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I've always been partial to architectural mountains—from the Mayans to Bruno Taut—so I was delighted to see the hilly design that Beijing-based MAD Architects has proposed for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Chicago.

During any given week, I’m told, 100 or more design buffs take self-guided tours of the San Francisco Federal Building (SFFB) by Pritzker Prize'winning architect Thom Mayne.

July 2011 Reassessing the rise and fall of Postmodern architecture It is now nearly a quarter of a century since Postmodern architecture — which proposed to make historical references respectable once again — was declared officially dead by none other than its most capricious establishment advocate, Philip Johnson. His exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture (co-curated in 1988 with Mark Wigley) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art brought an abrupt end to a trend that had lasted just over two decades. Photography ' Rollin La France The house Robert Venturi designed for his mother Vanna in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania (1964). Image courtesy

In 1998, the British critic Martin Pawley rather dramatically announced what he called “the strange death of architectural criticism.” Pawley lamented the disappearance of an aggressive, “take-no-prisoners” approach to critical writing about architecture, which he felt was being replaced by “wall-to-wall testimonials of praise.” Illustration: © Ross MacDonald I wonder what Pawley, who served as architecture critic for both the Guardian and Observer newspapers and died in 2008, would say about the state of the field today, particularly in this country. If the praise, at least for certain celebrity architects, has grown even more over-the-top, the number of critics has

Urban centers find innovative solutions for housing their middle class. Rendering © TF Cornerstone Arquitectonica’s forthcoming 606 West 57th Street (at right) in New York. The 40-story building will have 1,028 units, 224 of which will be affordable. The rendering depicts Bjarke Ingels’s future Pyramid building in the background. Geared to young professionals, micro-apartment building 38 Harriet Street in San Francisco by Lowney Architecture and Trachtenberg Architects includes 23 350-square-foot units. It's a well-known story by now: in the wake of a shift toward city living, and as housing prices continue to rise and wages stagnate, middle-class Americans are being

The difficult cause of willful buildings that demand heroic efforts to preserve. Photo © Peter Mauss/Esto The American Folk Art Museum in New York, by Tod Williams Billie Tsien, invited visitors to explore its many levels with narrow atriums and stairs lined with display niches. Though the public spaces of Boston City Hall choreograph a theatrical itinerary of light and shadow, many citizens and politicians find the building intimidating. Though it was indisputably a significant work of architecture, New York's American Folk Art Museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, is being demolished. Its fate was sealed when Diller

By Camilo José Vergara. University of Chicago Press, December 2013, 364 pages, $55. The City Observed The sociologist, photographer, and MacArthur Fellow Camilo José Vergara, known for his website Invincible Cities and his heartfelt documentation of devastated urban neighborhoods, says in this, his ninth, book that there are many Harlems he has been photographing since 1970. While that could mean the various populations he mentions—the early Jewish and Italian immigrant Harlemites, the big wave of African-Americans, the nearly as big influx of Latin Americans, the recent Senegalese and Malians—the pictures are primarily of built Harlem, its street life (concentrating on

By Russell Fortmeyer and Charles D. Linn. Images Publishing, April 2014, 224 pages, $78. Smart Skins Despite its title, Kinetic Architecture is not a book about buildings with components that literally move. Instead, its authors, Russell Fortmeyer and Charles D. Linn (both former editors at Architectural Record), investigate projects with envelopes that dynamically respond—in ways both visible and invisible—to their surroundings in order to modulate the interior environment, conserve energy, and enhance the comfort of occupants. Linn, an architect and director of communications for the University of Kansas School of Architecture, and Fortmeyer, an electrical engineer and sustainable-technology specialist at

By A+T Research Group (Aurora Fern'ndez Per, Javier Mozas, and Alex S. Ollero). A+T Architecture Publishers, June 2013, 496 pages, $53. European Lessons for Living This handsome and valuable compendium of social housing projects in Europe is actually three books: a chronological presentation of 10 projects tracing the development of architectural concepts for collective housing from 1919 to about 1970; a superlative example of how well-organized and stunning graphics can allow for comparisons between projects; and a manifesto for promoting humane high-density living. The authors, who are also the publishers, are members of a group formed in Spain in 1992

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