A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Here are some photos of the Музей Маяковского ( State Museum of Vladimir Mayakovsky , 1974) in Moscow by Andrey Bokov , photographed by Батенька (see many more photos in their Flickr set ). The museum, which is currently closed for repairs , is housed where the poet lived from 1919 until his suicide in 1930. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos  archidose

Nature has a good way of explaining to us humans how things can be structured. Think trees, termite mounds, beehives, the list goes on and on. A couple recent projects made me think of the latter -- beehives -- for the way they are structured with hexagonal, honeycomb-like modules. Neither regular nor mimicking beehives, these two projects have another interesting thing in common: at the apex of each cell, if you will, is a round opening, an oculus that makes each enclosure porous. The first project is the Picoroco Wall from Emerging Objects (design by Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, Seong Koo Lee): It is a freestanding wall system with a "variegated pattern [that] allows for views and light to pass through in some areas of the wall, but not in others." The front (above and below) lets the cones and holes come to the fore, but the underlying geometry is apparent where the aggregated pieces meet. But it's the back of the 3d-printed wall (below) where we can s...

On Tuesday, December 17, the Graham Foundation is launching a bookshop that occupies the former dining room of the foundation’s historic Madlener House on Chicago's Gold Coast. The bookshop is designed by local architect Ania Jaworska , an installation "comprised of four bold mesh structures that display books and periodicals from the fields of architecture, design, art, and culture," per the Graham Foundation. [Views of the Graham Foundation bookshop designed by Ania Jaworska , Chicago, 2013. Photos by Travis Roozée .] At first glance the design seems out of place, not so much for how it relates to the 1901 Prairie style mansion it occupies, but because the mesh forms – especially the arch in the foreground of the above photo – look like garden follies that want to be traversed by plants and/or people. But when considered as a pop-up bookstore (therefore not permanent) launched in conjunction with Environments and Counter Environments. "Italy: The New Dom...

Here is a visual journey in and around the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, designed by Noero Wolff Architects and featured on my weekly page in January 2008 . The 12-minute film was made by Stephen Hitchcock and David Long from Cape Town for last year's Venice Biennale.

Inside Piano by Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine BêkaPartners, 2013 Book: Hardcover, 144 pages DVD: All-Region PAL, 99 minutes In the vein of their earlier documentaries on the use and maintenance of buildings designed by Rem Koolhaas , Herzog & de Meuron , and Frank Gehry , Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine examine three buildings designed by Renzo Piano: B&B Italia Offices, IRCAM, and the Beyeler Foundation. While the previous titles clocked in at just shy of an hour, the three mini-documentaries add up to just over an hour-and-a-half – over two hours if we take the Renzo Piano interview into account. And while I thoroughly enjoyed the other three "Living Architectures" documentaries (of five, with one more to go), there was something to these three bite-sized films that made them even more enjoyable, each one making me anticipate the next one. [B&B Italia Offices, Studio Piano and Rogers] While it's hard for me to say exactly why these three s...

V' House in Maastricht, Netherlands, by Wiel Arets Architects, 2013 The following text and images are courtesy of Wiel Arets Architects (WAA). V’ House was constructed for a couple that collects vintage cars, and is stitched within the medieval tapestry of Maastricht. The city dictates all new structures remain within the envelope of pre-existing buildings, and so a cut was created in the house’s front façade to generate a triangulated surface, which leads from one neighbor’s sloped roof to the opposite neighbor’s vertical bearing wall. As the house’s site is long and narrow, voids were cut into the maximum permitted volume to ensure that natural light spills throughout the interior. The ground floor is both open to the exterior elements and sunken to the rear of the site, which makes possible the maximum two-story height allowance. A covered portion of this exterior space serves as an outdoor parking garage for the owners’ collection of Aston Martins. As the house finds r...

Opening today at MAXXI in Rome is Erasmus Effect: Italian Architects Abroad . Not surprisingly, the first architect that comes to mind is Lina Bo Bardi, since I just finished reading the excellent monograph by Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima on Bo Bardi's time in Italy and Brazil. The press materials also mention Pietro Belluschi, Ramoldo Giurgola, Renzo Piano, and Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano. The last are responsible for the exhibition design, which features LOT-EK's signature manipulation of shipping containers. The exhibition runs until April 6, 2014. [Photos courtesy of MAXXI]