A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

[All photographs by John Hill – see more in my Flickr set on the exhibition .] Earlier in the week I got a preview of the MoMA exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 , opening Sunday and running until July 19, 2015. The large-scale show, located on the museum's sixth floor (where Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes took place two years ago), is notable for being Barry Bergdoll's swan song at MoMA, although he organized the show with a number of people: Patricio del Real, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art; Jorge Francisco Liernur, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Carlos Eduardo Comas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; as well as an advisory committee from across Latin America. The show is also notable for being the first time MoMA has devoted a single exhibition to Latin American architecture since 1955, when it staged Latin Americ...

Tonight is the opening of the exhibition The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley, on display at the Center for Architecture until June 20, 2015. The show is organized by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), which has an excellent microsite devoted to an exhibition that has been shown at several institutions around the country, including the National Building Museum. For those in NYC, the opening takes place from 6pm to 8pm this evening. [Dan Kiley at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO | Photo: Aaron Kiley, courtesy of TCLF] The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley Dan Kiley (1912-2004) worked with equally significant architects, including Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, and I.M. Pei, to create internationally-acknowledged Modernist icons. His design legacy is substantial, influential, and, like the broad swath of our Modernist-designed landscape legacy, ephemeral. The exhibition honors Kiley and his legacy and calls attention to the ...

A couple days ago the LA Times published Peter Zumthor's revised design for the ~$600 million LACMA expansion. The Swiss architect generated the initial 2013 design as a sort of homage to the adjacent tar pits, so a lot of folks ended up calling the undulating shape an oil spill or oil slick. Not anymore: Christopher Hawthorne, in the article linked above, writes that the "LACMA design now looks less like an exaggerated version of a tar pit and more like a Chinese-language character or other strong calligraphic gesture." [Site plan of LACMA | Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner] But does it? To take a stab at determining what this latest shape might resemble I focused on the building outline and simplified it, per the images below. I then took each of these images and ran them through Google Images search to find "visually similar images." That said, this is a not-too-serious exercise in "objectively" determining what the shape resembles, rathe...

This morning I attended the press preview of the Latin America in Construction exhibition opening March 29 at the Museum of Modern Art. I'll have photos and comments on the MoMA show later in the week, but the visit inspired me to search out some photos of Latin American architecture in the archidose Flickr pool , though not necessarily ones in the show. By chance, Jonathan Reid added a bunch of photos from South America to the pool recently, and some of those are shown below. Ibirapuera Auditorium in São Paulo, Brazil, by Oscar Neimeyer: Some Brasilia buildings, all designed by Oscar Neimeyer: Brazilian National Congress: The Palace of Justice: Brazilian National Library: Pantheon of Liberty and Democracy Tancredo Neves: Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro by Affonso Eduardo Reidy: Municipalidad de Vitacura in Santiago, Chile, by Iglesis Prat: Cao Museum at El Brujo Archaeological Complex in Peru (architect not known): To contribute your Flickr i...

For the first time in its short history, FIGMENT selected two projects for the City of Dreams Pavilion Competition: Billion Oyster Pavilion by BanG Studio of New York City and Organic Growth by Izaskun Chinchilla Architects of Madrid and London. In addition to securing approvals for construction, each pavilion needs fundraising. Enter Kickstarter and two campaigns, one for the Billion Oyster Pavilion and one for the Organic Growth Pavilion . Details are in the videos below and on their respective Kickstarter pages. Billion Oyster Pavilion : Organic Growth :

The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings by Marc Kushner, published by Simon & Schuster/TED Books, 2015. Hardcover, 164 pages. ( Amazon ) The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings is based on a March 2014 TED Talk , "Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you," given by HWKN partner and Architizer co-founder Marc Kushner. In both the 18-minute talk and the roughly 150-page book Kushner argues, "we’re entering a new age in architecture – one where we expect our buildings to deliver far more than just shelter," as he puts it in a TED Ideas blog post . He does this in the talk by giving a quick tour of the last 30 years of architecture, while in the book he focuses on the immediate past through a selection and presentation of 100 projects – most of them built but some of them unbuilt proposals. Key to both the talk and the book is Kushner's optimism and media, social media, not surprising given his position at Architizer, a website th...

Here are some photos of Stage II of 19. Dzielnica (2015) in Warsaw, Poland, by Jems Architekci , photographed by Sebastian Deptula . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the  archidose pool To contribute your Instagram images for consideration, just: :: Tag your photos #archidose