Opinion

RSS

Some new additions to a balanced architectural library.

In A Genealogy of Modern Architecture, the prolific historian, critic, and theorist Kenneth Frampton presents a documentation of a course he used to teach, which involved comparative critical analyses of 14 pairs of more or less canonical modern buildings completed between 1924 and 2007.

It is impossible to do justice in the space available to the critical writing of the distinguished Canadian architect/theorist George Baird.

Named for the conventional Japanese word meaning “house,” Naomi Pollock’s book surveys the “wonderful, as well as the weird” residential architecture of Japan.

A traveling exhibition, now closed, is well documented in a book of the same name.

This is a beautifully crafted study of Wright’s place in the history of urbanism in the first half of the 20th century.

This is a superb history of the numerous ways that New York has provided subsidized housing for low-, moderate-, and middle-income residents from around 1900 to the present.

We may think we know all there is about the most famous display of architecture to be mounted in the the U.S., the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark show, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932. But there’s always more to dig up about this ultra-influential event and the fertile period from which it emanated, as we find in Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson.

Art of the Airport Tower, by Carolyn Russo. Smithsonian Books, November 2015, 176 pages, $45. This big, beautiful photographic survey of 85 historic and contemporary air traffic control towers from around the world and throughout history was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.