By Rob Kovitz. Treyf Books, November 2014, 664 pages, $30. The only bit of original text in Rob Kovitz's diverting According to Plan is a last-page mission statement about his imprint, Treyf Books. The objective of that publishing project is described there as making "unusual books of an indeterminate type, sort of story-picture remix books for people who can't stomach any more schmaltzy Chicken Soup for the Soul." If we are to take that title, volume one of the enormously popular self-help series, as a stand-in for all things that limit creative possibility through oversimplification, overdetermination, and, yes, schmaltz, then
By Ulrich Pfammatter. DOM Publishers, May 2014, 584 pages, $116. This well-documented volume casts a wide net in gathering sustainable projects from around the world-including floating reed houses in Iraq and the glass-and-steel headquarters Christoph Ingenhoven designed for Swarovski in Switzerland-and has a foreword by Stefan Behnisch.
Edited by Carol McMichael Reese, Michael Sorkin, and Anthony Fontenot. Verso, May 2014, 544 pages, $50. Can the Good Times Roll After the Flood Waters Recede? Images courtesy Waggonner & Ball Architects at Waggonner & Ball devised plans for the Hoffman Triangle area that change its current state (top) into one that accommodates various water-storage options (above). The subtitle here is a bit of a spoiler. News flash: equitable, sound, socially responsible planning did not happen in post-Katrina New Orleans. This won't shock anyone who watched HBO's Treme on a regular basis. But that's the message conveyed by the book's
By Rem Koolhaas with a supplement by Jorge Otero-Pailos, edited by Jordan Carver. GSAPP Transcripts, September 2014, 104 pages, $18 The idea that Rem Koolhaas and his firm, OMA, staunchly advocate preservation might come as a surprise. His large-scale buildings, such as CCTV in Beijing; or the Seattle Central Library attest to a "starchitect" at work, one who pushes for the new and unique, not the old and historic. Koolhaas, not surprisingly, abhors this hackneyed epithet. And now, two of his past lectures-assembled with a concluding essay by Jorge Otero-Pailos, associate professor of historic preservation at Columbia University-make a strong
By Brian MacKay-Lyons, edited by Robert McCarter. Princeton Architectural Press, January 2015, 224 pages, $50. Ghost Stories Thirteen times during a 17-year period, architect and educator Brian MacKay-Lyons hosted a multi-day gathering of his peers, students, and fellow travelers in the ad hoc movement to reestablish architecture's roots in local soil. Held at his family farm in Lower Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, not far from where Samuel de Champlain established the first French settlement in North America in 1604, these events combined talks by an international coterie of practitioners and critics with the construction of a design-build project by MacKay-Lyons' students
Edited by Denna Jones. Prestel Publishing, November 2014, 576 pages, $35. History looms over architects. In few other professions is there such a defined canon of masterpieces, such a tradition of reviving old styles. Yet, as Richard Rogers and Philip Gumuchdjian observe in their forward to Architecture: The Whole Story, “architecture is surely one of the most optimistic art forms.” Each generation searches for “new utopias, new ideals” and finds inspiration “from all our innovations and all expressions of harmony and beauty,” they say. Architecture always looks forward, but does revisiting the past offer new inspiration? That tension is at
Every year, hundreds of new architecture books find their way to Record's offices. Editors look at all of them, albeit some longer than others. Here are some of the ones that grabbed our attention in 2014. Notations: Diagrams & Sequences, by Bernard Tschumi.Artifice Books, August 2014, 304 pages, $40. An extensive collection of previously unpublished drawings, this book is beautifully bound in a red cloth cover, Tschumi’s signature color. It presents the conceptual “notations” behind a range of projects, arranged chronologically, from the Parc de la Villette in Paris to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. Tschumi’s expressive drawings, sketches,
Lina Bo Bardi 100: Brazil’s Alternative Path to Modernism, edited by Andres Lepik and Vera Simone Bader. Hatje Cantz Verlag, October 2014, 368 pages, $65. Lina Bo Bardi, by Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima with a foreword by Barry Bergdoll. New Haven: Yale University Press, November 2013, 256 pages, $65. Stones Against Diamonds, by Lina Bo Bardi. London:Architectural Association, 2013, 132 pages. Lina Bo Bardi is best known for the SESC Pompeia community center in S'o Paulo, completed when she was 72 years old, the culmination of a complex and contradictory bi-continental career. Now, two new books and the
These two new books provide strong and timely messages for people concerned with the present and future of cities. Both of them look at the dense, often chaotic conditions of big cities and find solutions where others have seen mostly problems. Click the image above for details about each book mentioned in this review. Focused on Latin America, McGuirk's book is carefully constructed, striking a balance between reportage and interpretation. A writer and curator who has worked as the design columnist for The Guardian, McGuirk describes what activist architects and politicians are doing to improve informal settlements in cities such
The City As Interface: How New Media Are Changing the City, by Martijn de Waal. nai010 Publishers, August 2014, 224 pages, $33. Smart About Cities: Visualizing the Challenges for 21st Century Urbanism, edited by Maarten Hajer and Ton Dassen. nai010 Publishers/pbl Publishers, June 2014, 250 pages, $33. Predicting the future of the city is a lot like predicting the future of human society. Urban areas embody the physical infrastructure of our cultures and economies, and will house 70 percent of the world's population by 2050. They are too complex for detailed extrapolations, yet we can make insightful observations about their
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