A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Ingrid Böck's Six Canonical Projects by Rem Koolhaas: Essays on the History of Ideas will be released by Jovis on July 28. ( Amazon ) Per the publisher's website : Rem Koolhaas has been part of the international avant-garde since the nineteen-seventies and has been named the Pritzker Architecture Prize for the year 2000. This book, which builds on six canonical Koolhaas projects [Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture; Ville Nouvelle Melun-Sénart; Maison à Bordeaux; Dutch Embassy; Seattle Public Library; and CCTV], traces the discursive practice behind the design methods used by Koolhaas and his office OMA. It uncovers recurring key themes—such as wall, void, montage, trajectory, infrastructure, and shape—that have structured this design discourse over the span of Koolhaas's oeuvre. The book moves beyond the six core pieces, as well: It explores how these identified thematic design principles manifest in other works by Koolhaas as both practical re-applic...

MONU #22 - Transnational Urbanism Magazine on Urbanism , April 2015 Reviewed by Iulia Hurducaș [All photographs are courtesy of MONU Magazine.] Continuing the conversation on urbanism, this issue of MONU Magazine picks up on a topic opened in MONU #8 on border urbanism. Transnational Urbanism expands the topic of trans-border relations between cities close to nation state borders, to interrogate the flux of exchanges that crisscross a multiplicity of borders. As MONU has accustomed its readers, architects, urban planners and designers, policy makers, sociologists, educators, photographers and filmmakers take part in the conversation. They make up a transnational community of researchers spanning from Rotterdam, the headquarters of MONU , to the United States, and East Asia, passing through Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. As Merve Bedir stresses in her essay, they themselves live intense transnational lives. I am a regular reader of MONU ever since my work ...

Mark your calendars: MAD (Museum of Arts and Design) is presenting a retrospective of director Andrei Tarkovsky's films this Summer. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time "presents the work of the revolutionary director and includes screenings – all on 35 mm – of all seven feature films and a behind-the-scenes documentary." The retrospective starts on July 10, with one film screened per week until August 28. [ Nostalghia , 1983, Andrei Tarkovsky, image courtesy of Kino Lorber] To date I've only seen Nostalghia from 1983, his first film made outside of Russia. It is, like the rest of his films (or so I've been told and read ), a slow and meditative film. It is so full of poetic images that it is easily one of the best films I've ever seen; it is cinema as a true art form. It made me want to see the rest of the films, but it's often hard to devote more than two hours to one of Tarkovsky's films or to get in the mood for them – they are the antithes...

Wired magazine has unveiled Bjarke Ingels' design for Two World Trade Center, which he took over from Norman Foster after Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox and News Corp decided to move into the tower developed by Larry Silverstein. [All images are screenshots from the video found at the bottom of this post] In a three-minute video from Silverstein Properties, Ingels describes the 1,340-foot-high tower as melding the glass towers of Lower Manhattan with the historic building stock of Tribeca. Seven roughly twelve-story blocks are stacked atop each other and shifted to create terraces rising on the east side of the tower and ticker-tape soffits on the north. Yet from the WTC memorial the tower's south and west elevations are flat, in order to fit with the other towers and complete the development's spiral of four towers. The video is kind of a hoot, with one minute of Ingels speaking and gesturing, a one-minute voyage inside the building (blink and yo...

Head on over to World-Architects to see some highlights from the London Festival of Architecture taking place this June. [Yellow Pavilion by Hall McKnight Architects in King’s Cross, as part of ID2015’s New Horizon_architecture from Ireland, for the London Festival of Architecture 2015. Photo: ©Ed Reeve]

Here are some photos of The 606 by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates , which opened today in Chicago, Illinois. Photos by John Zacherle . 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

Last Thursday, artist Olafur Eliasson, with some architects from the area (OMA, Field Operations, Steven Holl, DS+R, BIG, etc.), unveiled The Collectivity Project on the High Line at 30th Street. It looked like this: [Photo by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of Friends of the High Line] Two days later, when I visited with my wife, our daughter, and some friends, it looked more like this: My wife overheard somebody who worked at one of the participating architecture firms say that their "building" was completely unrecognizable. For me, the most signature model from the ones shown at top is the OMA contribution in the left foreground, a mini version of their unbuilt 23 West 22nd Street project (a design meant for LEGOs really). With only a bit of the walls with windows intact, the design looked pedestrian: So as quickly as 36 hours the creations of notable architects were reduced to rubble, in some cases, or strange hybrids. Their creations will be something else entir...