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Carrying a firm on after the founders are gone requires planning, but isn't right for every practice. Photo: © Ulrik Jantzen Bjarke Ingels (standing at center, bottom) surrounded by his seven partners in BIG. Photo © Thomas Mayer Frank Gehry hopes his partners will continue on their own. Bjarke Ingels, who is only 39, would like to have one, soon. “The reason succession plans don't work,” he says, “is that people start to think about them much too late.” By contrast, Daniel Libeskind, 68, says he doesn't need a succession plan. He sees his architecture firm as the equivalent of

Architecture takes up social causes in cycles. Since the 1970s, engagement has tended to rise when the NASDAQ falls and to correspond, roughly speaking, with the presence of solar panels on the White House.

When architect Bernard Tschumi was renovating a crumbling 1930s-​era zoo on the edge of Paris, his design team faced challenges.

Edited by Peggy Deamer. Routledge, August 2013, 264 pages, $45 . Money Talks At the top of the list of topics architects like to talk about as little as possible is money. Dirty, complicated money. Which means that Yale University Professor Peggy Deamer’s new book is a necessary—though highly theoretical and historical—addition to the global architectural conversation. And while the book doesn’t delve into the particularities of the professional economy, it opens up essential avenues of inquiry, as well as expressing some inspiring examples of historical and architectural scholarship at its finest. The best (and best-written) essay is Robin Schuldenfrei’s

Edited by Kevin Bone. Monacelli Press, May 2014, 224 pages, $40. When Less is More Earth-friendly By reducing green design to a set of checklists that are then used as shopping lists, LEED and similar environmental rating systems may actually increase consumption. And by turning sustainability into the province of consultants, such systems take the responsibility for making buildings ecologically sound out of the hands of architects. It didn’t have to be that way, Kevin Bone makes clear in this important new book. The outgrowth of a 2013 exhibition at New York’s Cooper Union, where Bone is the director of

On public works projects Photo © MMBB Arquitetos Urban Project for Antonico Creek reconciles a S'o Paulo favela and its area's waterways. Marta Moreira is one of the founders of MMBB Arquitetos in São Paulo. Formed by a group of university friends who worked for a time under Eduardo de Almeida, the studio is one of the leading lights of the post-dictatorship generation of architects and is known for the high quality of its public works projects. “The way we typically work at MMBB, with projects such as Jardim Edite (a multi-tower public-housing project in a central business district that