A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Turning on the radio this Sunday morning I was a bit surprised to hear Geoff Manaugh talking about architectural renderings during this week's On The Media , though if any blogger of architecture, landscape, and the built environment would be on a show devoted to space (and media), it would be Geoff. The show, Space Odyssey , also features New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger on the New York Times and Bloomberg towers in Manhattan, reporter Vinicius Galvao on São Paulo's billboard ban, Princeton University professor Emily Thompson on sounds in space, and music by build buildings , among other things. It's always great to find media devoted to space, a rare occurrence, given the difficulty in conveying certain ideas over the airwaves. Below is the whole show, as well as the individual clips. Space Odyssey The News Tower (Goldberger) Building Hype (Manaugh) Clearing the Air (Galvao) Sound Reasoning (Thompson) Moveable Type Head Room

The Endless City (2008) edited by Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, published by  Phaidon . Hardcover, 512 pages. ( Amazon ) The stats on the cover of Phaidon's recent tome to expanding global urbanism paint a picture of what many people know but what many people don't want to believe: the world is primarily urban and it's becoming more so every day, from 10% in 1900 to 50% last year. The next 40 years will supposedly see this situation grow to 3/4 of humans living in cities. Buried within these statistics are the environmental, social, and economic problems that are increasingly defining life for many in the 21st century: destruction, isolation, and inequality, respectively (to name but a few). While this book does not have the answers to these and other difficult challenges, it does a great job of describing various cities around the world as we enter the time of the majority of humans being urban dwellers. The book arose from a series of Urban Age conferences -- ...

Claude Watson School for the Performing Arts , originally uploaded by Scott Norsworthy . Claude Watson School for the Arts in Toronto, Ontario by Kohn Shnier Architects . The school was featured previously on my weekly page. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Back in 2000, then New York Gov. George E. Pataki " proposed building one of the first museums in the country to be devoted to women's history." The following year's competition for the Battery Park City site was won by Smith-Miller Hawkinson , but what interests me here is Weiss/Manfredi 's runner-up design. [Museum of Women's History | scan source ] Coming across the design in an issue of future devoted to New York City competitions, I was immediately reminded of this week's dose , Weiss/Manfredi's competition-winning design for the Barnard College Nexus now under construction. [Barnard College Nexus | image source ] Note each design's section, which incorporates what the architects call (in the Nexus) a slipped atria. What interests me, as a practicing architect, is not so much the design of the slipped atria (which I do like) but the way the architects found a way to utilize the concept in a later project, after it failed to come to fruition ...

_MG_1383-Edit , originally uploaded by Peter Guthrie . Cremorne Riverside Centre in London, England by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects (2007). To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Baha'i Lotus Temple, Delhi , originally uploaded by fabian-f . The Bahá'í House of Worship (aka the Lotus Temple) in Dehli, India by Fariborz Sahba (1986). To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Surface/Subsurface by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, published by  Princeton Architectural Press , 2008. ( Amazon ) New York-based architects Weiss/Manfredi are defined by the Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism description, one that could be said to be embraced by many architects today, by many who see these other realms as part of the architect's purview. It's a tricky notion, where one hopes that the apparent incorporation of landscape goes beyond green roofs, and that urbanism is more than just bigness. Each of these are not only separate disciplines with practitioners, professors and unique viewpoints and working relationships, but they are complex concepts that imply natural and social processes, respectively. That be...