A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Some events for those in an and around New York City in the next couple of months. The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion Tuesday, September 18, 7 pm Housing Works , 126 Crosby Street (between Prince and Houston) "Visionary and monumental, the Tennessee Valley Authority brought hydroelectric dams, electricity, controlled flooding, and consumer appliances to an area devastated by the Depression. As contemporary designers search for models of socially-engaged design, progressive city-planning, and conceptions of the social good, the TVA becomes an important model. Tim Culvahouse and Jane Wolff will discuss the role of design as an agent of public persuasion and as an embodiment of political ideals. Presented by Princeton Architectural Press and The Center for Urban Pedagogy ." Performance Z-A: a Pavilion and 26 Days of Events at Storefront Opening Friday, September 21, 2007 (Running until October 16) Storefront for Art and Architecture "Twenty-five years ag...

Leaning to the left , originally uploaded by thomaswongpz . The Freitag Flagship in Zurich, Switzerland by spillman.echsle . To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just: :: Join and add photos to the archidose pool , and/or :: Tag your photos archidose

The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad by NaJa & deOstos  ( Amazon ) The RIEAeuropa Concepts Series "presents in-depth explorations of ideas and conditions...[aimed] at exposing innovative, speculative and experimental work." Edited by über-experimenter Lebbeus Woods, the small monographs resemble the Pamphlet Architecture series (of which NaJa & deOstos will contribute for #29), though of course this series is less concerned with constructing architecture than with constructing ideas. With that said, one should not mistake Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos's Hanging Cemetery as anything but a speculative project of architecture.   But what a project. NaJa & ...

The design of cemeteries and other places related to death tend to fall outside the purview of architects, but Torino, Italy's Studio Elastico comes close to specializing on this much-neglected "building type," with four projects completed so far. The Borgaretto Cemetery, completed in 2005, is the most recent, acting as a hardscape plaza within a larger park. Accessed by a bright red bridge , the multi-level cemetery was conceived as a mass of stones and gravel that will surely be enlivened by flowers and other mementos left for the departed. Where the Borgaretto Cemetery is about landscape and spaces carved from the earth, 2004's Budioa Cemetery is about an object: a rectilinear piece sitting within a walled area as an extension of an existing cemetery. T...

Currently on view at the Queens Museum of Art is the exhibition Generation 1.5 , featuring works by artists who immigrated to a country in their adolescence. According to the exhibition page, "1.5 members are old enough to be fluent in their home language and culture, but have less difficulty adjusting to change than their first-generation counterparts. Often characterized by cultural hybridity, 1.5ers navigate various cultural perspectives from the inside, while often feeling un-tethered to any one homeland." The artists on view supposedly, "take part in dexterous manipulations of artistic modes and materials as they engage with diverse personal, social, and intellectual contexts...[walking] the line between assimilation and dissent...uniquely capable of critiquing their native country as well as their adopted ones." While a number of the pieces impressed me, what stood out the most were a couple rooms devoted to Pakistan/Brooklyn's Seher Shah . Her Black Cub...

"Particularly after the war, FHA's endorsement of prebuilt subdivisions paved the way for developments like Levittown that did not adopt the assembly-line house but rather turned the entire site into a giant assembly line. Holes were dug, slabs poured, and framing hoisted simultaneously in a stepwise sequence across the whole of the site within a huge choreographed machine that was several thousand acres large and produced fourty [sic] houses a day. Earth-moving equipment lined up and dug the holes for several buildings at once or planted a uniform number of shrubs on the lot. Even appliances were delivered to several houses at once. The balance sheet for this kind of subdivision was restructured as well. The bottom line did not only correspond to an individual address but to a process applied to hundreds or even thousands of homes. Thus, a developer might evaluate the costs of pouring a thousand concrete slabs, and as a consequence of this new tabulation of costs, find new w...

The World Edition is a new online urban development magazine, intended to be a source for an in-depth look into the evolution of cities. Its aim is to promote a better understanding of cities and the ways in which they are changing. For the magazine's first issue I contributed a piece on new residential developments underway on the Brooklyn/Queens side of the East River, speculating on what this might mean to the city years down the road (ignoring the effects of global warming, though readers in interested in that can read publisher and über-contributor Alexander H. Johnstone's cover story on coastal development). Where 's Brendan Crain also submits a piece on Pittsburgh, a city I was impressed with on a short visit last year.