A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Be sure to check out the winners of this year's AR Awards for Emerging Architecture. Winners are EcoBoulevard in Madrid, Spain by ECOSISTEMA URBANO ARQUITECTOS , Vegetation installation in Tokyo, Japan by TAKETO SHIMOHIGOSHI /AAE , and Wall House in Santiago, Chile by FAR: FROHN & ROJAS , with numerous commendations and honorable mentions. (via architechnophilia )

A couple weeks ago I featured The Boxwood Winery by Hugh Newell Jacobsen on my weekly page, the fifth of such a building type that I've featured. Boxwood and the four other projects are a varied mix that illustrates the relative freedom given architects for a fairly new building type that sits somewhere between the pastoral and the commercial. The Novelty Hill-Januik Winery in Woodinville, Washington by Seattle's Mithun is another notable winery that balances building and landscape to "celebrate wine's agrarian roots." The building itself is a balance of expansive, industrial concrete surfaces, soft woods and large glazed areas that make the winery an inviting location that doesn't gloss over its industrial context (the building sits between two railroad lines and just south of numerous large industrial buildings) or the industrial mechanisms that make large-scale winemaking possible. Exposing the barrel room (image below) is but one way of acknowledging...

Here's a couple images from bjorn_cph's Boston ArchitecTour , showing two different uses of brick in a 50-year span. DSC_0878 , originally uploaded by bjorn_cph . MIT Chapel (1955) by Eero Saarinen. DSC_0982 , originally uploaded by bjorn_cph . Stata Center (2004) by Frank Gehry. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

exhibition: dark side of the moon , originally uploaded by photograph er? . Dark Side of the Moon exhibition at SCI-Arc by Michael Maltzan Architecture , on display until December 9. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

SANAA Houses by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, published by Actar , 2007. ( Amazon ) In early 2007 the Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León (MUSAC) presented an exhibition "tracing the artistic trajectory" of Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). The trajectory of the duo -- whose design for the New Museum of Contemporary Art opened recently -- can be traced, like many architects, through their house designs. This book, published in conjunction with the above exhibition, presents twelve houses (five complete, seven unfinished) by the architects, both collectively and as individuals.   After a conversation with the duo and...

New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan, New York by SANAA The first day of December saw the much anticipated opening of the New Museum of Contemporary Art 's new home on the Bowery by the Japanese duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, aka SANAA . Featured previously on this blog in project form in early 2004 , the final product looks almost exactly like the renderings. This is less a testament to the realism of computer-based renderings than it is to the architects' ability to to cull abstract effects from the physical construction of architecture. Approaching the building, the ethereal effects of light reflecting off the outer skin of aluminum mesh gives way to a subtle reading of the skin's structure and paneling, giving the building an industrial aesthetic that strikes a chord with its context o...

A couple weeks ago the MTA publicly released the five design proposals responding to its RFP for the Hudson Rail Yards, a 26-acre tract of land in Midtown Manhattan extending west of 10th Avenue to the Hudson River and bounded by 30th Street to the south and 33rd Street to the north. Friday I ran through the exhibition currently on display next to Grand Central Terminal to see how these five developer/urban/architect/landscape teams responded to the mega-site. On first glance, I'd have to agree with Nicolai Ouroussoff's assessment that they "are not just a disappointment for their lack of imagination, they are also a grim referendum on the state of large-scale planning in New York City." Basically each scheme is a variation on the proverbial "towers in a park," with the design focus being on these two elements and a mandatory cultural center thrown into the mix. The schemes are evidence of top-down planning, meaning emphasis on plan over pedestrian-le...