A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

After Art David Joselit Princeton University Press , 2013 Flexicover | 6 x 7-1/4 inches | 136 pages | 40 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0691150444 | $26.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing c...

Megastructure:  Urban Futures of the Recent Past Reyner Banham The Monacelli Press , June 2020 Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11 inches | 232 pages | 222 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1580935401 | $50.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham’s 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of ...

Lateness Peter Eisenman with Elisa Iturbe Princeton University Press , July 2020 Flexicover | 6 x 7-1/4 inches | 120 pages | 39 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0691147222 | $26.95 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Conceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age,” an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be “of the times”—lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his s...

The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs Owen Hatherley (Editor) Open House, September 2020 Paperback | 6-3/4 x 9-1/2 inches | 274 pages | English | £14.99 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs is not just a catalogue of the places that may or may not be opening their doors in autumn 2020 for the Open House festival, this book is an exploration of the ordinary neighbourhoods, housing estates and public buildings that lie round the corner, rather than on a tube or a bus into town. In this new guide, guest-edited by Owen Hatherley and designed by Studio Christopher Victor, thirty-three writers, architects, activists, and Londoners present thirty-three essays exploring famous and unheralded buildings, streets, estates and neighbourhoods — some open for the Open House Festival, some not — across the thirty-three London boroughs. With contributions from columnist Aditya Chakrabortty to the historian Gillian Darley, via playwright Hanif Kureish...

Designed Future: Or Selected Writings by Paulo Mendes da Rocha Daniela Sá, Guilherme Wisnik, João Carmo Simões (Editors) monade , January 2019 Hardcover | 6 x 8-1/2 inches | 248 pages | 41 illustrations | English (translated from Portuguese by Mick Greer) | ISBN: 978-9899948563 | €33.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Designed Future is a journey through the modern era: our life in cities, the Americas, new territories and the old continent, of vision and design as essential tools for building the future. As the most complete collection of essays, interviews and lectures, this book is an in-depth view of the journey and particular thinking of one of the most relevant living architects, the Brazilian modern master, Paulo Mendes da Rocha (b. 1928). For the first time translated in English, it disclosures a must-read intense and provocative thinker in contemporary times. REFERRAL LINKS :         dDAB COMMENTARY : In 2006 Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha won ...

Built in USA: Post-war Architecture Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Arthur Drexler (Editors) The Museum of Modern Art , 1952 Hardcover | 7-1/4 x 10 inches | 128 pages | 190 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1199554352 | $7.50 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This book is the Museum of Modern Art's report on the best of American architecture today. Private houses, skyscrapers, schools, a hospital, a retail store, a chapel and a stadium are among the 43 buildings amply illustrated by plans and photographs. With the mid-century modern architecture has come of age, and American architecture in particular has come to occupy a position of special prominence in the world. The qualities that have brought our building to this preeminent position are reviewed in an introductory essay by Professor Henry-Russell Hitchcock, America's leading historian of modern architecture. Arthur Drexler, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture and Design, has provided a critica...