2018 Holiday Roundup of Architecture Books
Click through the slideshow to read brief reviews of each monograph.
Carlo Scarpa and Castelvecchio Revisited, by Richard Murphy; foreword by Kenneth Frampton. Breakfast Mission Publishing, 384 pages, $95.
This fastidiously documented analysis brings out splendidly the clarity and complexity of the renovation and conversion of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, Italy, undertaken by Carlo Scarpa in the 1960s and ’70s. Murphy, a Scarpa scholar and an Edinburgh-based architect and educator, has much revised and expanded his 1990 book on the subject with more photos, sketches, plans, sections, and details. It is required reading even for those familiar with Scarpa’s interventions that use the modern idiom in historic buildings. His layering of planes in walls, ceilings, and floors, and the design of doors, handrails, and easels for paintings or pedestals for sculpture create an “orchestration of experience,” in Kenneth Frampton’s words.
Le Corbusier: The Built Work, photography and afterword by Richard Pare; text by Jean-Louis Cohen. Monacelli, 480 pages, $125.
Most extant works of the 77 completed by the legendary 20th-century pioneer (who died in 1965) are captured in these masterful and poetic photographs by Richard Pare. Commentary by architectural historian and Corbusier specialist Jean-Louis Cohen on the 57 subjects highlights the history and significance of such landmarks as Sainte Marie de La Tourette (1960), near Lyon, which appears on the cover. While Corbusier’s own eight-volume Oeuvre Complète, produced from 1929 to 1970, elucidates the modern master’s vocabulary with plans, sections, and black-and-white photos to illustrate some 400 unbuilt and built projects, this publication does something else: it clarifies not only what remains of Corbusier’s architecture—in color—but how it appears with the patina of time.
John McAndrew’s Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by Mardges Bacon and others. Princeton Architectural Press, 192 pages, $45.
Although John McAndrew is one of the lesserknown figures active during the rise of modernist architecture in the U.S. in the early to mid- 20th century, this authoritative and engaging exploration brings to light his contributions as an architect, educator, and curator. Mardges Bacon illuminates his achievements as part of a fascinating sociocultural moment. McAndrew studied at Harvard at about the same time as future International Style architecture proponents Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Alfred Barr, and Philip Johnson, and then designed the library in the new Bauhaus-influenced approach at Vassar College, where he taught. From 1937 to 1941 he acted as the curator of Architecture and Industrial Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, following Johnson, who had left the post in 1934. At MoMA, Bacon argues, McAndrew introduced a more inclusive, American approach to the modern and International Style ethos, and in later years helped bring Mexican art to the attention of the U.S.
McKim, Mead & White: Selected Works 1879– 1915, introduction by Richard Guy Wilson; essay by Leland M. Roth. Princeton Architectural Press, in association with the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, 428 pages, $100.
The august four-volume collection dedicated to McKim, Mead & White’s work that was published in installments from 1915 to 1920 here coalesces into one handsome book. The black-and-white plates of architecture in American Renaissance and colonial-revival styles (among others) distill their moment, showing the buildings pure and uncluttered—helped by crisply delineated elevations, plans, and sections. It is a feast for the eye in classical proportion, scale, rhythm, and ornament.
Hassan Fathy: Earth & Utopia, by Salma Samar Damluji and Viola Bertini. Laurence King, 368 pages, $85.
The Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–89) was influential in his use of earth architecture, vernacular forms, and designing housing for the poor. In this compendium, the authors—one of whom, Salma Samar Damluji, worked for Fathy, the other, Viola Bertini, an architect who wrote her Ph.D. thesis on his work—create a scrapbook of sorts, featuring essays, interviews, and memoranda elaborating on his vision. Photos, drawings, and watercolors well illustrate the architect’s arguments: that cultural identity was being lost in modern architecture, and that it was oriented neither to human experience nor any but the rich. His works—such as the entire village of New Baris in his country’s Al-Kharga Oasis (1965)—draw you in, even if the book’s loose structure causes some overlapping of topics.
Projects and Provocations, by Mark Foster Gage; foreword by Robert A. M. Stern; afterword by Peter Eisenman. Rizzoli, 272 pages, $70.
Those with a penchant for philosophy will relish this collection of essays, conversations, and phantasmal renderings from digital provocateur Mark Foster Gage. (Even the book’s font, Atlas Grotesque, provokes). The classically trained architect who is now, according to Peter Eisenman, a “leading teacher in the present-day avant-garde,” discusses aesthetic theory, debates Patrik Schumacher on parametricism, and pays tribute to Zaha Hadid.
A Feeling of History, by Peter Zumthor and Mari Lending. Scheidegger & Spiess, 84 pages, $33.
This little book of conversations between Peter Zumthor and architectural historian and writer Mari Lending, joined to make a narrative, is as unassuming as Zumthor’s work; you won’t find any images of his buildings here. Instead, a series of black-and-white photographs by Hélène Binet—images that capture light bouncing off textured stone paving—accompany a meandering discussion on time, memory, and architecture.
Kengo Kuma: Complete Works, by Kengo Kuma; essay by Kenneth Frampton. Thames & Hudson, 352 pages, $75.
As Kenneth Frampton notes in the opening essay of this monograph, the architect looks at his work phenomenologically, regarding it as “anti-photographic.” Ironically, this hefty book is light on text and heavy on images. It may be hard to understand the essence of Kuma’s architecture without experiencing it from different vantage points, but what comes across is a studied exploration of craft, materiality, and space via layering, weaving, and breaking components down to particles.
Victor Lundy: Artist Architect, edited by Donna Kacmar; foreword by Nader Tehrani. Princeton Architectural Press, 240 pages, $55.
This is an impressive attempt to bring greater recognition to nonagenarian architect Victor Lundy, who “lets the natural grain of raw matter . . . determine the aesthetic sensibility of his buildings,” as Nader Tehrani writes in his cogent and incisive foreword. A pupil of Gropius and contemporary of Paul Rudolph, Lundy—also a talented painter and sculptor—advocated modernist principles with big sweeping gestures, as in his “wood curtains.” A mix of essays, sketches, and photographs shed light on this overlooked architect.
Studio Joy Works, by Rick Joy; essay by Michael J. Crosbie. Princeton Architectural Press, 208 pages, $55.
Whether in New England farm country or the Arizona desert, Tucson-based architect Rick Joy has built works on some of the most arresting sites imaginable. Drawing from the surrounding landscape, each of Joy’s mostly residential structures has a unique form and texturally rich material palette, reflecting a deep study of place. Vibrant photographs zoom in to highlight refined details and out to show the buildings at home in their environments.
Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See, by Frank Harmon, foreword by Tod Williams. Oro Editions, 168 pages, $24.95.
Frank Harmon is “an architect’s architect,” Tod Williams writes in his foreword, as shown by Harmon’s book of sketches and essays in what could be considered his travel journal. From the barns of his native North Carolina to the streets of London, these dozens of observations and reflections are an ode to the architecture he espouses: the everyday.
Henry N. Cobb, Words & Works 1948–2018: Scenes from a Life in Architecture, by Henry N. Cobb. Monacelli, 548 pages, $45.
This graphically appealing volume, small enough to fit in your hand, is much more than an examination of this modernist’s built works. Seventy years of conversations, lectures, writings, and photographs provide a wide view of Cobb’s thoughtful practice, pedagogy, and theory, including ardent defense of his Hancock Tower in Boston (1976), notorious at the time for its swelling costs, delayed construction, and glass panes that popped out.
Elemental, by Alejandro Aravena, Gonzalo Arteaga, Juan Cerda, Vítor Oddó, and Diego Torres. Phaidon, 256 pages, $89.95.
This monograph is an effort by Santiago-based Elemental, led by Pritzker Prize–winner Alejandro Aravena and his partners, to give an understanding of the firm’s work beyond “social” architecture. A variety of informally pulled-together photographs, drawings, and text demonstrate the architects’ rugged creations and forceful geometries, along with the firm’s anthropocentric, use-oriented process and democratic philosophy. Graphically, Elemental is an attempt to go back to basics, using the plain Courier font that mimics a typewriter’s and the name stacked as a three-tiered block pressed into a plain burlap cover. The book is simple but strong.
Michael Webb: Two Journeys, by Ashley Simone, editor, and Kenneth Frampton, Michael Sorkin, Mark Wigley, Lebbeus Woods. Lars Müller, 206 pages, $45.
The founding member of Archigram, the London-based 1960s-avant-garde architectural firm, describes the two journeys, fast and leisurely, that he has taken in a career of imagination and drawing mesmerizing images. He came to New York in 1965, where he taught at Columbia University and Cooper Union, among other schools. His plan and perspective projections, photo montages, and collages are all here in full panoply, accompanied by illuminating commentaries.
New York Splendor, by Wendy Moonan; introduction by Robert A.M. Stern. Rizzoli, 320 pages, $85.
Complete with engaging written reportage, this personal survey of outstanding rooms in New York’s most luxurious apartments, by architecture and design journalist Wendy Moonan, provides a richly illustrated overview of interior design, decoration, and architecture during the past half-century. Architects are well represented, with nearly half of the 112 projects, by such notable talents (past and present) as Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, Annabelle Selldorf, WORKac, and including RAMSA, whose founder is Robert A.M. Stern.
Architectural Digest: Autobiography of a Magazine 1920–2010, by Paige Rense; foreword by Mario Buatta. Rizzoli, 320 pages, $65.
Discover the roots of the “high-end-residential” phenomenon that began with Architectural Digest, in Paige Rense’s photo-rich, tell-all account. Editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1975 to 2010, Rense reveals its beginnings in 1920 (before her watch) and her subsequent calculated conversion of this regional residential magazine into the legendary “bible for decorators and architects,” in the words of late designer Mario Buatta. Rense takes us through the decades of her dominance in which she and the identity of the magazine became one. Celebrity clients have precedence over designers, but some architects, including Stanley Tigerman, Margaret McCurry, and Alexander Gorlin, make a showing in Paige’s pages.
Ellen Shipman and the American Garden, by Judith B. Tankard. University of Georgia Press, 298 pages, $39.95.
In this biography, historian Judith B. Tankard charts the life and career of one of the most prolific American landscape architects, whose work was characterized by “domesticity, intimacy, and sensual seclusion” in comparison to her colleagues’ “grander, self-consciously European schemes.” Though Ellen Shipman designed well over 650 gardens in her lifetime, the book focuses on 50 of her seminal works, including the impressively variegated Sarah P. Duke Gardens in North Carolina, through plans and glossy photographs.
The Complete Works of Percier and Fontaine, introduction by Barry Bergdoll, Princeton Architectural Press in association with the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. 384 pages, $100.
Few can match the ability of French Empire architects Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine (1762-1853) to draw. While they designed architecture and interiors (notably Empress Josephine’s Malmaison outside Paris), they first made their name measuring and drawing Renaissance buildings during their time in Rome by publishing their efforts in 1798. Now a single volume brings together this impressive compilation plus Percier and Fontaine’s own designs for interiors and furniture published in 1812, drawings of well known Roman villas (e.g. Villa Madama), published in 1824, and plans for houses in France, Italy, Spain and Russia, which appeared in 1838. Barry Bergdoll’s introduction reminds us that the key to success is to publish—especially when the work may be susceptible to demolition.
Vincent Van Duysen Works 2009-2018 by Vincent Van Duysen. Thames & Hudson, 320 pages, $75.
Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen brings simple volumes to life with sleek, contemporary applications of traditional materials such as sandstone, oak, brick, and concrete, as captured in the opening photo essay by Hélène Binet. Actress Julianne Moore wrote the foreword to this visually evocative and refined collection of work—mostly in Van Duysen’s home country—which features his timeless designs for furniture, private residences, as well as commercial and retail spaces.
Santiago Calatrava: Drawing, Building, Reflecting by Santiago Calatrava. Thames & Hudson, 224 pages, $45.
Although most of Santiago Calatrava’s built structures are white, this new book shows a more colorful side of the Spanish-born architect and engineer. Through pencil and watercolor sketches, Calatrava’s exploration of natural forms, light, and art give insight into the development of his sweeping designs. The drawings, along with intermittent photographs, illustrate four project case studies.
Open Studio: The Work of Robert A.M. Stern Architects by Robert A.M. Stern. The Monacelli Press, 384 pages, $50
With almost no text save for an introduction by Robert A.M. Stern himself, this might better be described as a picture book as opposed to a monograph. The intention, writes Stern, is to let RAMSA’s work speak for itself. The first half of Open Studio comprises black & white and matte color images that document the firm’s process: drawings, models, and photos (many of Stern candidly overseeing his team). Glossy photographs of the firm’s completed work, mostly known for drawing upon historic motifs, make up the second half of the book. Captions and photo credits are placed at the appendix, allowing the images to bleed off the page.
Gardens of the Arts & Crafts Movement, by Judith B. Tankard. Timber Press, November 2018, 299 pages, $45.00.
The revised edition of this monograph features nearly 300 illustrations and photographs of houses and gardens that were built in Britain and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some notable examples include Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens' formal but lush Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset and Harvey Ladew’s sculptured topiary at Ladew Gardens in Maryland.
Among the many architecture and design books published throughout the year, RECORD receives a number we would like to peruse at leisure or delve into to better understand significant contributions to the discipline. In the slideshow above, four editors briefly highlight books about historic architects (Suzanne Stephens), living ones (Alex Klimoski), interiors (Linda Lentz), and landscape design (Justin Chan) to guide our readers in choosing gifts for architects, clients, students, or interested lay people.
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