A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Here are a couple photos of the REM Island Restaurant in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Concrete , 2011. The restaurant occupies a re-purposed helicopter landing platform from "offshore broadcast platform [built] to circumvent Dutch licensing laws in the 1960s" that was moved to Minerva Harbor in Amsterdam. Photographs are by Klaas Vermaas . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

[Looking northeast from the Fifth Avenue Garden.] On December 13, 2011 The Frick Collection opened its doors with its first major addition in 35 years, The Portico Gallery for Decorative Arts and Sculpture . The small 815-sf spaces is a former outdoor loggia in the Carrère and Hastings original from 1914, then the Frick Mansion. Over time the elements, particularly the exhaust from Fifth Avenue traffic, did some damage to the loggia's limestone, pointing towards eventually enclosing the space as a gallery. [Looking north from the Fifth Avenue Garden with the library's shuttered windows just visible at right.] The opportunity to do such a thing came about when collector Henry H. Arnhold promised The Frick a gift of porcelains. With this gift and the institution's recent focus on sculpture it made sense to put the loggia to good use, taking advantage of the southern light the Fifth Avenue Garden affords, a situation that makes the space unsuitable for paintings. Not ...

ARCHIZINES edited by Elias Redstone, published by Bedford Press/ AA Publications , 2011. Paperback, 152 pages. ( Amazon ) Compared to market and professional publications, 'zines are more personal in nature, reflecting an individual or small group's passion for a particular topic. Driven by a love for a subject and the desire to explore it in ways not afforded by other publications, 'zines are as diverse as the people making them. In the realm of architecture these "little magazines" -- as they were called in the 2010 exhibition and book Clip, Stamp, Fold -- are going strong today, as is evidenced by the website, exhibition, and publication ARCHIZINES , curated and edited by London-based Jack-of-all-trades Elias Redstone . The book is the third installment for ARCHIZINES , following on the heels of a recent exhibition at the Architectural Association and the website that has been online since early last year, and which continues to catalog the growing num...

Head over to ELLE DECOR for a feature on my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture . After a brief intro (screenshot below) comes a slideshow with excerpts from some buildings featured in the book.

Here are some photos taken by ken mccown of the Agave Library in Phoenix, Arizona by Will Bruder + Partners , 2009. See also Today's archidose #304 from April 2009. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America by Writers for the 99% OR Books, 2011 Paperback, 200 pages In July 2011 the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters put out a call for readers to "flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street." This " campaign " in the anti-consumerist rag is well known, as is the September 17 start of what became a two-month "occupation" of Zuccotti Park (formerly known as Liberty Plaza Park or Liberty Park, what the occupiers call it and what I will here) in Lower Manhattan, but the steps leading up to occupation and how it actually worked is not information as readily available or known. Hence this book by an assemblage of writers that lived and/or spent a great deal of time at Liberty Park as part of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is required reading for those interested in the change this and other occupations has affected on the self-pr...

Kindergarten (KIGA) in Neufeld an der Leitha, Austria by SOLID architecture, 2010 Photographs are by Kurt Kuball, courtesy SOLID architecture. The influence of the Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, designed by Perkins + Will (then Perkins, Wheeler, and Will) with Eliel and Eero Saarinen in 1940, is undeniable. Its floor plan ingeniously utilized L-shaped classrooms to create small outdoor spaces adjacent to each classroom. (The classroom itself is rectangular, appended by a workroom to form the L.) Additionally the corridors are open and light, punctuated by circular skylights, but it is the way the classrooms are linked to outdoor spaces scaled to the students, especially kindergarteners, that has been passed down across time and space. Crow Island School may not be a direct precedent for SOLID architecture 's design of a kindergarten (KIGA) in the small Austrian town of Neufeld an der Leitha, but the articulation of the plan to help define outdoor zones...