A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

marne la vallee (26) , originally uploaded by juliazxiao . Ecole d'architecture de la ville et des territoires à Marne-la-Vallée , France by Bernard Tschumi Architects , 1999. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Since featuring Feilden Clegg Bradley's (FCB) award-winning Westfield Student Village four years ago, the studio has completed many more projects and won many more awards. One project that's garnering much awards and attention is Accordia, Cambridge (England), "a scheme of 212 houses and 166 apartments on a 9.5 hectare (23 acre) site adjacent to the Botanic Garden on the southern edge of the city." [view from the village green | image source ] FCB were masterplanners and architects for 2/3 of the dwellings. The remaining units were designed by MacCreanor Lavington Architects and Alison Brooks Architects. The site is near the city center and the train station, and the site planning reflects an emphasis on pedestrian movement and the design of well-scaled in-between spaces, something FCB are highly skilled at. Of course what's lacking most is a mixed-use component to the large development, though the dwellings do allot for 30% affordable units. [masterplan with FCB...

Ílhavo, Centro Cultural. Filipe Afonso e Ilídio Ramos. , originally uploaded by z.z . Cultural Center in Ílhavo, Portugal by Filipe Afonso and Ilídio Ramos, 2008. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Gaudí , originally uploaded by jmtp . Schools of Sagrada Familia (1909) in Barcelona, Spain by Antoni Gaudí. To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

Amazon's recommendation are usually slightly off the mark, ramming Roland Barthes down my throat after I bought one of his collection of essays for a class, for example, or misinterpreting gifts for families and friends as items I bought for myself. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this spot-on recommendation land in my inbox: Juhani Pallasmaa's The Architecture of the Image: Existential Space in Cinema , published by Rakennustieto Publishing . The publisher's description: This book explores the shared experiential ground of cinema, art and architecture. Pallasmaa carefully examines how the classic directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky use architectural imagery in creating emotional states in their films. The author also explores the startling similarities between the landscapes of painting and the landscapes of film. Pallasmaa suggests that the architectural imagery of poets, painters and film directors could re-sensit...

Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000 by John Archer, published by University of Minnesota Press , 2008 ( Amazon ) Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness by Elizabeth Farrelly, published by  MIT Press , 2008 ( Amazon ) In recent years critiques of suburbia have shifted from a focus on the much-known negative traits of the condition to an acceptance of their existence, good or bad, and asking: What can be done to improve them, to make them sustainable? These two books fall at both ends of the spectrum, be they fashionable or not. Australian writer Elizabeth Farrelly falls into the former category, outlining a sometimes harsh and always biting critique of the conditions that not so much...

Badajoz Congress Center and Auditorium in Badajoz, Spain by SeglasCano Arquitectos The last stage of knowledge is recognizing that all we were looking for was always in front of our eyes. This line by Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi is SelgasCano Arquitectos 's "headword" for the Badajoz Congress Center and Auditorium in Badajoz, Spain, a circular building located on the remains of an old bullring. This line that the architects quote seems to indicate that a search for another form was fruitless, that when the circle was used for the current building it just worked. With the center of the circle occupied by the auditorium, one wonders if a uni-directional assembly space should occupy the same shape as a sporting event seen in the round. In the case of its current state, the circular shape allows for a certain hierarchy, with circulation encircling the auditorium and smaller rooms in...