A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

In my ongoing series-that's-not-a-series of posts on the Blog-o-sphere, I decided to look at advertising after seeing a glut of it on a blog that shall remain nameless. The below diagram is my overlay of four types of content on a single post from that blog (from dark to light): blog post, blog-related information (blog title, feeds, internal links), external links, and advertising (google ads, books, etc.). Without measuring the exact areas, and ignoring the white space, I'd guess the post itself is 10% of the content, blog-related is 20%, external links another 20%, and advertising the remaining 40%. What makes the majority of a page advertising is not the fact that blogs are money-making undertakings -- as that fact is far from true, unless you're Treehugger -- but that advertising now is as easy as blogging itself. Google makes it especially easy to incorporate their AdSense into a page, be it in the sidebar, header, footer, or within a post itself. Amazon makes t...

Shanley Building -- perspective , originally uploaded by Remiss63 . The Shanley Building in Clayton, Missouri by Harris Armstrong, 1935. Compare the rendering above with the "as-built" view . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

While the new Visitor's Center for the Queens Botanical Garden doesn't open to the public until September 28, I was able to check it out during a Green Drinks night on Tuesday. Unfortunately missing a tour of the interior, the main draw is obviously the building's sheltered plaza, seen above in the approach from the Main Street entrance. As my friends pointed out, the columns -- set at various angles in a manner resembling a project (PDF link, see page 4) by Zaha Hadid -- resemble tree trunks, a metaphor that will be strengthened when they are painted a dark brown. The large asymmetrical canopy is designed to collect rainwater, to be used for gray water in toilets and for the pool in the left foreground of the above image. Materials inside and out (per a conversation with the Assistant Director of the Center) are geared towards achieving LEED Platinum status. For example, the horizontal wood slats overlooking the covered plaza are salvaged, as was the wood used to form the...

NYC-Soho Diesel installation 1.2 , originally uploaded by brandon pass . Installation by Korban/Flaubert at the Diesel Denim Gallery on Greene Street in SoHo. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

One of the most unique presentations of a firm's personalities is Atlanta-based Cooper Carry 's stand-alone site Cooper Carry Talks . On that page one is confronted by 12 cropped faces (of 32 possible ones, changed by refreshing or clicking "shuffle"), faces which start talking when ones moves the mouse over them. Each person then has one or more short snippets of video that fill the screen when that snippet is clicked. Lauren Perry Ford's snippet below describes how the private sector eventually succumbed to the public sector's desire to build sustainably, as the former saw that healthier buildings "may contribute to their bottom line." The videos are characterized by the tight close-ups of the thumbnails, a shaky camera, and an off-camera glance, making the sound-bites a bit stylized but ultimately very consistent, so a certain homogeneity comes across. It's hard to listen to more than a handful of snippets before one gets the idea. It's ap...

"Architecture can only intervene in situations which have already been defined as being worthy of intervention. Yet, to fully exploit its potential as a generator of reality, architecture has to position itself in such a way that it is not bound to wait until a brief is presented (which it can then gracefully react to), but rather so that it can produce a brief in any given situation of its own. Architecture's avatistic habit of responding to a brief is then replaced by a practice of scanning reality for situations which have the potential to be acted upon by architecture itself. Escaping the reductive assignment of being the problem-solver, architecture assumes the capacity to pose problems, or rather, issues, that are relevant for architectural intervention. In doing so architecture would ultimately escape the boundaries it has been living with for too long and start to self-confidentially negotiate the limits of its actions in every step it takes." - Andreas Ruby, from...

Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture by Liat Margolis and Alexander Robinson, published by Birkhäuser , 2007. ( Amazon ) This well-illustrated volume collects a number of recent lanscape-oriented projects and a selection of innovative products and technologies, both sections addressing the "widespread professional and academic recognition that knowledge of material properties and processes is fundamental to innovation in design applications, and [that] cross-fertilization among professional fields...may broaden and advance the scope of landscape architecture."   The first section of the book -- the projects -- is broken down into seven sections: Launch, ...