makes the results far from conclusive, but an emphasis on neighborhoods as the defining area for community belonging and social interaction is an important one that, while fairly obvious, merits mention and attention. The Citizens Committee extends this focus on neighborhoods to its series of five planned books, edited by historian Kenneth T. Jackson, presenting every neighborhood in the city's boroughs. ...