By Edwin Heathcote. London: Frances Lincoln, 2012, 160 pages, $20. This book is so petite and whimsical-looking you could easily mistake it for “bookshop candy”—those cutesy, little tomes perched around cash registers—but don’t be fooled. While this rambling meditation on the significance of home mixes plenty of wit and surprising factoids with occasional clichés, it also draws on such heavy-hitting intellectuals as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Ingmar Bergman, and Gaston Bachelard. The Meaning of Home grew from a series of essays its author, British journalist Edwin Heathcote, wrote as the Financial Times’ architecture critic, a position he has
Edited by Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske, and David Fixler. Yale University Press, 2012, 323 pages, $75. Alvar Aalto considered moving to the United States after World War II. The dapper, charming Finn loved America and, despite his mythic status in Finland now, felt unappreciated in his homeland (his boat, which he had designed and built, was named Nemo Propheta in Patria). He did, however, do two stints as a visiting professor at MIT in the 1940s. It was for that Cambridge campus that he created Baker House, one of his most important works and the protagonist of this handsome book.
By Christopher Bascom Rawlins. Foreword by Alastair Gordon. Metropolis Books/Gordon de Vries Studio, 2013, 202 pages, $60. Consider this book a handy time machine set to take you to a sun-soaked place in a hedonistic era. Bring your Speedo and Ray-Bans and let go of your hang-ups. Both a cultural history and an architectural meditation, Fire Island Modernist captures the look, feel, and sensation of gay society in the 1960s and '70s that flourished on the sandy shores and shifting dunes of the 31-mile-long barrier island of its title. Separated from the Hamptons by Great South Bay, Fire Island developed
By Caroline Rob Zaleski. W.W. Norton, 2012, 336 pages, $80. This fascinating book is as much a social history as a documentation of architects working on Long Island during the period of “high Modernism,” when ideology was considered as important as space and form. Organized in chapters devoted to individual architects, rather than in a coherent thematic order, the book includes a surprising number of well-known architects who built on Long Island, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Antonin Raymond, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Paul Rudolph, and Marcel Breuer. Disappointing, although not entirely unexpected, is the almost total
Exclusive: a tour inside a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Southwest reveals the power of the original interiors, never before published. I visited the Fir Tree House only once, in 1950. An apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright, I was on my way from Taliesin in Wisconsin to Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, with another apprentice, John deKoven Hill, who had supervised the stonework for the house. Wright had finished it in 1948 for a family who wanted a vacation home with four bedrooms, three baths, and a separate servant's room and bath in a remote valley in the Southwest.
In the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami that devastated the eastern coast of Japan two years ago this month, the small town of Rikuzentakata has looked to the ruins for renewal.
By Matthew Gordon Lasner. Yale University Press, 2012, 336 pages, $40. This superb study of co-owned housing in America-from the first cooperative apartment buildings in 19th-century New York City to condominiums around the country today-is not only an architectural history but also a social, political, urban, economic, and political one. With only 125 black-and-white images, the author manages to provide enough information for the reader to picture those apartment buildings and townhouses, while he explains the socioeconomic circumstances under which they were created. High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, by Matthew Gordon Lasner. Yale University Press, 2012, 336
Edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. University of Illinois Press, 2012, 224 pages, $60. SynergiCity: Reinventing the Postindustrial City, edited by Paul Hardin Kapp and Paul J. Armstrong. University of Illinois Press, 2012, 224 pages, $60. Focusing mostly on Rust Belt cities in the United States, this book examines urban-revitalization strategies in places such as Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, and Peoria, Illinois. In a lively foreword, urbanist Richard Florida argues that these cities should be wary of megaprojects like “heavily subsidized convention centers and downtown sports stadiums” and should look instead to smaller-scale, grass-roots efforts
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