By Alexander Gorlin. Pointed Leaf Press, 2013, 192 pages, $60. Mystical Thinking This informative and heavily illustrated book is not so much about places where artists have applied principles of Kabbalah—the Jewish mystical interpretation of the universe—but where Alexander Gorlin takes readers to find them. Gorlin, a New York architect and author, uses Kabbalah as a lens for “re-reading . . . art and architecture,” much as critics might interpret art through the filters of class, race, gender, or the Holocaust. The book stems from his fascination with the Kabbalistic idea of genesis expressed as light, space, and geometry, which

By Françoise Astorg Bollack. Monacelli, 2013, 224 pages, $50. Second Lives for Old Structures Faced with the prospect of the gradual degradation of the buildings that are our architectural heritage, designers need to reconsider their focus on the heroic model of practice, with its emphasis on idiosyncratic form-making and new construction. Instead, they should look to “the creative possibilities of preservation,” says Françoise Bollack. Pursuing these possibilities while celebrating modernity and producing conceptually powerful work is the focus of her book Old Buildings, New Forms. In it, Bollack posits that, “an old building is not an obstacle but rather a

By John Fernández and Paulo Ferrão. MIT Press, 2013, 264 pages, $35. Helping Cities Go Green In 2012, officials in Dubai asserted that their city would rank among the most sustainable metropolises in the world by 2020. About the same time, Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Grey trumpeted greenest-city status by 2032. A glimpse of the cities' sustainability plans shows two different approaches to the same goal. For Dubai, it means supplying five percent of electricity photovoltaically and outlawing energy-hog buildings. While Washington also aims for renewable-energy use and efficient structures, it prioritizes cleaning up the Anacostia River and increasing urban

By Anthony M. Townsend. W.W. Norton, October 2013, 400 pages, $29. Brave New World Anthony Townsend started thinking about the intersection of technology and cities before the rest of us knew such a place existed. Back in 2002, when carrying a telephone in your pocket still felt slightly cutting-edge, Townsend, with the volunteer labor of civic hackers and donated equipment, was helping to blanket New York City's Bryant Park with 10 acres of free wireless Internet. Today, Townsend is a research director at the Institute for the Future and a fellow at NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation, and the rest

By Witold Rybczynski, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2013, 368 pages, $27. Sense and Sensibility in Design Today At several points throughout his new book, Witold Rybczynski invokes Steen Eiler Rasmussen's classic text Experiencing Architecture (1959). Rybczynski, until recently professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has served as an architectural critic for an array of publications. When he studied architecture in the late 1960s at McGill University, he tells us one of his teachers was a Rasmussen disciple. In How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit, Rybczynski follows faithfully the central tenets of his predecessor. Both books organize architectural design into

By Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove. Monacelli Press, 2013, 1,072 pages, $95. Utopia by Design When Paradise Planned arrived at my home—all 1,072 extra-thick high-gloss pages—my first instinct was to set the volume down on its own half-acre lot, give it a peaked roof, and simply move in. Instead, I rushed to the gym and spent a few days building up the biceps needed to lift the thing. Then, awed by the sheer cumulative industry of writing triumvirate Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove, I lowered their exhaustive survey of the garden suburb onto my

By Rowan Moore. Harper Design, August 2013, 400 pages, $30. The View From Across the Pond As he indicates in the title of his new book, British architecture critic Rowan Moore sets out to joust with Big Questions. What is the relationship between political and economic power and architectural patronage? How does active human desire translate into the latent desires embedded in architectural space? What is the relationship between the longing for home and the urge to wander? In addressing these concerns, Moore revels in ambiguities, selecting examples to support widely differing interpretations. Drawing mostly from the 20th century, he

By Ben Katchor, Pantheon, 2013, 160 pages, $30. Out of Whack: A Cartoonist's Vision Picture a bizzaro realm where building, construction, architecture, and just plain city living are slightly off-kilter—the stuff that dreams are made of. Welcome to graphic novelist Ben Katchor's world. If you're willing to immerse yourself in it, you may find yourself lying awake at night, worrying about your cellar and bearing walls. The characters in Katchor’s new book inhabit a built environment that’s familiar but distorted by their own personality quirks and hang-ups. If you haven't crossed paths with Katchor before, Hand-Drying in America: And Other

By Gregory L. Heller. Foreword by Alexander Garvin. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 290 pages, $36. Power Broker Ed Bacon was born, raised, and—except for a brief stint in Flint, Michigan—spent his long career in Philadelphia. Gregory L. Heller notes in fascinating detail every post and position Bacon held, every colleague, boss, opponent, mayor, and governor who crossed paths with him. More than a biography, this book is the story of mid-20th-century planning, complete with the passions and dogma that attended it, as told through one man in one city. In doing this, Heller answers the question still posed about