Edited by Karla Britton, Yale University Press, 2011, 248 pages, $50 This inter-faith overview of contemporary religious architecture, distilled from a 2007 Yale University School of Architecture symposium, showcases 20 essays by architects, historians, and theologians. And the architects steal the show. Outstanding insights from the likes of Stanley Tigerman, Richard Meier, Steven Holl. Zaha Hadid, and Peter Eisenman make half of this book illuminating, alas, the latter half. Britton’s rambling but informative prologue traces the roots of 21st century religious architecture to Le Corbusier (from whom the book takes its title) and Louis Kahn, who introduced a sense of
Edited by Robert Twombly, W.W. Norton, 2010, 344 pages, $25. Generally speaking, the writings of designers are not as important to understanding their intentions as their actual work. Frederick Law Olmsted’s copious writings are an exception, for two reasons. He was a man of letters before he was a landscape architect. He wrote The Cotton Kingdom, an influential chronicle of his travels as a newspaper correspondent in the ante-bellum South, edited Putnam’s Magazine, an important literary journal, and co-founded The Nation. Moreover, because he was not formally trained in an art or design school, Olmsterd approached park and landscape design
By Anthony Vidler. The Monacelli Press, 2011, 368 pages, $50 Some first impressions about this new collection of old essays by Anthony Vidler are misleading. The title, for instance, The Scenes of the Street, and the city plan on the cover indicate a broad coverage of topics regarding the city. In fact, two thirds of the book is dedicated to Paris and most of that to Paris before the turn of the 20th century. Those essays that do not deal with Paris directly are mostly concerned with theories created by 19th century French male architects, authors, and humanists. Vidler’s texts
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