A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Flipping through January's Architect Magazine on the train this morning, something on page 136 caught my eye. A photo of Tour Total, designed by Barkow and Leibinger , seems to be capped by a large ghostly gable. [Tour Total, Barkow and Leibinger, detail of photo by Christian Richters | Scanned from page 136 of Architect Magazine , January 2013] The mirage that perfectly rises from each corner of the building comes from an advertisement for Hanley Wood University on page 135. I'll admit it's all pure coincidence, but the "capping" of the building is heightened by, well, the height at which the photographer took the shot, which flattens the top of Tour Total to a horizontal line. The shape then looks like a 30-60-90 triangle balancing atop the building, or an inadvertant Hitler-esque* attempt to historicize the unrelenting modernism of the tower. *I've heard that Hitler had pitched roofs installed on the Bauhaus in the mid-1930s, but I've yet to he...

My latest Ideabook at Houzz zooms over the United States, looking at the various patterns created by houses, particularly in the suburbs. Below is a sneak peek, but head over to Houzz to read about fairway housing, fly-in houses, tract mansions, and a few alternatives to traditional sprawl.

Here is a photo of the " Minibib " in Stadtgarten, Köln, Germany, by Sonja Zimmermann (2009). Photographs are by Matthijs Borghgraef . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos  archidose

Today at the Museum of the City of New York, Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the adAPT NYC competition for a micro-unit apartment building in Kips Bay. The winner is "My Micro NY" from a team made up of Monadnock Development, the Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, and nARCHITECTS. Their winning project is a 10-story building with 55 micro-unit apartments ranging from 250 to 370 square feet. Head over to Houzz for more images and my write-up on the winning project .

Over at American-Architects I've been developing a Building of the Week feature that takes a state-by-state look at architecture in the United States in 2013. We are presenting one recent project from each state in alphabetical order, from Alabama to Wyoming. Projects are added every Monday, and this week's building is the South Mountain Community Library in Phoenix, Arizona. Have a project in mind for your state? Please email me .

Ezra Stoller, Photographer by Nina Rappaport and Erica Stoller, published by  Yale University Press , 2012. Hardcover, 288 pages. ( Amazon ) Starting on January 24 the Yossi Milo Gallery is exhibiting a number of Ezra Stoller 's photographs under the name Beyond Architecture . It is their second show on a now common name (the first happened in early 2011 ). At a time when architectural photographers can reach the same celebrity status as their clients (well, at least one ), it's no surprise that photos of buildings and interiors are being shown in a New York gallery. But flash back to the 1940s, when Stoller began his three-decade career photographing modern architecture, and that sort of appreciation was non-existent. This partly stems from the fact Stoller was a commercial photographer working on assignment, not an artist pursuing an independent vision. But mainly it is because Stoller, along with Julius Shulman on the West Coast and Hedrich Blessing in Chica...

Małopolska Garden of Arts in Kraków, Poland, by Ingarden & Ewý Architects, 2012 The following text and images are courtesy of Ingarden & Ewý Architects . The building of the Małopolska Garden of Arts (MGA) has been realized according to a competition-winning design by Ingarden & Ewy Architects. The program and the initiative of establishing this new cultural institution in Kraków was proposed in the year 2004 by Krzysztof Orzechowski, director of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre and Janusz Sepioł, at the time the Marshal of the Małopolska Voivodeship. It is no coincidence that the building was built in the vicinity of ul. Karmelicka – a street popular with students and locals alike – opposite the building of the public library, with the aim of ensuring its smooth inclusion into the “bloodstream” of the city. The building of MGA introduced a new spatial order to the old backyards and ruined buildings in Rajska and Szujskiego streets in Kraków. The starting point was a mult...