A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Just over three months ago, Chicago's Prairie Avenue Bookshop held a Spring Sale with 25% savings. Their Summer Sale doubles those savings on purchases over $100. The sale started a couple days ago and runs until July 18. Click the image for more information. For those who cannot make it to the store, be sure to brose their web page , especially the out-of-print titles, magazines/journals , and the sale books , for an even deeper discount.

Here's a few views of the Igualada Cemetery in Barcelona, Spain by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós , 1994. Photographs are by jmtp . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000 by Dolores Hayden, published by Vintage, 2004. Paperback, 336 pages. ( Amazon )   The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream by John F. Wasik, published by Bloomberg, 2009. Hardcover, 240 pages. ( Amazon ) Changes to suburbia's physical structure can be said to fall into one of two types: those created by attempts to reverse its negative characteristics and those acted upon by the forces that helped shape it initially. While in neither case are the formal properties of change apparent, it's clear the first is a proactive response -- ideally a combination of bottom-up and top-down strategies -- and...

mkSolaire by Michelle Kaufmann Designs Part of this year's Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is Michelle Kaufmann Design 's mkSolaire, a three-story prefab house built on the museum's grounds. The redesigned house (it was on display last year) is the exhibition's showcase of sustainable living, but the kudos is tempered by the recent news that Ms. Kaufmann closed her 17-person, Oakland, California-based design studio, a victim of the financial crisis. In practice since 2004, after working with Frank Gehry and Michael Graves, Kaufmann pushed her ideals for prefab residential architecture in response to a "lack of affordable, sustainable, well-designed ...

The 3rd Advanced Architecture Contest is organized around the theme of THE SELF-SUFFICIENT CITY: Envisioning the habitat of the future. The first contest focused on housing (here's my review of the subsequent book), with the following one devoted to the Self-Fab House. [click image for 1mb PDF ] From the IaaC website : "The aim of the competition is to promote online discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like. The competition is open to architects, planners, designers and artists who want to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable by developing a proposal capable of responding to emerging challenges in areas such as ecology, information technology, socialization and globalization, with a view to enhancing the connected self-sufficiency of our cities. Competition entries should be submitted via the Internet on Connected metrop...

Inspired by Mario Ballesteros's post on Modern Mexico , an image search for the term " modern architecture " in LIFE Magazine yielded some interesting photos, most in Chicago. The image below particularly struck my eye. It is a construction shot of Marina City (1960-62) by Bertrand Goldberg. ["Modern Architecture In Chicago" photograph by A. Feininger | image source ] The view is looking northeast, with the well-known Chicago Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building to the right of the taller "corncob" core. The contrast between these cores and both the background towers and the low-rise buildings nearby is striking. One seeing these rising at the time would have known that something different was on the horizon. Of course this contrast might not be as great as the one between the above photo and the same view about 50 years later. (I wish I could find one.)

Here's a couple views of Kurt Perschke 's Redball Project David Rokeby 's long wave (2009) in Toronto, Ontario's BCE Place Galleria by Santiago Calatrava , 1992. Photographs are by picturenarrative . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose