Opinion

RSS

By Diana Balmori and Joel Sanders. The Monacelli Press, 2011, 208 pages, $50. In Groundwork, landscape architect Diana Balmori and architect Joel Sanders explore the territory between their fields, which is often painted—falsely, they write—as a dichotomy. “An integrated practice of landscape and architecture could have dramatic environmental consequences: the disciplines would cease to have separate agendas and would instead allow for buildings and landscapes to perform as linked interactive systems that heal the environment.” It is tantalizing, despite the hubris behind the idea that people or designers can “heal” nature. Ecologists and biologists maintain that the best way to

Edited by Lukas Feireiss, Introduction by Ole Bouman. NAi Publishers, 2011, 240 pages, $40. This book profiles 30 progressive architectural projects from more than 15 countries in an attempt to demonstrate the productive potential of community-centered design. Editor Lukas Feireiss goes beyond curatorial norms by including the testimonies of people who have interacted with the finished buildings, along with full-page color photos, contextual descriptions, and mission statements. Testify! The Consequences of Architecture, edited by Lukas Feireiss, Introduction by Ole Bouman. NAi Publishers, 2011, 240 pages, $40. These interviews show how the combination of physical intervention and community programs can impact

Edited by Lukas Feireiss, Introduction by Ole Bouman. NAi Publishers, 2011, 240 pages, $40. June 2012 This book profiles 30 progressive architectural projects from more than 15 countries in an attempt to demonstrate the productive potential of community-centered design. Editor Lukas Feireiss goes beyond curatorial norms by including the testimonies of people who have interacted with the finished buildings, along with full-page color photos, contextual descriptions, and mission statements. Testify! The Consequences of Architecture, edited by Lukas Feireiss, Introduction by Ole Bouman. NAi Publishers, 2011, 240 pages, $40. These interviews show how the combination of physical intervention and community programs

Edited and with an essay by Susan Morgan. East of Borneo Books, 2012, 392 pages, $35. Affection isn’t a word often used to describe architecture criticism, but that’s the ruling emotion of Piecing Together Los Angeles, the first collection of the writings of California historian and critic Esther McCoy (1904-89). There’s McCoy’s affection for Los Angeles superstars like Charles Eames, Pierre Koenig and John Lautner when they were young and needed books like McCoy’s Five California Architects (1960) to give their work a backstory—and when they were old, and the world needed a reminder of their talents. (On Lautner: “Instead

Edited by Harry den Hartog. 010 Publishers: 2010, 416 pages, $44. Related Links: The Vertical Village and How the City Moved to Mr. Sun This densely packed book presents a broad range of research on the remarkable growth of the greater Shanghai metropolitan area in recent decades. With more than 300,000 people moving to Shanghai each year, the city government is busy building satellite towns, some of which are themed on ersatz visions of foreign places. So today, you can live in or visit Holland Village or Thames Town. Other new towns, such as Qingpu and Jiading, employ more sophisticated

By Victoria Newhouse. The Monacelli Press, 2012, 272 pages. $50. You can’t count off four beats of a twelve-bar blues, let alone flip through an opera score, without being aware that time is one of music’s essential ingredients. Another is space, though notation reveals nothing about it. Harmony, rhythm, melody, and instruments are all negotiable, and shaped by the place where it’s imagined, performed, and heard. Slave songs were pitched to carry across an open field. Beethoven composed his Eroica symphony to rattle the walls of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Medieval polyphony depended on the reverberations of

By Richard Olsen. Rizzoli, 2012, 240 pages, $45. Click the image above for details about book mentioned in this review. Handmade Houses takes us on a delightful journey back to the heady and rebellious days of the 1960s and ’70s, when green design—the world of reduce, reuse, and recycle—was sired. Its author, Richard Olsen, is a West Coast architectural writer and editor; he is also the grandson and great-grandson of Norwegian carpenters. This tale is a lot more than hippies and hot tubs, however. Olsen provides a thorough history of the owner-built, woodbutcher movement from places like Big Sur, California,

Monadnock Summer: The Architectural Legacy of Dublin, New Hampshire, by William Morgan. David R. Godine, 2011, 160 pages, $30. Tomorrow’s Houses: New England Modernism, by Alexander Gorlin. Rizzoli, 2011, 256 pages, $65. Together, these very different books on New England houses provide an intimate introduction to American domestic architecture and the values it embodies. Architectural historian William Morgan’s Monadnock Summer focuses on one quietly elite, very small town but explains how the buildings there exemplified some of the aspirations and achievements of the nation. Architect Alexander Gorlin’s Tomorrow’s Houses concentrates on houses in New England built between 1912 (Purcell &