A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

A couple nights ago I watched the PBS documentary Containment , a sobering look at the practicalities and uncertainties of dealing with nuclear waste. The film bounces back and forth between a few places around the world – a nuclear weapon facility in South Carolina, an underground burial site in New Mexico, and Fukushima, Japan – but of interest here are the speculative designs of artists, architects and other experts on "imagining society 10,000 years from now in order to create warning monuments that will speak across time to mark waste repositories." ["Landscape of Thorns" | Image: Screenshot from Containment ] Architect Michael Brill, who died in 2002, was one participant in a 1991 study commissioned by the US Department of Energy through the Sandia National Laboratory. In Brill's words , "DOE wants to make a permanent warning at this burial site of its dangers, to help prevent inadvertent release of radioactivity into our descendant's food ch...

This looks promising: the REAL Foundation has gained exclusive access to the long-inaccessible and unpublished archive of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's unbuilt Mansion House in London, and they're planning on publishing the first-ever book on the project, Mies in London . [Mansion House Square photo-collage. Image: RIBA Collections / John Donat] To make Mies in London happen they're going the Kickstarter route. Watch the video below to learn more about the project and head over to Kickstarter to give them lots of £.

Architectural Guide Berlin by Dominik Schendel, published by  DOM Publishers , 2016. Paperback, 192 pages. ( Amazon ) In November last year I traveled to Berlin to cover the World Architecture Festival (WAF) for World-Architects (some highlights are here ). Previously I'd visited Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart, but this was my first trip to Germany's capital, Berlin – a much overdue visit. To plan for what to see in what little time I had outside of WAF, beforehand I bought a used book covering projects completed in the 1990s. With so much construction taking place this century, that dated guidebook was missing plenty of what I wanted to see, even obvious projects like Libeskind's Jewish Museum. So I was pleased to learn that DOM was giving out a Berlin guide to WAF attendees. Compared to other DOM guidebooks (I've reviewed those on Venice , Pyonyang , Japan and Taiwan ), this guide to Berlin is shorter, more selective, but also more thematically honed. There ...

Here are some photos of The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II (2016) in Markowa, Poland, by Nizio Design International . (Photographed by Piotr Krajewski ) 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

At American-Architects – the U.S. platform of World-Architects – I oversee the Building of the Week feature. As in past years, the beginning of the year entails voting for the "Building of the Year" from the year before. So click here or on the image below to browse through the projects and vote for your favorite. Voting ends on January 31, 2017.

Here are some photos of Shanghai Tower (2016) in Shanghai, China, by Gensler . (Photographed by Fernando Herrera ) 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

Posts will resume the first week of January.