A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

As an addendum to this week's dose , Papa by Hal Ingberg , the artist/architect sent some drawings to further explain the installation. The drawings illustrate how the piece's form is influenced and generated by a number of site factors. [click above image for larger and expanded map] [click image for map with location of Maman by Louise Bourgeois]

Before today's wrap of the AIA Convention in Miami Beach, I had only one chance for a little architectural tourism, a 30-minute drive before dinner on Friday. Below are the three buildings I drove by, photos snapped through the windshield quite haphazardly. A few more photos can be found in this Flickr set . These buildings will be posted to The Archi-Tourist soon with more information; for now just a few comments. New World Symphony by Frank Gehry, scheduled to open later this year: This elevation facing the Fillmore and the Convention Center to the north gives only a hint at the "Gehry" going on here. Around the corner is a long wall -- half blank white (for projecting images) and half glass -- facing a future 2-acre park. The glazed area is where the action is , with sculptural objects, visible behind the glass, apparently breaking through the roof above as well as the curtain wall at the entrance. It's an interesting parti that veils Gehry's expression behi...

I'm in Miami at the AIA Convention, so posts will resume over the weekend.

Last year I posted about some advertising in Architectural Digest that used architects and architecture to sell cars. Well the other day I was flipping through a travel magazine and was surprised to see an ad for Buick Lacrosse using the America's Cup Building in Valencia, Spain by David Chipperfield Architects . In my previous post I focused on how Lexus used the architect's name (Richard Meier) more than his architecture for their purposes; in effect the architect was promoting the car. But for Buick it is the image of the building that matters; the architect in name or personality is nowhere to be found outside the architecture. Remembering other advertisements with cars using architecture as a backdrop ( I blogged five years ago about VW and OMA's Seattle Public Library), I think the America's Cup Building works similarly here: it does a better job of distinguishing a car from its peers than the car does itself. Given that cars increasingly look like each ot...

Papa in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada by Hal Ingberg Photographs are courtesy National Capital Commission . Artist and architect Hal Ingberg is best known for the facade of the expansion of the Palais des Congrès in his home city of Montréal, which he co-designed as an independent consultant architect in collaboration with the consortium Les Architectes Tétrault, Dubuc Saia et Associès. The apparently random grid of glass in red, orange, yellow -- well, all the colors of the rainbow -- enlivens an otherwise staid glass box, both from the outside and the inside. That the colored glass predominates at the southern public entry is important, for it creates a stunning environment of color that one moves through from the sidewalk to the exhibition halls within. Ingberg's subsequent installations, such as Coloured Reflections and Dirty Realism extend the investigation of the effects of colored glass on experience and movement in different environments, in these cases a...

Here are some photos of Andy Warhol's " Silver Clouds " installed in the Illinois Institute of Technology 's S.R. Crown Hall (Mies van der Rohe, 1956) in Chicago, Illinois, 2010. Photographs and video are by brandon pass . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

For the last few months I've been slowly migrating my weekly page from old-fashioned html to WordPress. While I'm not even half way done I've decided to link to the new site to get some feedback on the v2 Beta version and to tweak it before the whole site is migrated. About five years worth has been put into WordPress (245 "doses" and 36 book reviews) with more added every week. Click the image below to visit the future home of a weekly dose of architecture . I'm currently using the Neutica theme, with some slight revisions, nothing major. I think it's a cool theme, even though the content is sometimes overshadowed by the other two columns; it's not a widescreen format in any way. If you have any comments on the design, layout and any features on the site, please post them on my v2 Beta page . I'm aware of some areas that need improvement, particularly the archive page and the shifting sidebar on short posts, but I'm sure there's plenty m...