By Deane Simpson. Lars M'ller, March 2015, 384 pages, $50. In the fastest-growing city in America, the birth rate is less than half the U.S. average. Most of us aren't allowed to live there. It's The Villages, a Florida retirement community whose population has more than doubled since 2010 and now stands at 114,000. Ninety-eight percent white, 80 percent married, and 86 percent between the ages of 60 and 85, The Villages is uniquely homogeneous, banal, and bizarre by turns. America's largest gerontopolis is the most developed of four case studies in Young-Old: Urban Utopias of an Aging Society, an
By Giulia Foscari with a foreword by Rem Koolhaas. Lars Müller Publishers, October 2014, 696 pages, $32. To say Giulia Foscari's book is a beautifully put together trove of information about Venice's luxuriantly scenic architecture sounds gushy. Actually, it is an understatement. Foscari's distinctive analysis of the variegated riches that are a feast for the eye in this city of encrusted layers pays proper homage to its subject. By zeroing in on the architectonic vocabulary of facades, walls, ceilings, stairs, doors, and other elements, the author, who is a young architect in Hamburg, provides an intensive look into the creation
Villages in the City: A Guide to South China’s Informal Settlements, edited by Stefan Al. Hong Kong University Press and University of Hawaii Press, October 2014, 216 pages, $28. Handmade Urbanism: From Community Initiatives to Participatory Models, edited by Marcos Rosa and Ute Weiland. Jovis, October 2013, 224 pages, $40. Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change, by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia. Island Press, March 2015, 256 pages, $25. From the slum settlements of burgeoning megacities to the guerrilla gardening and pop-up everything we celebrate in the United States, recent years have seen a growing interest in creative and
By William J.R. Curtis (revised and updated). Phaidon, April 2015, 512 pages, $150. In the preface to his classic Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, published in 1986 and for the quarter century since the most thoughtful and complete analysis of the architect, William J.R. Curtis compared his subject's impact to that of Freud, Joyce, and Picasso. But why stop there? If the pronouncement-making passion of the early Corbusier makes him another Freud (explaining away the darkness, an answer for everything), then the later Corbusier—the architect of post-rational dreamscapes like La Tourette and Ronchamp —is another Karl Jung. There simply is
Edited by Nicholas Dagan Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence J. Vale. Cornell University Press, April 2015, 296 pages, $70 (hardcover), $23 (paper). Nothing led to the disillusion with modern architecture during the postmodern era more than the critique of public housing. It was not, after all, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) that really ushered in the new style. That book was too complex and subtle. Charles Jencks's more colorful and bombastic The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977) was much more influential, and it began with a view of the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe. With one facile fell swoop,
Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks, edited by Donald Albrecht and Andrew S. Dolkart. Photographic portfolios by Iwan Baan. The Monacelli Press, 2015, 208 pages, $50. Filled with Iwan Baan's people-centric photographs of New York City's five boroughs and his famous helicopter aerials, Saving Place celebrates the 50th anniversary of the New York City Landmarks Law. “Much of what we love about New York today we owe to the law and its administering body,” writes Robert A.M. Stern in the introduction. With archival photographs, too, the book narrates the preservation movement, from its origins to its later
Edited by Okwui Enwezor and Zoë Ryan in consultation with Peter Allison; Yale University Press , April 2015, 296 pages, $55. Wrapped in golden tracery, this nearly 300-page book showcases the sophistication and craftsmanship of the London-based architect David Adjaye. The book's material is drawn from an exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (where it's on view until January 3, 2016) and the Haus der Kunst in Munich (through May 31). The introduction, written by curators Zoë Ryan and Okwui Enwezor, defines two essential threads in Adjaye's work: a strong sense of artistry, materiality, and craft, as well
Edited by Neil Spiller and Nic Clear. Thames & Hudson, November 2014, 352 pages, $50 (hardcover). This is actually three books in one. As a collection of 40 essays by 35 different authors, it is, first, an advertisement for the University of Greenwich's Department of Architecture and Landscape in its new location at the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site outside of London and its assumed new relevance. It is, alternatively, a platform for schools of architecture that indulge “radicality,” “innovation,” and visions of the “future.” And, finally, it is a history of various schools offering alternative (read: anti-institutional) modes of
By Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luiz Lara with a foreword by Jorge Francisco Liernur. University of Texas Press, January 2015, 424 pages, $81 (hardcover) $45 (paperback). Whose Continent Is It Anyway? Eurocentrism Is Hard to Break. Except for a handful of anthologies and books focusing on specific architects or events, Latin America has received little attention in English-language histories of architecture. The Museum of Modern Art, though, mounted three exhibitions (and published accompanying books) on the region in the 20th century—Brazil Builds in 1943, Latin American Architecture Since 1945 in 1955, and The Architecture of Luis Barragán in 1976—and
Edited by Rosemarie Haag Bletter and Joan Ockman, with Nancy Eklund Later. Yale University Press, February 2015, 348 pages, $80. Thirty years after the legendary show Modern Architecture: An International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), its curators, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, launched a series of symposia assessing the development of this new architecture. Whereas the MoMA show was accompanied by a book, the symposia had to wait almost 50 years for the proceedings to be published. It is like opening a time capsule—and a compelling one. The three Modern Architecture Symposia (MAS) took place at Columbia
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