A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA by Sam Lubell, photographs by Darren Bradley, published by  Phaidon , 2016. Flexicover, 376 pages. ( Amazon ) [All photographs courtesy of Phaidon] I've never considered that the idiom "never judge a book by its cover" should be ascribed to illustrated books. It makes sense in regards to works of fiction, where the text could hardly be distilled into a cover image. But covers of illustrated books, while not capturing every aspect of the contents, contain some accuracy about the words and images inside. Take the geometric cover of the Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide , which features five rows of patterned shapes: diamonds, circles, squares, hexagons, and triangles, from top to bottom. These shapes reference the five chapters that the 254 buildings are grouped into and they reflect the graphic design of the pages and maps, but they also capture the mood of mid-century modernism from a remove, mu...

Head on over to World-Architects to read my take on Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center , an exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City that examines how the months spent in a World War II internment camp impacted the life of Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi. [Isamu Noguchi, This Tortured Earth , 1942-43 (cast 1963), bronze | Photo: John Hill]

...yet again. In lieu of clips from  Groundhog Day , as in previous years , here's Bill Murray making an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in 1993 to promote the film.

One of my duties at World-Architects is curating the Building of the Week feature, which ends in each year with Building of the Year voting. The results are in: American-Architects Building of the Year 2016 is the Sharon Fieldhouse in Clifton Forge, Virginia, designed and constructed by the design/buildLAB at Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design.

Here are a some photos of the Maison de Verre (1932) in Paris, France, which Pierre Chareau designed for gynecologist Dr. Jean Dalsace. The house is owned now by architectural historian Robert Rubin, who allows visits by appointment months in advance . For those who are unable to travel to Paris anytime soon but will be in NYC, the Maison de Verre is beautifully presented by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design , on display at the Jewish Museum until March 26 – highly recommended. (Photographed by August Fischer .) 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

"Book Briefs" are an ongoing series of posts with two- or three-sentence first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that make their way into my library. These briefs are not full-blown  reviews , but they are a way to share more worthwhile books than I'm able to review. The Cornell Journal of Architecture 10: Spirits  edited by Caroline O’Donnell | Cornell AAP Publications, distributed by Actar D | 2016 |  Amazon In the introduction to Spirits , O'Donnell and her fellow editors assert the issue "examines a range of spirits haunting architecture today." Colin Rowe, who taught at Cornell for much of his life, must be one of those spirits, for the editors find phantoms in his writings, occupying the realm between buildings and the interaction or people "reading" them. Heady stuff but a great starting point for a mélange of essays on the theme of spirits, ranging from data and the Anthropocene, to Louis Sullivan and meloncholia in citie...

Here are a some photos of the National Art Schools in Havana, Cuba, which were designed by Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti in the early 1960s but then abandoned in 1965 when the Communist Party came to power. Made a National Monument in 2011, the site was added to the World Monuments Fund's 2016 World Monuments Watch , which "aims to build on its new-found international prominence and highlight the need for a comprehensive and integrated approach to the management of the site." (Photographed by Trevor Patt , who has many more photos of the National Art Schools in his Flickr set .) 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