A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

A new addition to the far-right sidebar of this blog is "My Bustler Bookmarks," a banner that lists handpicked Competitions, Events and News from Bustler . Clicking on the individual heading will change the list within the banner, which also includes a scrollbar if required. Clicking the individual listing will open a new window with information on that item. Pretty neat. Attention New Yorkers: the Events listing will be limited to events in New York City, thereby replacing my occasional lectures posts. By contributing lectures and other events to Bustler, this listing (usually the next two or three weeks) should be a pretty thorough list of choice happenings. After clicking on Events, hold your mouse over the individual listing for a moment to see the date; the most immediate dates are at the top, later events at the bottom. I hope this new banner is a helpful addition to this blog.

Here's some photos of the British High Commission in Colombo, Sri Lanka, by Richard Murphy Architects with local architects Milroy Perera Associates , 2006. Photographs are by Daveybot , who has many more pics of the building in a Flickr set . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Hearing the word "bunker," one most likely thinks of the Cold War, of protecting oneself and one's valuables from destruction, specifically nuclear destruction. Cold War bunkers ranged from individual shelters buried in one's suburban backyard to the US government's many real or mythological subterranean vaults for the storage of everything from arms to money. With the Cold War long over and the term bunker taking on purely historical connotations, the transformation of those facilities, and the revitalization of the idea of subterranean fortifications for other purposes, is leading to a plethora of what I'm calling New Wave Bunkers. The Federal Reserve Communications and Records Center (Mt. Pony) in Culpeper, Virginia is one such government bunker, a facility for the storage of currency in the case of a mass catastrophe on US soil. It also housed the "central switching station of the Federal Reserve's Fedwire electronic funds transfer system...in ...

Here's a few buildings in Austin, Texas. Photographs are by T. Cook . [ Austin City Hall by Antoine Predock ] [ Texas Hillel Center for Jewish Life by Alterstudio ] [The Opium Den in the Charles Moore House at the Moore/Andersson Compound by Moore/Andersson Architects (now Andersson • Wise Architects )] To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Book Review of World's Greatest Architect Published in edited form in The Architect's Newspaper March 4, 2009 World's Greatest Architect: Making, Meaning, and Network Culture  by William J. Mitchell, published by  The MIT Press , 2008. ( Amazon ) Collecting over thirty short essays originally appearing in the British publications Building Design and RIBA Journal, this book continues the MIT School of Architecture former dean William J. Mitchell's investigations into the influence of technology on urban space, architecture and design. As the current head of the Smart Cities research group in the school's well-known Media Lab, the professor and author is situated in an ideal position for such ongoing academic analysis. These essays, admittedly written at airports and other non-places during the travels of a global nomad, indicate a predilection for readable and highly accessible writing that is as thought-provoking as it is varied. Locating itself as a rec...

Noticing a plethora of panoramas and/or photos cropped to panorama proportions in the archidose Flickr pool , I decided to present a number of them in one post. [Bloch Building of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri by Steven Holl Architects | photo by archipreneur ] [Millowner's Association Building Villa Shodhan in Ahmedabad, India by Le Corbusier | photo by superka_01 ] [The High Court in Chandigarh, India by Le Corbusier | photo by superka_01 ] [Swiss Re HQ, 30 St Mary Axe in London, England by Foster + Partners | photo by deejaypow ] To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Almanac of Architecture & Design 2009 , edited by James P. Cramer and Jennifer Evans Yankopolus, published by Greenway, 2009. Paperback, 590 pages. ( Amazon ) With Google search, Web 2.0 tagging and other means of making information easier and faster to find online, the existence of reference books is harder and harder to argue for. Those big 26-volume encyclopedias surely won't be missed, but how this thinking applies to more concise reference guides, like almanacs, warrants some attention. To dismiss them outright is to gloss over the advantages that books offer, namely that information is clearly located . Online information may be easy to find quickly but its location is vague, the rise of social bookmarking and other tools aiding in our orientation in cyberspace testament to this. But to say something is located is only part of the story, because it's what we can do once we locate something that is important. What we hold in our hands can be marked, highlighted, d...