Books of the Week

KA ME RA: Modern Japanese Architecture through the Photographer’s Lens, by Ari Seligmann (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Vanishing Japan: Modern Architecture, Gone But Not Forgotten, by Naomi Pollock (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

I’m far from alone in being a Westerner who has a deep appreciation for Japanese architecture, both traditional and modern. I’ve never tried to put my finger on what makes so much of the country’s architecture so appealing to me, but I’d wager it has to do with an attention to craft and materials, a human scale to many buildings, and the way the buildings relate to gardens and nature. Although I traveled to Japan once, more than twenty years ago now, and was able to see many famous and lesser known-buildings firsthand, I still rely greatly on the publication of Japanese architecture in books, magazines, websites, and social media to both keep up with developments there and track buildings under threat of demolition. So, my appreciation can be seen to be a product of the architecture itself but also the way buildings are photographed and presented to a wider public. These two books foreground that mediation: one focusing on architectural photographers in Japan and one about buildings that have been demolished but live on through photographs.

Not that I was looking, but it didn’t take long to discover a building that makes an appearance in both KA ME RA and Vanishing Japan: Nakagin Capsule Tower was designed by Kisho Kurokawa in 1970 as a built manifesto of Metabolism, the homegrown movement that conceptualized the built environment as an organic assemblage of modules, but demolished in 2022 to make way for a luxury hotel. Naomi Pollock includes it in her book as one of more than 90 postwar buildings across Japan that are no longer with us, situating it in the “Stay” chapter alongside Kiyonori Kikutake’s Hotel Sofitel Tokyo, a later Metabolist building that met the same fate and which gives the book its striking cover. While most of the buildings in Vanishing Japan are given one spread, with text on one page and a photo opposite, Nakagin is one of the occasional—and therefore special—buildings given two spreads and multiple photos.

Nakagin Capsule Tower is found in KA ME RA in a chapter devoted to photographer Tomio Ohashi (1932–2017). We learn through Ari Seligmann’s biographical background on Ohashi that the freelance photographer collaborated with Kishi Kurokawa regularly after the architect saw a photograph of his Hawaii Dreamland Resort (also appearing in Vanishing Japan) from 1967. The pair worked closely together from 1968 until 1989, including the comprehensive documentation of Nakagin, which Seligmann describes as “one of their most iconic co-constructions,” since the photos tracked the project under construction and after completion.

KA ME RA is a curious creation that mixes scholarly texts with glossy photos that are more akin to a coffee table book. A large book with a $100 retail price, it presents thorough biographies of nine photographers, the most famous among them (at least in my mind) being Yukio Futagawa, who created ADA Edita Tokyo to publish GA Document and other publications that almost exclusively featured his architectural photography. But biographies on Futugawa, Ohashi, and others are just a third of the 304-page book. There are also a portfolio of color photos by building type, which mix the various photographers together; a first chapter that traces the historical development of architectural photography in Japan; and a closing analytical chapter, complete with complex charts, that uses the oeuvres of the nine photographers to examine broader questions around architectural photography. While I don’t see every reader ingesting each part of the book, I’d wager that everyone will learn something from Seligmann’s deeply researched texts—I know I did.

Speaking of learning, while I don’t think that Pollock sheds new light on why demolition in Japan is so prevalent—she mentions the usual economic, environmental, social, and religious justifications found elsewhere—she does draw attention to many overlooked victims of the wrecking ball, not just famous buildings like Nakagin. Heck, I wasn’t familiar with Kikutake’s Sofitel project before diving into the book, but then I noticed far too many buildings by the same architect spread across some of the book’s nine other chapters. I also noticed other architects making frequent repeat appearances: Togo Murano, Kenzo Tange, Team Zoo, and Shin Takamatsu, among others.

Among these, Tange’s Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium, which many architects around the world have been trying to save, is included in the book with a “TBD” demolition date. So, while it has not yet met the fate of Nakagin and the rest of the buildings in the book, the cards are stacked against it. What will replace it is another question, but one that gives me a none-too-serious idea for a followup to Vanishing Japan: Replacing Japan, a look at the buildings that rose in wake of notable modern architecture. Occasionally good but more often bad or average or oversized, seeing how once creative buildings were replaced with their opposite just might give pause on decisions to demolish or preserve—or give more consideration to what replaces “gone but not forgotten” buildings.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Kengo Kuma: New Works (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The second monograph on one of the world’s preeminent architects, showcasing projects completed around the world between 2012 and 2024—a long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed Kengo Kuma: Complete Works.”

• Legorreta: Mexican Architecture (Buy from Rizzoli / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A visually immersive celebration of recent residential, commercial, institutional, and mixed-use projects, this book reveals the poetic spirit and guiding principles behind the firm’s unmistakable architectural language.”

• Folger Shakespeare Library: Renewal and Revitalization, by Stephen Kieran and Huwayda Fakhry (Buy from PA Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book brings together a collection of essays that trace the work of those who have built, supported, and reimagined the Folger Shakespeare Library, from its founding in 1932 to its reopening in 2024.”

• An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles, by David Gebhard, Robert Winter and Robert Inman (Buy from Simon & Schuster [Distributor for Angel City Press] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — The “extensively revised and rigorously updated” sixth edition of “the bible of Los Angeles Architecture” and “iconic guide to the buildings to see in the City of Angels.”

• Zaporizhzhia: Architectual Guide, by Pavlo Kravchuk and Mykhailo Mordovskoi (Buy from DOM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Architectural Guide Zaporizhzhia is a unique opportunity to approach this war-threatened city and hold it in one’s hand. To peruse the pages of this guide is to wander the city’s streets and squares and breathe again the air of a more peaceful, more purposeful age.”

• Penn’s Sylvania: The Campus as Landscape, edited by Frederick Steiner and Ignacio Bunster-Ossa (Buy from University of Pennsylvania Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Penn’s Sylvania analyzes and celebrates the development of the [University of Pennsylvania] as a green space, with noted landscape architects, designers, architectural historians, and photographers providing their perspectives on the campus and the specimens housed within.”

• Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California, edited by David Jacob Kramer (Buy from DAP / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A compendium of unseen folk architecture and a cultural history of 1960s NorCal utopianism, published with Edition Patrick Frey.”

• Northern Exposure: The New Canadian Cabin (Buy from getstalten / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Moving past the settler fantasy, [this book] reveals what the archetype has become: a powerful refusal of the urban clamor.”

• Frank Lloyd Wright Encore: Space and the Organic Ideal, by Neil Levine (Buy from OA+D Archives Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The three essays in this book examine how Wright transformed buildings from static enclosures into living spatial experiences that are fluid, multidimensional, and deeply human.”

• Degree Zero in Architecture: Form, Value, Authorship, edited by Lyna Bourouiba and Wouter Van Acker (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Spector Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Fifteen essays that examine architectural practices through the conceptual framework of Roland Barthes’ ‘degree zero’.”

• The Emotional Power of Space, edited by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine (Buy from Artbook/DAP / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Twelve architects—from Tatiana Bilbao to Álvaro Siza—reflect on the affective potential of space within their personal practices.”

• Women of Architecture: a collective of unique voices, by Beth Benton Buckley (Buy from benton buckley books / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This landmark volume honors twenty five leading women architects whose work is as deeply intelligent as it is beautifully human.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Daniel Stilwell reviews Where We Live: The Fractured Art of British Housebuilding and How to Build the Homes We Need, by former Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey. (Building Design)

• Reading Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, Aaron Betsky muses on Stephen Shore’s famous photograph Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975. (Architect)

• Colin Marshall delves into a bunch of books on Seoul, including Sung Hong Kim’s Seoul Urban Architecture (2026) and Russell Burge’s The Promised Republic (2026), both published this year. (Colin Marshall’s Books on Cities)

• “How to Spend a Bookish Afternoon” in Prospect Heights and Park Slope, Brooklyn, the latest in a series of “bookish guides” to New York City neighborhoods. (New York Times)

• Two reviews of Out There: New Architecture Across America, which I reviewed in Week 23/2026: by Christopher Hawthorne at Punch List and by Michael J. Crosbie at Common Edge.

• “An alt-stream of idiosyncratic American architecture”: Jincy Iype reviews Jo Farb Hernández’s Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments. (STIR World)

• “Kemi Lawson’s new book [House Proud: Architecture and Interiors Across Continents and Centuries] celebrates the joy manifested in Black homes around the world.” [Wallpaper*]

From the Archives

As mentioned atop this newsletter, the Nakagin Capsule Tower is the most prominent of the buildings found in both Books of the Week. The famous building was also the subject of 1972 - Nakagin Capsule Tower, the 2015 book featuring photographs by Noritaka Minami and essays by Julian Rose and Ken Yoshida. Below is the text from my May 2021 review.

The recent news of Nakagin Capsule Tower’s imminent demolition pushed me to purchase 1972 by Noritaka Minami, a photographic documentation of the tower and around a dozen of the capsule’s interiors carried out between 2010 and 2013. For sure, the building deserves a book-length case study on its design, construction, history, evolution, and eventual demolition, but in the meantime 1972 will have to suffice—as an excellent snapshot of Nakagin Capsule Tower at the beginning of its fourth decade. If the two gatefolds among the book’s 55 photographs are any indication, the building was equal parts empty and in ruins: the first gatefold shows what appears to be a recently gutted unit, its custom casework ripped out and new wood flooring put down; the second shows a capsule with unhealthy amounts of mold, a collapsed ceiling, and an AC unit barely hanging on. Anyone looking at just the latter would no doubt come to the conclusion that this building needs to come down, although in theory the offending capsule could be removed without affecting the rest of the building.

What about the rest of the photographs, the 49 that aren’t in those two gatefolds? They reveal a lot of variation between the two poles of emptiness and ruin. Some capsules, such as the one that wraps around the front and back covers, have the original casework, a feature that now looks like a distant past’s idea of the future, one that has been superseded in the intervening years. Built-in TVs, radios, and other electronics reinforce the anachronistic nature of the capsule’s built-ins. Most of the capsules appear to have had the built-ins removed, with desks, shelves, and other furniture taking their place. What is constant in the capsules are the round windows, always in the center of Minami’s photos but never in exactly the same place, a result of the tripod navigating the unique living circumstances of each capsule, something pointed out in Julian Rose’s illuminating essay.

Ken Yoshida’s essay, a less architectural take than Rose’s, is nevertheless informative, revealing, for example, that the outer layer of the windows don’t open because they were designed to be removed only by firemen in the event of a fire. That the few remaining residents of Nakagin Capsule Tower cannot open their windows fully for natural ventilation means they crack open their doors to the core to get some air, a fact revealed in a few of Minami’s photos. Some of the most interesting images are actually those of the core, where the owner’s possession spill over, bags and buckets catch leaks and AC condensation, and curtains provide privacy while the doors are open. Although we never see the residents, we “see” them through their possessions inside and outside the tea room-sized capsules. As such, Minami’s photos capture Kurosawa’s intent to enable individuality in the midst of mass production and urbanity. The building’s demolition will be a loss to an idea that didn’t have the influence it arguably should have.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

New England Architectural Guide (Vol. 1: Boston, Cambridge, Providence, and New Haven; Vol. 2: The Berkshires, Southern Coast, Northern Coast, and from New Hampshire to Vermont), by Sam Gurwitt, edited by Natascha Meuser and Philipp Meuser, with additional contributions by Dietrich Neumann (Buy from DOM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

DOM Publishers is easily the most prolific publisher of architectural guidebooks. The Berlin-based publishing house owned and managed by Philipp Meuser and Natascha Meuser has put out dozens of guidebooks to various countries and cities around the world since 2005, all of them the same size (13.5 x 24.5 cm) and most of them with a bold color and DOM’s Cyrillic “d” logo on the cover. Although the guidebooks appear the same on the outside and tend to have interiors formatted with similarly high-quality photographs and maps, the contents are variable in regard to focus, structure and writing. The Berlin guide by Dominik Schendel is structured as four walking tours, for instance, while Vladimir Belogolovsky’s guide to New York City is subtitled a Critic’s Guide to 100 Iconic Buildings in New York from 1999 to 2020, and the two-volume guide to Pyongyang features an English translation of a propagandist North Korean text in the first volume and illustrated essays by various writers in the second.

One of DOM’s latest guidebooks, released in July, is another two-volume guide, this time focused on New England, the region of the United States that is made up of a half-dozen northeastern states: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. The first volume covers four major cities (Boston, Cambridge, Providence and New Haven) while the second volume presents four road trips spanning the region (The Berkshires, Southern Coast, Northern Coast and from New Hampshire to Vermont). This separation is logical, with each volume the same size (328 pages) and therefore portable, allowing them to be taken along on trips alone or together. Being a New York resident for twenty years now, I’ve been able to take the occasional jaunt into New England. Similarly, my trips have either found me taking a plane or bus to a specific city or driving around an area like the Berkshires, inadvertently reflecting the book’s urban/rural split.

Another reason the book is split into two volumes arises from the editorial decision to cover the region’s architecture extending back to—and even beyond, in a few cases—the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. A guide to modern and/or contemporary architecture in New England would have fit neatly into a single volume, much like Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: East Coast USA by Sam Lubell and Darren Bradley, cited numerous times across the two volumes. While requiring more buildings, the historical sweep allows for a critical look at America’s founding and the country’s treatment of Indigenous and Black populations, as well as urban development in the 20th century and the concerns of architects in the 21st century. Although both volumes are authored by Sam Gurwitt, a writer who grew up in Vermont and attended Yale, it is Philipp Meuser who gives the book its moral compass, using the introduction in Volume 1 to lay its foundation, if you will, by exploring the above topics. Volume 2’s introduction, on the other hand, is relatively benign, featuring a genealogy of the architects who have made their stamp on the region, from Charles Bulfinch and H. H. Richardson to Josep Lluís Sert and Maryann Thompson.

The first, green-covered volume presents the four cities in four color-coded chapters. Given that Boston is first and each chapter is ordered chronologically, someone who reads the book cover to cover or happens to be planning a trip to the capital of Massachusetts will encounter some of the oldest 18th-century buildings in the book before moving forward, entry by entry, to the present day. Travelers venturing across the Charles River to Cambridge will find a chapter split into Harvard and MIT sections, each one featuring some of the most notable contemporary architecture across the two volumes. The chapter on Providence was written with contributions by Dietrich Neumann, whose entries are signaled by a “DM,” though I also noticed numerous entries by “PM,” obviously Philipp Meuser; not surprisingly, the latter’s contributions are most strongly aligned with the strong political stance of his introduction. The chapter on New Haven, home to Yale University, clearly benefits from Gurwitt’s firsthand experience there, even throwing in the occasional quote by Vincent Scully, the famed art historian at the Ivy.

While the chronological chapters of Volume 1 mean readers need to craft their own walking routes through the respective cities, the four subregional chapters of Volume 2 are ordered according to particular driving routes. Although this means the entries bounce around in terms of completion date, the geographical ordering is really more attuned with reality: reflecting a traveler’s actual route but also the way cities and their hinterlands are made up of buildings spanning decades or centuries, often side by side. As it happens, given that a few of the drives bypass the four cities of Volume 1, one could feasibly take both volumes on the road and do an in-depth architectural tour of New England architecture across a week or so.

This doesn’t mean the guidebook is exhaustive though. For example, while it features a number of houses that can only be seen from roads (accompanied by a “respect privacy” note at each table of contents), including a fair number of them on Martha’s Vineyard, for some reason it overlooks the Foster Retreat on the island. Ditto the just completed MIT Metropolitan Warehouse in Volume 1, even though it peers over Alvar Aalto’s Baker House in an aerial view in the book. Less a criticism, I point out these omissions as just facts of architectural guidebooks, even the excellent ones produced by DOM: there are always omissions and there are always projects that will be completed sometime between manuscript and printing. What is included in this two-volume guidebook is exemplary.

A note on the back matter. Each volume ends with a 25-page appendix that features contributor bios on a page opposite a photo of some of the many books consulted for the writing, a four-page index by architect (covering both volumes), a two-page bibliography (ditto), and 15 pages of sources (ditto; featuring magazines, newspapers and websites). While I get the inclusion of the bibliography and think the photo of the bookshelf is a nice addition, the small-type list of sources seems unnecessary for a guidebook. I would have preferred the space used for additional indexes, such as a chronological index, a typological index, and one by building name. An architectural historian may appreciate the sources, but for those using the guidebook the way it’s intended, the sources just take up space that could be put to better use.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Adaptable Homes: Convertible Dwellings and Furnishings, by Avi Friedman (Buy from Simon & Schuster [US distributor for Edition Axel Menges] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Would smaller houses, smaller apartments, and space-saving furnishings not be better for our environment? This book contains a multitude of examples that show how we can live differently.”

• Radically Local: studiolada, by Mathias Rollot (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Based in Nancy in eastern France, studiolada is an architectural collective founded on values such as commitment to the common good, responsible use of resources, service to the public sector, collaborative dialogue, short supply chains, and circularity. These principles shape a collective practice deeply rooted in its local territory, drawing on its resources and dynamics.”

• The Matter of Architecture: Geology, Buildings and Us, by Paul Dobraszczyk (Buy from Reaktion Books / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Providing a provocative and original take on the relationship between ecology and architecture, this book asks what architects do with, and what they might learn from, what the earth creates. From caves and crystals to volcanoes and earthquakes, The Matter of Architecture delves deep to mine a different way of building.”

• An Opinionated Guide to New York Architecture, by Allison Meier (Buy from Hoxton Mini Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “From brownstones to skyscrapers, New York’s skyline dazzles. This opinionated guide features 50+ iconic and hidden buildings, perfect for locals and visitors alike.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Among the Graham Foundation’s 2026 Grants to Organizations are 45 exhibitions, film and new media, public programs, and publications. Highlights among the last are Madelon Vriesendorp: Too Late to Die Young from The Cosmic House, ANY Book: Reading Architecture of the 90s Through the Lens of ANY Magazine from PRAXIS, and Telesis (Volume IX: Pause and Volume X: React) from University of Oklahoma–Gibbs College of Architecture. (Graham Foundation)

• Elizabeth Blasius takes an in-depth look at “The Highs and Lows of Inland Architect,” the Chicago-based architecture magazine that published on and off from 1883 until 1999. (MAS Context)

• “With the release of his two-volume monograph,” Chicago architect Ralph Johnson “reflects on six decades of practice, place, process and the future of design.” (Newcity Design) I reviewed Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World in Week 20/2026.

• John Hancock, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Cincinnati, has released not one, but two books on Ohio earthworks this spring: Traveler’s Guide to Ancient Ohio and Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley. (The Ohio Newsroom)

• “Albania recruited top starchitects to transform its image. A new book [The Albanian Files: Freedom and Architecture, by Anneke Abhelakh] is raising questions about that process.” (Wallpaper*)

• V. Mitch McEwen’s Erasure by Design “demonstrates how demolition is a key aspect of modernity” and is, per Janet Vertesi, “a tour de force: beautiful and haunting, thoughtful and inspiring, witty and clever.” (The Architect’s Newspaper)

From the Archives

The two-page bibliography for the two-volume New England Architectural Guide lists nearly sixty books, ranging from regional histories and case studies of buildings to guidebooks, architectural and otherwise, of some of the places found in the book. I was surprised to not see listed one New England guidebook that I actually have in my library: The Beacon Guide to New England Houses of Worship: An Architectural Companion, written by G. E. Kidder Smith and published by Beacon Press in 1989. Though not the most celebrated of Kidder Smith’s dozen books, the book is strongly aligned with the DOM book, not only in its regional focus on the six New England states and for spanning nearly two-and-a-half centuries, but also in its look at a defining characteristic of the United States: religious freedom, particularly Christianity. (I should also point out that among the guidebooks Kidder Smith wrote, most notably the hefty, three-volume The Architecture of the United States, this one is the most portable.)

As I mention in the Book of the Week, omissions are a matter of fact for architectural guidebooks, as much a product of timing and oversight as of editorial curation and space constraints. Nevertheless, I was surprised to discover what seemed like as many churches in Kidder Smith’s Beacon guide missing from the DOM guide as the inverse: churches well within the timeframe of the Beacon guide apparently overlooked by Kidder Smith. An example of the first is Pietro Belluschi’s Portsmouth Abbey Church, north of Newport, Rhode Island, completed in 1961 and restored a decade ago. One example of the numerous mid-century modern churches in New England Architectural Guide not in in Kidder Smith’s book is St. George’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Manchester, New Hampshire, designed by Christopher Kantiaris in 1964. (It should be noted that the Kantiaris church is also found in the Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: East Coast USA by Sam Lubell and Darren Bradley, an oft-cited resource for Sam Gurwitt, but one that doesn’t have the Belluschi church in its pages.) Although I’d wager the omission of Kantiaris’s church stemmed from Kidder Smith’s architectural tastes, the inclusion of four indexes in his book (chronology, architects, buildings, denominations) at least made it that much easier to search for.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Diagrams: A Project by AMO/OMA, edited by Mario Mainetti (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Fondazione Prada] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

From May 10 to November 24 last year, Fondazione Prada’s venue at Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice hosted Diagrams: A Project by AMO/OMA, overlapping with the Venice Architecture Biennale. I was in Venice for the Biennale’s vernissage, but when I tried to see Diagrams on its opening day I was confronted with a ridiculously long line and, unfortunately, not enough time to wait in it. Such is the draw of Rem Koolhaas, founding partner of OMA and its in-house research and design studio, AMO. It would be hard to imagine any architecture firm besides AMO/OMA devising an exhibition aimed at “investigating the visual communication of data as a powerful tool for constructing meaning, comprehension or manipulation and a pervasive instrument for analyzing, understanding and transforming the surrounding world.” Even the first few pages of the 1,344-page S,M,L,XL—the 1996 book that predates AMO’s founding by three years—layer charts with data about the firm over photographs of the cluttered Rotterdam studio. With projects like Volume and Countryside, much of the output of AMO in the years since can be seen as the creation and sharing of thousands of different diagrams—on paper, screens, gallery walls, and other surfaces. Koolhaas clearly loves diagrams and, by extension, so does AMO/OMA.

Although I missed the Diagrams exhibition, I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of its companion book of the same name and devour its contents over the last week. Devour might be a strong word for a book about an exhibition, but this is not your average book; it is one that demands physical work on the part of its reader to literally unpack much of its contents as one goes. As designed by longtime Koolhaas collaborator Irma Boom, Diagrams comes in a box that indicate its contents are fragile but is itself cheap—cardboard protecting a $90 book? This oxymoron echoes one of Koolhaas’s first works with Prada: The fashion house’s “Epicenter” in SoHo, considered the most expensive retail project at the time (2001), featured gypsum board walls whose joints were patched but surfaces were otherwise exposed, not painted. A reader buying Diagrams at its cover price might be disheartened to see the book is not a hardcover, but a paperback with flimsy covers and a taped spine. But before even flipping open its pages, one is forced to tear open a banderole directing them to use the provided bone folder to “open the perforations at the top of the book.” … Wait, what? The book’s folded signatures are uncut, requiring me to tear at them so the partially hidden pages can be seen? Yes, indeed:

This unexpected feature of the book foregrounds its physical production, something often overlooked in the final product a reader holds in their hands. The perforated edges work in concert with the untrimmed pages and the hidden information along their edges, including CMYK and RGB color bands and the InDesign filenames, to turn this very physical book into one that is actually unfinished, at least compared to books as most people know them. Following from this, one learns the flimsy covers are not paperback covers, they are endpapers for a hardcover book sans cover, exposed rather than pasted onto boards. The design therefore makes the reader highly aware of the book’s various parts: physical, printed, and experiential. One could then say Diagrams is a diagram of books in general, a means of explaining how they are made and function by showing what is normally trimmed and discarded. For the most part it is successful—heck, even the opening the perforations is enjoyable—but I couldn’t help being bothered by the fact the page numbers are at the bottom edge, in an area that would otherwise be trimmed. Shouldn’t they be higher so they’re not trimmed? Their placement runs the risk of turning the whole design concept into a conceit rather than an honest expression of a book literally unfinished.

What about the diagrams themselves? Per a note to the reader ahead of the table of contents, “the diagrams in the exhibition are presented in the book in the same thematic categories and subcategories in which they are displayed in the rooms of Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice.” Diagrams whose reproductions or rights could not be obtained for the book are noted by a box on their respective pages with a title and caption, making the documentation as exhaustive as it can be relative to the exhibition but, again, unfinished as a book. The categories are nine-fold, starting with the Built Environment, ending with Value, and exploring Health, Inequality (spreads pictured above and below), Migration, Environment, Resources, War, and Truth in between. The subchapters mentioned in the above quote are found in all of the chapters, some of them honing in on certain smaller-scale issues (e.g., Sustainability within Built Environment) and others focusing on individuals, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, William Playfair, and Charles-Joseph Minard. The book begins with a conversation between Koolhaas and Katya Inozemtseva, and each chapter is followed by an essay by experts in the data viz field, including Theo Deutinger, who worked at OMA before heading out on his own to create such books as All About U.S.: 250 Years of the United States of America, featured in this newsletter last week. Unfortunately, the book does not include bios for the contributors, many of whom will be new to architects, like me, who are drawn to the “project by AMO/OMA.”

With diagrams spanning centuries and therefore a variety of media, the book traces the evolution of data visualization but also draws attention to the ways apparently fact-based illustrations are often wrong—at least when seen in hindsight. Likewise, many diagrams have been used, not to describe the world as it is, but to convey a particular perspective about a certain issue or even blatantly argue a falsehood; what such diagrams omit is as important as what they include. Whatever their intentions, diagrams are often seen to be trustworthy, something that Sietske Fransen explores in the “Diagrams and Truth” essay that suitably follows the Value chapter. “Diagrams are not true just because they look convincing on account of their abstract forms,” she concludes, “however, they do help the reader (or perhaps their author) see something more clearly.” And while a fair number of the diagrams are too small on the page to read the keys, labels, or other words accompanying the lines and colors of the illustrations, each diagram’s clarity is on full display. Most astonishing is the variety of diagrams, the nearly infinite number of ways of visually conveying information. Not all of the diagrams hold relevance today, but nearly all of them are—in their own way—beautiful, which makes the book itself that much more of a special object.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Order and Disorder: Selected Essays and Interviews by Manfredo Tafuri 1964–1994, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Jolanda Devalle, Theodora Giovanazzi and Marson Korbi (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Manfredo Tafuri was one of the most important historians of architecture in the 20th century, and his work continues to influence the landscape of architectural history and theory. This anthology offers—for the first time—a curated selection of his essays and interviews [across 1200 pages!] covering the entirety of his career from 1964, the year in which Tafuri decided to focus exclusively on architectural history, to 1994, the year of his untimely death.”

• Jens Jensen: Nature’s Artist, by William Tishler (Buy from University of Illinois Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Celebrated as one of the great landscape architects of his era, Jens Jensen drew on his love of nature to transform Illinois and the Midwest. William H. Tishler tracks Jensen’s career and provides a wealth of new information on his personal life: his fierce dislike of and independence from the eastern establishment, and his bold proposals for the Indiana Dunes and other spaces.”

• Claying Architecture: Making Machine and Material Kin, by Shelby Doyle, Frank Melendez, Jonathan Scelsa and Kelley Van Duck Murphy (Buy from ar+d / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Claying Architecture: Making Machine and Material Kin presents a curated collection of essays, interviews, and projects from leading architects, designers, and researchers who are analyzing the role of clay 3D printing in contemporary architecture.”

• Mixed Reality Fabrication, by Gwyllim Jahn (Buy from Actar Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Mixed Reality Fabrication challenges the conventional focus on automation and precision in digital fabrication, instead advocating for approaches that bridge the gap between digital design and the wide tolerances, improvisation and non-uniform materials common to traditional craft practices.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• A website I learned about via last week’s USModernist newsletter: “Architectural Periodicals is an open platform for digital research on European 20th-century architecture similar to the USModernist Library [with which it is a partner]. Magazines are readable as interactive booklets or downloadable PDFs with a unified search engine spanning titles and languages.” (Architectural Periodicals)

• “Responding to the climate crisis demands expanding our view of what counts as design, and who we consider a designer,” per an op-ed by Billy Fleming, author of the recently published Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

• If you insist on owning Taschen’s oversized volumes, Marc Newson has designed a “crafted bookstand” for you, one that is “the ultimate showcase” for displaying the publisher’s “heftier tomes.” (Wallpaper*)

From the Archives

It’s highly unusual to find a book, like the Book of the Week, that requires the owner to tear apart or otherwise physically change a book to “complete” it. One that comes to mind is Diller & Scofidio: The Eyebeam Museum Of New Media, which was published in 2003 as the tenth installment in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning’s Michigan Architecture Papers (MAP), a series that documented the school’s annual Charles and Ray Eames lectures. The designers at M1DTW made a dramatic departure from the slim paperbacks they designed for Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Patkau Architects, and other architects in the series: they spiral-bound unperforated (“frustrated”) signatures that could then be “unfolded” as large sheets or “liberated” into a traditional book by tearing at the perforations. With two copies—one that I bought at a used bookstore and one sent to me by the designers—I unfolded and liberated one copy and took photos of the process, posting them to Instagram last year and putting a few of them below.

Frustrated:

Unfolded:

Liberated:

Frustrated and Liberated side-by-side:

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

All About U.S.: 250 Years of the United States of America, by Theo Deutinger (Buy from Lars Müller Publishers / from Artbook/DAP / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

The 250th anniversary—or semiquincentennial, a word many people added to their vocabulary recently—of the signing of the Declaration of Independence came and went last month, with some larger-than-usual fireworks displays here and there, but without any really grand gestures to be found for such a substantial milestone. The official and semi-official celebrations created by Congress (America 250) and President Trump (Freedom 250) encapsulated the partisan divide the US finds itself in now; the latter’s Great American State Fair on the National Mall was plagued by sloppy construction, ill-considered circulation, shallow exhibitions, and other features that seem indicative of the administration as a whole, especially its move-fast-and-break-things approach to the infrastructure of Washington, DC and American democracy overall.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of a democracy should be a cause for patriotic celebration, but Trump’s broadening of executive powers and related “democratic backsliding” (a milder expression than others used to describe Trump 2.0) made it hard for many people, myself included, to feel good about the state of the US and gather with others to celebrate the semiquincentennial. Curiously, Theo Deutinger’s All About U.S.: 250 Years of the United States of America, which I received from Lars Müller Publishers about a month after the Fourth of July and a month ahead of its US release, made me feel a bit better about things—by seeing things in perspective and putting the blip that is Trump into a grander historical context.

Those not familiar with Deutinger, the founder and head of The Department (TD) “works in the fields of spatial science, urban planning, architecture and curation.” He is best known, at least to me, for Handbook of Tyranny, a twice-updated book (and related 2019 exhibition) that illustrates various data around methods of physical control. Published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2018 (and expanded in 2023), the book was followed by the über-minimalist Ultimate Atlas: Logbook of Spaceship Earth in 2019 and Joy and Fear: An Illustrated Report on Modernity in 2023, both building on the Tyranny template: two-page spreads with charts, maps, and/or other visualizations of data expressing change over time and around the world. Deutinger bills his latest book as “a birthday gift from Europe to the United States on the 250th anniversary of its founding,” one that “investigates the current state of the country in seven chapters from an admittedly European standpoint.”

Following an introduction that lays out Deutinger’s motives for the book (“to establish common ground,” among them) and charts important “firsts” and social movements over those 250 years, the seven chapters are thematic but also take a roughly chronological view of that time period: Frontier, We the People, Mr. President, Global Policeman, Stand Your Ground, American Dream$ [sic], and Californication. Reading the short texts that preface each chapter and are keyed to the visual spreads that follow is basically like learning an alternative history of the United States—the good and the bad, the famous and the infamous, the familiar and the obscure—akin to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (see bottom of this newsletter), but in images.

Given the focus of Handbook of Tyranny and Joy and Fear on violence, tools of destruction and killing, and means of control, it’s no surprise that Global Policeman and Stand Your Ground come across as the most thoroughly developed chapters, at least visually. One related highlight (not illustrated here, unfortunately) takes a deep look into home security across three spreads. We see how single-family houses are designed for security and surveillance, aided by cameras and other technologies. One spread even shows the possibilities of so-called concealment furniture, in which a long gun can be stored in a drawer at the back of a cabinet, for example, or a hand gun in the base of a lamp. The furnishings are depicted in a perspectival view of two rooms, accompanied by information on the weapons—it is straightforward, even dry, but it hints at how a living room or bedroom can become a weapon room in disguise.

Although the US’s military budget (now around $1 trillion!) has defined its presence on the global stage since at least World War II, the country’s impact has been as great (if not greater) through the “soft power” of cultural, business, and other non-military exports. Fittingly, the last chapter, Californication, examines this pervasiveness through, for instance, a chart of the highest-grossing films since 1915 being almost exclusively US creations (spread above) and a map of McDonald’s locations basically outlining a world map (spread below), sans post-2022 Russia and parts of Africa. Signs that US dominance in these and other spheres may be waning can be found in the Chinese fast food and coffee chains Mixue and Luckin sitting side by side on a graph with McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway, KFC, and Domino’s Pizza. So, in a subtle way, Deutinger’s latest book conveys the impact the US has had on the rest of the world over the course of the last 250 years, just as it hints at the changing course the world may undergo in the ensuing centuries.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Sverre Fehn Architecture, edited by Neven Fuchs, Aleksandra Ognjanov and Stefano Graziani (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Walther König] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Fehn received the 1997 Pritzker Prize for his ‘fascinating and exciting combination of modern forms tempered by the Scandinavian tradition.’ This comprehensive monograph presents 80 of his built and unbuilt projects, offering a more nuanced survey of his career, replete with blueprints, drawings and archival photographs.”

• Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View of a Trailblazing Architect, by Janna Ireland (Buy from Angel City Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Known as ‘Hollywood’s Architect,’ Paul Revere Williams was a Los Angeles native who built a wildly successful and as an architect decades before the Civil Rights Movement. Artist Janna Ireland explores the work and legacy of Williams through a series of intimate black-and-white photographs.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• “A New Biography Chronicles the Life and Career of a Groundbreaking Black Architect and Advocate”: Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People’s Architect, by Brian D. Goldstein. (Architectural Record)

• Read an interview with architecture critic Mark Lamster, author of the just released Welcome to Paradox City, about “[his] hope for a downtown Dallas reset—and the one local building he’d like to see knocked down.” (D Magazine)

• Paul Makovsky beautifully eulogizes Robin Middleton, the architectural historian who served as technical editor of Architectural Design, wrote books on nineteenth-century French architecture, and had a library in his East Village home that students said “felt less like entering a private residence than stepping into architecture’s collective memory.” He recently died at the age of 94. (Architect)

• Heads up, architecture book buyers:

  • To make room for more books, William Stout Architecture Books is marking down its monographs 40% from today, August 10, until August 22. (Stout Books)

  • Are you a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright and have $2,000 to spend? Argosy Books recently listed all twelve volumes in GA’s exhaustive Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph, featuring texts by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and photographs by Yukio Futagawa. (Argosy Books)

From the Archives

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present was first published in 1980. By the time I read and reviewed the book on my blog, in 2005, the book was on its fifth edition; today, sixteen years after Zinn died at the age of 87, the book is in its sixth edition, done in 2015. As mentioned atop this newsletter, Theo Deutinger’s All About U.S. often had me thinking of Zinn’s alternative history of the United States. Below is my 2005 review of that classic book.

Late in Howard Zinn’s immensely popular “alternative history” of the United States, the historian clarifies his intentions in writing the book, the “prospect—for the first time in the nation’s history—of a population united for fundamental change.” Leading up to his hope for “the coming revolt of the guards,” Zinn acts like a deprogrammer, breaking down what most Americans have learned about their country only to build it back up with the truth as told by the people, the other 99% of the country without power and riches. Where most textbooks and histories center on the presidents and others as “saviors,” the author looks to the unspoken: Native Americans, slaves, women, those that were treated unjustly, and those that revolted against these supposed saviors. It’s an illuminating yet unsettling book, one that should be required reading in the US as early as high school, if not for those abroad.

Zinn acknowledges the fact than any history will be biased, even if it sticks to facts, because all histories must omit other facts in order to tell a story. That most histories have omitted those accounts of the people and focused instead on the white males with money and power, Zinn was driven to the enormous undertaking of shifting American history’s focus. Starting with Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, the author goes beyond the long known but played-down bad acts of the sailor to give us detailed accounts of the genocidal violence that would continue for hundreds of years. It is these first-hand accounts of various atrocities that make up a lot of the book, giving it a powerful weight but also making the flow a bit choppy at times. Continuing through slavery, the rise of unions, women’s equal rights, Zinn keeps the focus on people’s stories, though his coverage of the 1960s and 70s takes aim at the country’s leaders and their drastic acts, shifting this focus ever-so-slightly before it returns in the greedy decade that followed. The newest edition adds a couple chapters on the Clinton presidency and the 2000 election, further proof that the country’s history of violence and greed is alive and well, a breeding ground for Zinn’s “coming revolt of the guards.”

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Autobiography of a Skyscraper: And the Story of Those Who Built It, by Francis Greenburger and Rebecca Paley (Buy from OR Books / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Normally I would not review a congratulatory, business-minded book by a developer celebrating their latest project, but Autobiography of a Skyscraper happens to be about a building that follows (at least) two unsuccessful attempts by two different developers on the same site, at 1000 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago—two attempts I happened to work on. They occurred when I was working as an architect at DeStefano + Partners, the Chicago firm (and SOM offshoot) that was founded by Jim DeStefano in 1988 and branched off into two firms in 2011.

The first proposal was mixed-use, with three residential towers (the tallest, on Michigan Avenue, at around 700 feet), a hotel, retail, and facilities for neighboring Columbia College Chicago. The second proposal, following the landmarking of the Michigan Avenue “streetwall” in 2002, was just residential and retail in two towers (in two phases), with the Michigan Avenue tower brought down to 425 feet per the new landmark district height restrictions. How, I wondered, was 1000M, designed by the Chicago firm of Helmut Jahn for a team of New York developers, able to finally put a building on that long vacant site—pushing the height to nearly 800 feet while also addressing some of the site issues I was all too well aware of? I hoped Autobiography of a Skyscraper would have the answers.

The book, written by Francis Greenburger, founder of Time Equities, one of the project’s developers, with freelance writer Rebecca Paley, begins in 2014, when Jerry Karlick of JK Equities, one of the other developers on the team, went to Chicago to see the vacant lot at 1000 South Michigan Avenue, and ends in 2024 with the building’s completion. In 2014, the site had just been put up for sale by the bank that foreclosed on it after the 2005 developer (unnamed in the book and in my memory; ditto the 1999 developer) failed to follow through on their plans. Greenburger and Karlick joined up to buy the land as well as the neighboring 1006 South Michigan Avenue, an eight-story loft building that would enable them to use the air rights for their new tower or sell them if their plans for 1000M didn’t work out.

Soon after purchase, the developers brought in Helmut Jahn, whom Greenburger was working with at 50 West, a residential skyscraper then under construction in Lower Manhattan, to design 1000M. Sadly, Jahn died suddenly in 2021, making 1000M one of his last projects, if not the very last. But it was Covid-19 that would provide the main drama for the project, as lockdown hit just after construction was slated to get underway and the pandemic would move the project from condo to rental, at a time when the unit plans were finalized and initial sales had been made.

50 West was similarly impacted by the Great Recession and, in another parallel, Greenburger and Paley co-wrote Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur, a biography centered around that tower. While I haven’t seen that 2016 book, Autobiography of a Skyscraper adds the voices of other members of the development team, Jahn’s office, the real estate brokers, the interior designer, the contractors and subcontractors…just about anybody you can think of who is involved with taking a building from sketch to reality. Hence the book’s subtitle, And the Story of Those Who Built It. As such, instead of a consistent narrative, readers encounter snippets of text from Greenburger and the other important players. While this editorial decision recognizes the many contributions to the project and instills their actual voices into the story, it makes the book choppy rather than smooth. It also lacks any suspense built into the narrative, even as the project faced numerous issues—financial, political, architectural, viral—across those ten long years.

Going into the book, I had two main questions, the first one being: How did 1000M rise above the height limit of the landmark district? To which Greenburger might answer, “What landmark district?” Yes, when he purchased the site in 2014, the Historic Michigan Boulevard District encompassed it, but ten years later it appears to be gone. What happened? According to Greenburger, in the second of the book’s eighteen chapters, “The city voted to approve the proposal…[making] the decision that we were not in the historic district…[paving] the way to get approval for the building plans.” His words here seem to indicate that the southern boundary of the district was moved so it did not include the 1000M parcel. In reality, per a 2016 document from Chicago Landmarks, the heights of new construction on the blocks from Eighth Street to Eleventh Street, at the southern edge of the landmark district, “can fall between 400–900 feet.” So, instead of moving the district boundaries to the north of 1000M, as Greenburger says, the three-block portion of the district that encompasses the site was amended to allow taller buildings than in the rest of the district, where a maximum height of 425 feet remains in place. While the end result is the same, the means are different in Greenburger’s account versus the actual public record—an albeit minor discrepancy that makes me wonder if there are others in the book’s oral–history format.

My second question: How did they accommodate the neighbor at 910 South Michigan Avenue, a residential loft that features some units whose bedroom windows are at the party wall facing the 1000M lot? As I learned in 1999, if the developer then wanted to build out to the full width of the site, as they were well within their right to do, those windows would have to be filled in and the bedrooms would no longer meet building code requirements for light and air. Going into the loft building posing as a buyer at the time, I looked out one of those windows and asked the broker what would happen if the parking lot next door gave way to a building. Their reply: “We own that land, so no need to worry.” Even with such misleading tactics, the developer in 1999 was fine with the notion of building out to the property line and destroying the investments of those unlucky condo owners next door. The design guidelines within the Historic Michigan Boulevard District passed three years later encouraged a flush and continuous streetwall, at least up to 55 feet, likewise encouraging the developer to be a bad neighbor by covering some of the the neighbor’s windows.

By contrast, the team at 1000M are nice neighbors. As I noticed when in Chicago visiting family recently and stopping by 1000M one afternoon, there is a gap between old and new. At grade, this means a walkway now allows pedestrian access to and from Wabash Avenue on the west, as well as room for a vehicular drop-off and service access in the podium behind the tower. In the lower floors of the tower (above the height of 1006 South Michigan Avenue, at least), this means the floor plans have four facades, not just three, while the residents in the loft building next door are still happy…or at least not as mad as the worst case scenario, now that they look out to a glass facade fifteen or twenty feet away. Unlike the in-depth, if slightly inaccurate explanation behind reworking the landmark district, this gap in the Michigan Avenue streetwall does not appear to be explained at any length in the book. Yes, Helmut Jahn, speaking in 2015, did describe how “a big cut marks the transition off the street wall as the tower rises,” but I can only guess that it was the landmark amendment described above that gave the team liberties in what they could do at the base of the building.

Unfortunately, given how the book ends with six blank pages instead of an index, it’s quite difficult to find bits of information corresponding to this street wall gap or other parts of the project that are not otherwise explained in more depth, such as tower’s height, or are given their own chapters, be it the Covid-19 shutdown, the move from condos to rentals, the artworks installed in the lobby and other spaces, “finding the money” and, yes, even a “closet crisis” that led to the reworking of hundreds of units late in the process. Therefore, instead of a reference on what is alternatively described as “a legacy example of Helmut and [Jahn partner Phil Castillo’s] best work” and “an icon of Chicago’s renewal” after Covid, Autobiography of a Skyscraper is a disjointed yet often times enjoyable and informative story about a building that finally filled that hole in Michigan Avenue’s famous streetwall.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• 100 21st-Century Buildings, by Twentieth Century Society (Buy from Batsford / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Twentieth Century Society are looking to the future with this latest title in the ‘100 Buildings’ series, providing an overview of the best and most interesting buildings created in the 21st century so far… from Tate Modern and the Shard to Gateshead Millennium Bridge, the Scottish Parliament Building and Belfast’s Lyric Theatre…”

• Gaetano Pesce: The Chiat\Day Project, edited by Editions Norma and Galerie Pulp (Buy from Simon & Schuster [US distributor for Editions Norma] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Gaetano Pesce explores the visionary designer’s collaboration with Jay Chiat, revealing how art, design, and technology merged in the 1990s to reinvent the modern workspace.”

• Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture, by Mark Lamster (Buy from Deep Vellum / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “With an exceptional blend of architectural history, social history, and critical writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Lamster takes readers to the sun-scorched origins of Dallas as a remote outpost on the Texas frontier, then traces the city's development into the dynamic, if imperfect, metropolis we know today.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Owen Hatherley reviews Naomi Pollock’s Vanishing Japan, “a glossy series of monochrome photographs of structures that were, in the old rock and roll phrase, ‘too fast to live.’” (The Ideas Letter)

• “A new in-depth architectural history of Broadcasting House explores the BBC’s origins”: Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922-1932 by Elizabeth Darling. (Wallpaper*)

• The Architecture Foundation asked the practices featured in New Architects 5 to “donate a book that had been influential on their development to the POST PRESS library.” It’s a long and quite diverse list, with quite a few obvious choices but even more unexpected ones. (Architecture Foundation)

• “The man who changed how we see American modernism”: Paul Molovsky’s obituary of Thomas S. Hines, “whose groundbreaking books on Irving Gill, Richard Neutra, Daniel Burnham, and Los Angeles rewrote the history of American architecture.” (Architect) His 2019 book, Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years, 1951-1986, is excellent.

• David Terrien reviews Irénée Scalbert’s Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, which comprises ten texts and lectures on twentieth-century European architecture and is “presented in a format that comes close to matching the Michelin Green Guide my grandparents would have carried on visits to European museums and archaeological sites.” (ArtReview)

• “Douglas Haskell Award 2026 Recognizes Four Student Journals on Architecture.” (Center for Architecture)

From the Archives

If the Book of the Week is an oral history told by a building’s major players as it was being designed and erected, Dan Cruickshank’s Skyscraper is its opposite, an anti-Autobiography of a Skyscraper, if you will. Skyscraper was written by Cruickshank, an architectural historian and television presenter from Britain, in 2018, nearly 125 years after the completion of the Reliance Building—the tall building that is the subject of the book. Not only did the building’s first architect, John Wellborn Root, die in 1891, four years before its completion, Charles B. Atwood, the architect who wrapped up the rest of building, died in December 1895, six months after the building opened. As such, their contemporary accounts are highly incomplete, basically limited to drawings, while those of its developer (William E. Hale, d. 1898) and builder (George A. Fuller, d. 1900) shed some light on the building but do not make its history crystal clear. Cruickshank calls his history “archaeological,” and clearly he was indebted to the work of preservationist Gunny Harboe, who worked on the building’s restoration and its conversion to the Hotel Burnham (now called, shudder, Staypineapple) in the 1990s.

Although the book is called Skyscraper and the skyscraper is the Reliance Building, the building is the explicit subject of just one of the book’s six chapters. This is the chapter I honed in on, after coming across the book recently at Powell’s Chicago, on the same day I saw 1000M in person and took the photos at top. The first four chapters put the Reliance Building and its architect (Root) in Chicago’s late 19th-century context (post-fire and in the midst of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, mainly), while the last chapter looks at the Reliance Building’s impact on later skyscraper development. Still, chapter five’s roughly 60 pages are fairly captivating, aided by the way Cruickshank reveals the building’s history as he makes his archaeological dig into it. One tidbit is the way the project’s lengthy, five-year construction is attributed to tenants in the previous five-story building on the site unwilling to move out before their leases expired in 1894. With the retailers on the ground floor out early, Hale started construction on Root’s design in 1900, building the first floor, basement, and foundations while jacking up the upper floors of the old building. Four years later, and with Atwood in charge, Hale resumed construction, erecting the rest of the innovative riveted steel-frame building in less than a year. One would be hard-pressed to “read” such a history on the building itself, but thanks to Cruickshank (and others before him, including Jay Pridmore), readers can see how the building’s realization is as fascinating as the building itself is beautiful.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Future or Eclipse of Criticism, edited by Lina Malfona, with Lucia Giorgetti, Cecilia Marcheschi and Elisa Barsanti (Buy from Actar Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

One of the numerous sessions I attended at the UIA World Congress of Architects about a month ago was a talk by Mario Carpo on “Generative AI and the revival of creative imitation in the visual arts.” Carpo, author of The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence, Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity, and other texts on the incorporation of digital tools into architectural practice, was a suitable for choice for the topic. Being a historian, he approached the topic with what seemed like tangents on art and architecture in Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, but in the end he used those references to show some parallels between human creativity and the AI equivalent: namely, that they both work via imitation and transformation. The biggest difference between the two forms of creativity—one that ensures AI is not an immediate existential threat to architects—is critique: architects can criticize, while AI cannot … at least, not yet.

What Carpo did not address in his talk (at least not the talk I attended, as he did participate in others) was the current state of criticism in architecture. Are young architects and students of architecture today as well versed as previous generations in critique—both in critiquing built works they experience and in projects that they or others are working on? One could say that healthy architectural criticism—in journals, newspapers, online, in classrooms, wherever—has the benefit of giving students and architects the tools and perspective to better critique designs, ultimately making them better architects. If, as Carpo attests, criticism is necessary to make architectural practice stronger and more relevant in the face of AI, then criticism should be fostered in academia, publishing, and other areas of architecture, reversing the otherwise downward trend that is addressed in Future or Eclipse of Criticism.

“Future or Eclipse of Criticism” was both a lecture series at MAXXI in March and April of 2023 and a symposium at Università di Pisa on April 4, 2023. The book of the same name, released by Actar last month, features essays by, and interviews with, some of the participants in those two events, plus some texts by the editorial team. Paramount is, in the words of editor Lina Malfona, “the eclipse of the traditional architecture critic and emergence of new figures, such as the curator and the architecture journalist.”

Given the Italian context of the lecture series and symposium, this shift is examined through the lenses of Manfredo Tafuri and Bruno Zevi, but also via such intellectual voices as Roland Barthes and Bruno Latour. Latour’s ideas are indeed the basis for Albena Yaneva’s essay, “Putting Things Into Orbit: The New Style of Critique,” which argues for a form of criticism that is embedded within architectural practice and takes the many parts of the architectural process into account, echoing her 2009 book Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. Cecilia Marcheschi and Elisa Barsanti, in their recap of the book, indicate that Yaneva’s “from the ground” approach “sparked tensions among participants” when she presented it at the symposium in Pisa.

The other essays are not nearly as controversial. The ones standing out to me are Marco Biraghi’s “The Destiny of Critique,” which argues for the importance of critical thinking but also the responsibility architectural thinkers have in keeping it alive; Cynthia Davidson’s “In Critical Condition,” which sees history as “the ecosystem in which criticism itself resides”; Lucia Giorgetti’s “Annotated Bibliography” that puts today’s criticism within the lineage of important 20th-century architectural criticism; and Joseph Bedford’s “On the Value of Criticism within Architectural Education.”

The last, subtitled “The Open Jury and the Liberal Democratic Promise of Post-War Pedagogy,” is most strongly aligned with my thoughts that began this review, in the way Bedford distinguishes between journalistic criticism and “metacriticism.” While the former type speaks to a broad audience, the latter is focused on academia, found in the dialogues between students and professors. It seems that those dialogues take on more pressing meanings with the rapidly expanding impact of generative AI on nearly every field today, including architecture. As such, Future or Eclipse of Criticism can be seen as a snapshot of architectural criticism at a time of transition, as it contends with the seemingly unavoidable onslaught of generative AI.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Black Architect, by Sekou Cooke (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A provocative and deeply personal investigation into the intersection of race, identity, and the built environment [that] blends memoir, cultural critique, and a series of candid conversations with leading Black practitioners to explore what it truly means to be a Black architect in America.”

• Defining Architectural Quality, edited by José Manuel Pozo and Wilfried Wang (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “While quantitative-technical evaluations of buildings abound internationally, the qualitative assessment of architectural works has so far been lacking. Defining Architectural Quality ranges from general observations and theories to case studies and lays a rigorous foundation for assessing works of architecture.”

• Mysteries of a Communist Cave, by Lytle Shaw (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The second book in the Gumshoe series turns its investigative eye to Oscar Niemeyer’s unique construction for the French Communist Party in Paris, a microcosm of the shifting political and architectural landscape of the 1960s.”

• Global—Neutral: Architecture from Austria in Africa and Asia 1955–1989, edited by Monika Platzer, Susanne Rick and Architekturzentrum Wien (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Examines the complexity of postcolonialism through the lens of the work created by Austrian architects in African and Asian countries between 1955 and 1989, a period of global political upheaval during which numerous states gained independence from European colonial powers and international cooperation was increasingly marked by Cold War tensions.”

• New Schools on the Block: A Typological Inventory, by AFF Architekten (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Surveys a decade of school building design by Berlin- and Lausanne-based AFF Architekten, a collective of architects, researchers, and crafts people that understand schools as spaces of identification as much as they are places of learning.”

• The Roofless Truth: Planning and Architecture for Homelessness, edited by Matthias Drilling and Fabian Neuhaus (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Roofless Truth brings together contributions by international researchers and practitioners from the fields of architecture, urban development and design, sociology, ethnology, social work, and education. The book highlights how spaces should be designed to offer protection, dignity, and opportunities for homeless people, and to facilitate encounters and interaction.”

• Stone Voids: Xu Tiantian’s Reactivation of the Huangyan Quarries, edited by arc en rêve centre d’architecture (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “From cavernous quarries carved by centuries of stone extraction to vibrant public spaces, Stone Voids tells the story of how architect Xu Tiantian and her studio DnA Design and Architecture transformed the Huangyan stone quarries in Taizhou, China, through her ‘architectural acupuncture’ approach.”

• The Architecture of Housing Co-ops: 15 Case Studies in DE/NL, edited by Marieke Kums and Carolin Koopmann (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for nai010 Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “To stimulate interest in cooperative living, The Architecture of Housing Co-ops highlights successful examples from Germany alongside more recent Dutch projects, showcasing recent developments through detailed analyses, financial models, floor plans and interviews with designers and residents.”

• Dom Hans van der Laan in Practice: A Design Manual, by Caroline Voet (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for nai010 Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Dutch Benedictine monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan (1904–91) built his practice around his concept of the ‘Architectural Space’ and a proportional system based on the 3:4 ratio. In this practical guide to his methodology, Caroline Voet uses his students' examples to update his principles for the 21st century.”

• LANDMARKS: Every Place Has a Story. Every Story Has a Place, by Selbert Perkins Design (Buy from Visual Profile Books / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Great destinations around the world are evolving. Today’s global populations expect … more complex and highly rewarding experiences. LANDMARKS lets readers see 60 projects by Selbert Perkins Design in branding, wayfinding, and placemaking from diverse destinations around the world.”

• Somewhere, Something, Someone, by Leers Weinzapfel Associates (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Leers Weinzapfel Associates present fifteen of their recent architectural projects since 2011 through photography, diagrams, drawings, and supportive texts and annotations. Somewhere, Something, Someone functions both as the book’s title and organizing principle.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• “How to Turn Architecture’s Devolution Around”: Eva Hagberg reviews Reinier de Graaf’s latest book, Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto, ahead of the the July 25 gathering of the New York Architecture + Design Book Club when it was discussed. (Untapped)

• “Another Architecture is Probable”: Read an excerpt from Antifascist Architecture, a new book by Daniel Jonas Roche and Andrew Santa Lucia. (Scratching the Surface)

• “The Many Acts of Stages, David Kohn’s ‘Architect’s Book’”: Nishi Shah reviews the monograph on David Kohn Architects that features twelve volumes connected by wire binding. (World-Architects)

• “Living in Tanizaki’s Shadows”: On the 140th anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s birth, Gregory Starr, a translator of In Praise of Shadows, “reflects on the work and its echoes in his own life in an old home on the Pacific coast of Japan.” (Nippon.com)

• Furthermore is now accepting applications for Fall 2026 grants for “the publication of nonfiction books concerning the arts, history, and the natural and built environments.” Submission deadline is September 1, 2026. (Furthermore)

• AJ reports on the death of Jeremy Melvin, who was a significant contributor to the development of World Architecture Festival (WAF) since its founding in 2008 but was also an oft-published author, including a monograph on FRS Yorke and …isms: Understanding Architecture. (Architects’ Journal)

• “She’s just our type”: Irma Boom is “the experimental book designer who isn’t afraid to push boundaries—and crack some spines along the way.” (Monocle)

From the Archives

Although I did not attend either the “Future or Eclipse of Criticism” lecture series at MAXXI or the symposium at Università di Pisa a few years ago, one symposium I did find myself at many years ago was “Anything: Architecture at the End of the Millennium,” held at the Guggenheim in June 2000. The event was the tenth and final ANY event organized by Cynthia Davidson and her Anyone Corporation. One year later, MIT Press published Anything, though I didn’t get around to reviewing it on my blog until November 2004. Below is that review.

Anything marks the end of ten years of multi-disciplinary conferences and books on architecture and theory sponsored by Anyone Corporation, who recently resurfaced with Log. Spanning three days at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in June 2000, I was fortunate enough to attend day two of the conference and symposium, featuring Jeffrey Kipnis, Steven Holl, Ben van Berkel, Jacques Herzog, Rafael Moneo, Elizabeth Diller, Zaha Hadid, and others. The book afforded me the opportunity to see what I missed the other two days, particularly the discussions that followed each half day’s prepared lectures. Its these transcribed discussions that make the book worthwhile, more argumentative, opinionated, and off-the-cuff than the lectures.

At the conference, the highlight for me was Gary Hill and Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson’s day-ending “Anything Intervention,” a live and pre-recorded, mixed-media work made specifically for the conference; my sentiment was shared by most of the panel members. Surprisingly the highlight of the book (without diminishing the accomplishments of the presenters) is the graphic design, carried out by 2x4, the popular New York-based firm also responsible for the 2D elements of Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s student center at IIT. 2x4 creates both macro and micro designs that create cohesion while also setting apart each piece as a unique part of the whole. This happens by subtly changing page colors throughout the book like a catalog of paints (blue-orange-green-pink-brown-purple-gray) and by laying out text and images differently for each contributor, in subtle ways as well.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Ikebana & Other Infidelities, by Coy Howard (This 2025 book and its two predecessors—The Thickening of Time and The Silhouette of Feeling—can be bought from Hennessey + Ingells, via AbeBooks.)

What is the architectural equivalent of a haiku? I’m far from an expert in poetry, much less Japanese poetry, but that thought came to mind when thumbing through the trio of coffee table books made by Coy Howard over a ten year span: The Thickening of Time (2015), The Silhouette of Feeling (2022), and Ikebana & Other Infidelities (2025). In dark images drenched with sensual implications, the books respectively document Howard’s residential architecture, furniture designs, and … well, flowers, but I’m not really sure why. While the first two books blur the physical and the digital to create stunning, occasionally abstract images on the page, their subject matter remains in grasp, if fleeting at moments. Ikebana & Other Infidelities, on the other hand, goes so far as to feel, not like a representation of designs, but like an entirely imagined realm created for and limited to the page. Put another way, the books move from representations of space, object, and material in the first two to pure floral and visual poetry in the last.

In a now famous photograph taken in 1980, a group of seven young Los Angeles architects (and a dog) posed on a chilly-looking Venice Beach for photographer Ave Pildas, for a short story by Joseph Giovannini that would run in Interiors magazine. The LA architects in the photo and article were Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Craig Hodgetts, Frederick Fisher, Robert Mangurian, and Coy Howard. While Gehry, Mayne, Moss and, to a lesser degree, Hodgetts would become familiar names far beyond the Southern California scene, the others remained more focused on the region, at least in terms of impact and exposure. Howard’s greatest contribution appears to have been via teaching: in the Environmental Arts Program at Otis College of Art and Design and the undergraduate program at SCI-Arc, both of which he has directed. As such, it is difficult to look at the images in these three books and connect them with projects that might have gained exposure through more straightforward representations—something that could have happened with, say, artistic photos of Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall or a collection of Mayne’s “sculptural drawings.” This, in turn, helps Howard’s images to stand simply on their own.

Of this apparent architectural trilogy, the first book—The Thickening of Time, published by SCI-Arc Press in 2015—is the most straightforward. It presents three villas in three cities (Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York) and is accompanied by three critical essays, by Jeffrey Kipnis, Dr. George Rand, and Larry Rouch. The later books would eschew essays, focusing squarely on enigmatic images, but such images are in abundance here too. Howard, in his introduction, describes the images as “photographic framing of perspectival fragments, not as views so much as glimpses.” He describes each villa as “a cryptic code of visual braille, a rebus, on the deep culture of place,” even though the respective cities (places) are nowhere to be seen. While the images blur the physical and the digital, the real and the unreal, the New York villa—the Max Palevsky Residence—is most certainly built, but the “glimpses” of it meld with the uncertain realities of the other two villas in the way they describe the feeling of the villa’s spaces and its textures rather than the shape of its spaces or layout of its rooms, as one might grasp in other architecture monographs.

The second book—The Silhouette of Feeling, published by SCI-Arc Press in 2022—presents Howard’s line of furniture, called the Solita Collection, in three categories: sofas, lights, and tables. Featuring one object after another with names, materials, and dimensions indicated, the book could be seen as a 350-page catalog—if not for the fact the photos (done with Omar Busbait) depict just fragments of the pieces of furnitures, sometimes giving more real estate on the page to background than object. Even the image wrapping the front and back covers reveals nothing about the book’s contents. So, like the first book, The Silhouette of Feeling elevates feeling over form, saying as much in the title. Still, one gathers a sense of the sensuality and craft via the photos of the real and imagined furniture, while the lush backdrops create a mood that pervades the book while also hinting at the kinds of ascetic spaces one would need to create in order to suitably live with the furniture Howard has designed.

The third book in Howard’s apparent trilogy is Ikebana & Other Infidelities, published last November by SCI-Arc Press and celebrated earlier this year. If the first book applied the designer’s dark, sensual aesthetic to residential designs and the second to furniture, the latest finds nearly 200 pages of arrangements: of flowers in vases on furniture in rooms. The images are painterly in their colors, lighting, and framing—carefully and beautifully composed standalone images that defy meaning beyond appearance. In praising the book, Hernan Diaz Alonso, former director of SCI-Arc, describes the images “like riddles that never quite want to be solved.” Similarly, architect and educator Christopher Aykanian asks if the book is “a catalog of simple flower arrangements, or are my eyes wandering through collages of pulsating flowers as they emerge from darkened dream states…?”

As I look at the arrangements, it seems that, if anything, meaning in them is personal rather than universal, colored by experience, taste, and other factors; though I also see them as antidotes to the onslaught of images courtesy of endless scrolls in Instagram, TikTok, and other social media apps, and to the eclectic conformity of generative AI. Howard’s images (done with Dewan Li) are static and calm, with the large and saturated backgrounds free of details as important as the carefully arranged flowers themselves. The images invite people to slow down, stop, and look—really look. While the arrangements are the product of Howard’s design process, in regard to immersive looking they might also be inspiration for others, for people who need to tune out the world of distractions and focus on something quiet and beautiful.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, edited by Martino Stierli, Ikem Stanley Okoye and Mallory Cohen (Buy from MoMA Design Store / from Artbook/DAP [distributor for MoMA] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa focuses on seven western African nations—Benin (Dahomey), Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo—and illuminates the ways in which architects sought to adapt, adopt or reinvent the idiom of modernism for their specific cultural, political and economic purposes.”

• New England Architectural Guide (Vol. 1: Boston, Cambridge, Providence, and New Haven; Vol. 2: The Berkshires, Southern Coast, Northern Coast, and from New Hampshire to Vermont), by Sam Gurwitt, edited by Natascha Meuser and Philipp Meuser (Buy from DOM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Two volumes, one region: from Boston’s civic and academic institutions to coastal landscapes and post-industrial sites, this 650-page title maps the full spectrum of the built environment in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.”

• Building Better - Less - Different: Transforming Cities and Sustaining Labor, by Dirk E. Hebel and Felix Heisel (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Sustainability is to become the guiding principle of social action and economic activity. At the same time, its implementation is far from clear. In no other field can this be better observed than in architecture. Each volume of Building Better – Less – Different explores two areas of sustainability. The third volume combines the topics labor and city.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Domus selects 15 architecture and design books to read this summer—books that “invent new genres, stretch existing vocabularies and propose different ways of thinking about design.” (Domus)

• Trend Hunger highlights the fifth monograph from Archi-Tectonics, Monsters and Mutants: Explorations in the Architecture–Nature Continuum. (Trend Hunter)

• John Pardey “enjoys a lyrical tour” through Thomas Bo Jensen’s compendium of the paintings, sculptures and buildings of Danish artist, poet, sculptor and film maker Per Kirkeby. (Architecture Today)

From the Archives

Although the review on my old blog does not mention him, one among the few dozen architects featured in A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California, the catalog accompanying the 2013 MOCA exhibition of the same name, is Coy Howard. Hence I’m copy-pasting my review here.

Even before opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, A New Sculpturalism was getting scores of press when Frank Gehry pulled out of the show, citing a lack of intellectual depth in the show. Cries of “No Gehry = No Show” followed, but Gehry eventually relented (to Thom Mayne, reportedly) and rejoined the show a couple weeks before its revised start date in mid-June. Press also focused on the exhibition’s large budget—it received a $445,000 grant from the Getty, the most of any component of Pacific Standard Time.

Yet I had received the companion book well before the controversy and the opening of the exhibition, a signal of how publications and exhibitions are strongly wedded these days (it’s close to impossible to have one without the other)—but also how they are produced relatively independently from each other. The focus of the book, like the show, is on the architects that have reshaped Southern California and become some of the most influential practitioners and academics (a two-page spread at the back of the book actually maps the teaching engagements of the various architects) on a global scale: Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Michael Rotondi, Greg Lynn, Neil Denari, Michael Maltzan, and lots of others. Photographs of their projects are the majority of the visual material in the book; only renderings of proposed pavilions by emerging architects in and around LA allude to the physical reality of the exhibition.

The architects are presented through photographs of completed buildings (no renderings of in-progress projects) in Southern California and beyond. Their order in the book is apparently random; my best guess is age, since it starts with Gehry and ends with Ball-Nogues. But given the purely visual presentation, curator/editor Christopher Mount’s introduction and the four essays interspersed between the architects (by Margaret Crawford, Johanna Vandemoortele, Sam Lubell, and Nicholas Olsberg) are especially important. A standout of these is Vandemoortele’s “conversations with clients in Southern California.” If the region is (still) seen as a bastion of what Eric Owen Moss calls “perpetual experimentation,” then the openness of clients to allow architects to do so with their money is required. Or to put it another way, you can’t have any “new sculpturalism” without somebody paying for it.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Seny i Rauxa: An Account of Catalan Architecture, edited by Joan Roig and Carme Ribas (Buy from Amazon)

A couple weeks ago, I was in Barcelona for the UIA World Congress of Architects, covering it for World-Architects. It was an ambitious event curated by a group of six young architects from Barcelona under the theme Becoming: Architectures for a Planet in Transition. It spanned an exhibition at Three Chimneys, a former power plant just outside the city; three days of sessions at the Barcelona International Convention Centre (CCIB), with ancillary sessions held at Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHub); an awards ceremony at Sagrada Família; and a bevy of exhibitions across the city within the framework of Barcelona World Capital of Architecture 2026. One of the last is Seny i Rauxa: An Account of Catalan Architecture, an exhibition at DHub (until September 6) curated and designed by architects Carme Ribas, Victòria Garriga, and Joan Roig as “a broad and evocative journey through Catalan architecture, highlighting its richness, diversity, and historical continuity.” A compact (4.25” x 7.5”), trilingual (CAT/ESP/ENG) companion book, edited by two of the three curators, features new and archival essays that elucidate the titular terms seny and rauxa.

So, you might be asking, what exactly are seny and rauxa? The editors, in their introductory essay, describe them respectively, and simply, as common sense and capriciousness, which I further take to mean logic and intuition. They reference a number of authors and architects whose texts they excerpt in the book, including a passage from Jaume Vicens Vives’s We, the Catalans (1954), who believed their collective behavior was “governed almost always by seny and, on certain occasions, by rauxa.” A decade earlier, in The Forms of Catalan Life, Josep Ferrater Mora included seny alongside continuity, moderation, and irony as one of the four characteristics of Catalan identity. Irony is found again, in Oriol Bohigas’s 1969 article “A Possible Barcelona School,” as something architects tended toward in the Catalan capital: “towards irony, towards positions that are fundamentally insecure, ambiguous and, we might even venture to say, openly cynical.”

Overall, the texts point toward a certain tension between a logical order—best exemplified by the 1860s Cerdà Plan, aka the Eixample, with its regular grid and chamfered corners—and an artistic expression embracing irony. The tension can be seen in Josep Maria Sostres’s El Noticiero Universal Offices and Workshop (1968), with its flatter-than-flat facade, and the folded facade of the building designed by Ricardo Bofill at 276–278 Carrer del Comte d’Urgell (date unknown), both of which are mentioned in a 2004 piece by Josep Quetglas. The most helpful example is found in the last essay in the book, Ángela Molina Clement’s “At Last, a Possible Dialectic,” which comes after an illustrated appendix with a few of the hundreds of artifacts in the exhibition and a visual essay by Xavier Monteys Roig. Clement writes that an amalgam of seny and rauxa can be found in the work of Antoni Gaudí: “His buildings combine the rationality of meticulous structural planning—the calculation of forces, the geometry of catenary arches—with exuberant shapes and fantasy.”

Like any exhibition catalog or companion, Seny i Rauxa: An Account of Catalan Architecture is most valuable for people who have seen the exhibition in person—a lush, deep red exhibition located in a temporary gallery space while portions of DHub are under construction. After entering through the gift shop, visitors see the exhibition in its entirety, as in my first photo above. The curators have grouped the 150 years of Catalan architecture thematically, by scale (from furniture and rooms to cities and territories), covering the perimeter walls and locating models and other objects on tables and vitrines following a regular grid. This layout, which also includes objects and armatures suspended from the ceiling, can be seen as an expression of seny and rauxa: the regular grid allowing unique, somewhat capricious displays at each node. While the exhibition is overwhelming at times, due to the large volume of artifacts on display, the book is compact and concise, allowing the titular themes to resonate clearly.

Books Released This Week (and Last Week)

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• The Eames Houses: Charles and Ray Eames Residential Architecture, by Eckart Maise (Buy from Phaidon / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Eames Houses is the first comprehensive overview of Charles and Ray Eames’s residential architecture. It includes several previously unpublished buildings and places the powerhouse couple’s architectural work alongside their widely known designs in furniture, exhibitions, and film, showing how they carried consistent design principles across different disciplines.”

• StudioMDA: Space for Art: Space for Art, by studioMDA (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Hatje Cantz] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Frankfurt and New York–based architecture and design firm StudioMDA has achieved a high degree of visibility in recent years through the completion of many prominent gallery design projects, including the first American location of Lisson Gallery in New York, three New York galleries for Paul Kasmin, and the High Line Nine galleries.”

• Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, by Eyal Weizman (Buy from Penguin / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on [Forensic Architecture’s] original and extraordinarily comprehensive research to bring us on an eye-opening journey through the “deep cartography” of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarized topography, settlements, and barriers.”

• Carlo Scarpa and Carlo Maschietto: Expressive Forms and Structural Forces (1st Edition), by Anne-Catrin Schultz and Christina McCoy (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In five chapters and based on several of Scarpa’s key buildings, the book investigates different approaches to structural design and its formal expression. The authors—an architect and an engineer—mirror the cooperation of Scarpa and Maschietto.”

• The Agentic Architect, by Randy Deutsch (Buy from Routledge / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Agentic Architect explores how current and future architects can harness AI to become indispensable. The book addresses the critical gap between AI’s current (mis)use in academia and practice and how to pivot towards its full, effective adoption.”

• Architecture Educators and Practitioners in Collaboration: Chicago Studio over 25 years, by Kathryn Clarke Albright, et. al. (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The book tells the unwritten story of Chicago Studio over 25 years—a semester-long, place-based, experiential learning program harnessing the city as a learning lab through engagement of practitioners, city leaders and neighborhoods, while also providing pedagogical assessment and a look going forward.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Publishers Weekly gives Eyal Weizman’s Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide a starred review, calling it “a sickening look at Israel’s systemic erasure of Palestinian life.” (Publishers Weekly)

• “A New Book by Harry Francis Mallgrave Explores the Evolution of American Architectural Discourse”: Writers on Architecture in America: From Jefferson to Giedion. (Architectural Record)

• “From Marina Abramovic to John Gerrard, artists share the books that changed them,” with architect/artist Andreas Angelidakis citing Deconstructivist Architecture, the catalog to the 1988 MoMA exhibition of the same name. (Art Basel)

• The latest title in the New York Architecture + Design Book Club is Architecture Against Architecture by Reinier de Graaf. The talk takes place at Head Hi in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, on July 25. (Head Hi) I reviewed the book back in Week 13/2026.

From the Archives

In contrast to this week’s book, which is small and focused on a single exhibition, I dug back into my archive for a two-volume (with slipcase) coffee table book that spans multiple exhibitions over decades: Storefront Newsprints: 1982-2009. The storefront of the title is the Storefront for Art and Architecture, founded by Kyong Park in 1982 and has been located behind Steven Holl and Vito Acconci hinged storefront on Kenmare Street since 1992. The book collects the newsprints accompanying each exhibition mounted by Storefront between 1982 and 2009. I reviewed it on my blog in March 2010 and have copy-pasted it below.

Anybody who has visited the Storefront for Art and Architecture has probably walked away with a folded piece of newsprint with details on the exhibition on display. Since my first visit in 1997 I've amassed quite a few, storing them in a shoebox with pamphlets from other museums and venues I've visited in New York City and beyond. The Storefront newsprints have a way of standing out from the rest, in large part from the material they are printed on as well as the monochrome graphics employed. They are anachronistic without being reactionary. They recall a time before ink-jet printers and digital publishing, a time of literal cut-and-paste graphic design and printing in local copy shops. Yet the newsprint is a consistent medium in the nearly 30-year Storefront history, spanning a time of great changes arising from digital technologies, be it graphic design, publishing, or architecture. That Storefront continues to use the format points to a desire to keep in mind the organization's origins, even as it grows in scope and influence beyond the confines of 97 Kenmare Street.

Storefront Newsprints collects over 150 of the newsletters from its early days on Prince Street to 2009, reprinted in two volumes nicely packaged in a black slip case. This is book as historical artifact, focused on what could be considered Storefront’s unintentional archive. Not all of the text in the reprints is legible (essays by Lebbeus Woods, Michael Webb, and Vito Acconci are reprinted in easy-to-read format), but it is the images, layouts, and most of all the subject matter that rises to the fore while perusing the collection.

Storefront Newsprints comes at the end of Joseph Grima’s three-year directorship. Heading for Italy and Domus, he followed Sarah Herda, who is now at the helm of the Graham Foundation in Chicago after her eight-years at Storefront. Before them founder Kyong Park directed the space’s exhibitions, and Grima’s interview with him is particularly revealing about the organization and its newsprints. As the Storefront searches for Grima’s replacement, the past tenuousness of its existence seems to have given way to a widespread appreciation of the organizations, its space (restored in 2008), and its place within the broader architectural community. The influence of its programs reaches beyond its 868-square-foot home, but the newsprints are unique artifacts for those able to visit the gallery in person...and now for those willing to spend $40.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

NOTE: I’m taking next week off for a short summer break, so the next newsletter will arrive in your inboxes on Monday, July 13, aka Week 29/2026.

Summer Reads

I’ve always found that “summer reads” and “architecture books” do not, in any way, go hand in hand—the former aim to be breezy fare that is easy to take to the beach or the poolside, while the latter are sometimes challenging to read and are often large, overpriced books that one doesn’t want to get wet. Still, with the publishing cycle prioritizing spring catalogs, fall catalogs, and holiday books, “summer reads” are an excuse to shine the light on some books whose release dates have less-than-ideal timing but are nevertheless worth reading.

While I can’t say that the dozen recently published and forthcoming books I cobbled together are all worthwhile (I’ve started reading just two of them but have not seen the others…yet), they all share one trait: they are small. Or, at least they are small relative to other architecture books. This makes them portable, be it to the cliché summer destinations or to whichever city or countryside you may be lucky enough to visit over summer break. But this also means they are fairly intellectual reads, given that small page sizes in architecture books tend to equate with theory rather than monographs, and lots of text rather than lots of pictures. This is hardly the case with tall the books I selected, but hopefully everyone who reads this newsletter will find something of interest.

Without further ado, the dozen summer reads are presented below in basically random groups of three, featuring excerpted texts from the publishers’ descriptions and, related to a preference for small books on summer trips, the size of the book and the number of pages.

Future or Eclipse of Criticism, edited by Lina Malfona, with Lucia Giorgetti, Cecilia Marcheschi and Elisa Barsanti (Buy from Actar Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Has architectural criticism disappeared for good or has it adapted to the pressures, exigencies, and fashions of the present? [These questions were addressed at] the lecture series ‘The Future or the Eclipse of Criticism’ presented at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and the eponymous symposium which took place at the University of Pisa’s School of Engineering,” events this book documents. (6 x 7 inches, 260 pages)

Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization, edited by Nitin Bathla, Silvia Cipelletti, Markus Lähteenmäki and Klearjos Papanicolaou (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “How do cinema and the city mutually shape each other? This book stages an encounter between film and the theory of planetary urbanization by deploying the notion of the Sensoriums of Planetary Urbanization. It offers a deep analysis of the multifaceted experiences of urban life—within and beyond the city.” (6.75 x 9.5 inches, 256 pages)

Right-Wing Spaces: Political Essays (Bauwelt Fundamente, 179), by Stephan Trüby (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Do the emerging forces of the political far right have an architectural and urban planning agenda? This question runs through Right Spaces, a collection of essays written between 2015 and 2020 that anticipated many elements of the current debate. [It is] supplemented by a new, detailed foreword that sheds light on recent international developments.” (5.5 x 7.5 inches, 304 pages)

Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, by Eyal Weizman (Buy from Penguin / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Taking us through the broader geographical and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between colonizer and colonized—and how Israel’s actions have escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.” (6.5 x 9.5 inches, 416 pages)

An Opinionated Guide to New York Architecture, by Allison Meier (Buy from Hoxton Mini Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “From Brooklyn brownstones to Bauhaus blocks, Art Deco icons to towering skyscrapers—New York’s ever-evolving skyline spans all architectural styles, tracing the history of this modern metropolis. From famous icons like the Flatiron Building to hidden architectural gems, the guide features more than 50 must-see buildings spanning all architectural styles.” (4.5 x 5.5 inches, 176 pages)

Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture, by Mark Lamster (Buy from Deep Vellum / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “With an exceptional blend of architectural history, social history, and critical writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Lamster takes readers to the sun-scorched origins of Dallas as a remote outpost on the Texas frontier, then traces the city's development into the dynamic, if imperfect, metropolis we know today.” (5.5 x 8.5 inches, 250 pages)

Astra Zarina: She Was an Architect, by Laura Helena Wurth (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Hatje Cantz] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In the first volume of Hatje Cantz’s new series She Was an Architect, journalist and art historian Laura Helena Wurth vividly recounts the fascinating life of American Italian architect Astra Zarina (1929–2008), the Rome Prize winner (1960), preservationist, and founder of the Washington University Rome Program. (4.75 x 7.5 inches, 64 pages)

David Chipperfield: Reflections on Architectural Practice, edited by Sarah Handelman (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Walther König] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Operating by turns as theorist, polemicist and editor, Chipperfield has drawn upon various forms of rhetoric and published across various platforms—including books, articles and lectures—in order to articulate his vision of an architectural practice that questions accepted truths and embraces the tangible qualities that shape our lives. This compact volume compiles Chipperfield’s diverse writings from the entirety of his career.” (4.5 x 7 inches, 256 pages)

Joe Day: Essays, edited by Joe Day (Buy from Inventory Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Including pieces for both academic and general readership, letters, reviews, public addresses and responses, Essays offers a full account of Los Angeles–based designer and architectural theorist Joe Day's 30-year critical development, and a revealing look at LA's built environment and intellectual climate at the turn of the millennium.” (5.5 x 9.5 inches, 392 pages)

Rem Before Koolhaas: Journalism by an Architect, by Antonio Cantero (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for nai010 Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This pocket-size volume is the first to compile Koolhaas' interviews for the Haagse Post [done between 1963 and 1968], reproducing their original layouts. Rather than treating this period as a mere precursor to his architectural career, Rem Before Koolhaas presents it as culminating in a valuable body of critical work that lent itself to his later endeavors.” (4.5 x 6.5 inches, 384 pages)

Black Architect, by Sekou Cooke (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Black Architect is a provocative and deeply personal investigation into the intersection of race, identity, and the built environment. Written by architect and educator Sekou Cooke, author of Hip-Hop Architecture, this book blends memoir, cultural critique, and a series of candid conversations with leading Black practitioners to explore what it truly means to be a Black architect in America.” (4.75 x 8.75 inches, 144 pages)

Mysteries of a Communist Cave, by Lytle Shaw (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — The second book in the Gumshoe series “that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history [that emulates] the detective novel,” investigates Oscar Niemeyer’s building for the French Communist Party’s (PCF) central committee in Paris. (4.25 x 7 inches, 288 pages)

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• “How Books Built Bjarke’s Brand”: On the occasion of BIG’s new monograph, BIG Atlas, Jarrett Fuller takes “a look back on their previous books and the brand they cultivated.” (Scratching the Surface) ICYMI, I reviewed BIG Atlas in Week 19/2026.

• “No Roman holiday is complete without this new guide [from Blue Crow Media] to the city’s modern architecture.” (Wallpaper*)

• A list of summer 2026 recommended reading from MIT faculty and staff includes a handful of titles on arts and design, architecture, urban studies and planning. (MIT News)

• A selection of summer reads that will help you “lose yourself in architecture, objects and thoughts.” (Salone del Mobile.Milano)

From the Archives

Summer reads are things I would feature every now and then in my writings, and a couple of them I did for World-Architects show a similar interest in the size of books. But instead of limiting my choices to small books, as in this week’s recommendations, I drew attention to the relative sizes of architecture books. For instance, back in 2022 I presented fifteen summer reads in a undulating curve, from small (4.5 x 6.75 inches) to large (11.25 x 15 inches):

One year earlier, I photographed the ten recommendations for summer reading from big (9 x 11.75 inches) to small (4.25 x 7 inches), also showing the thickness of each book:

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Undercover Architect: Townhouse Design-Build in Harlem NY, by Christian Volkmann (Buy from Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

When is a case study more than a case study? When is a building monograph about more than a building? For Christian Volkmann, architect and associate professor at City College of New York, the residential project he realized on West 123rd Street in New York’s Harlem neighborhood is a lesson for other architects and students of architecture in one potential avenue of practice: design-build. In addition to designing the multi-family townhouse, Volkmann served as developer and built the project—both as contractor and occasionally as a laborer. It was a many-years-long process that had a happy ending, as the photographs on the cover of Undercover Architect attests. But it was far from a smooth process, as Volkmann details it in a half-dozen chapters across 200 pages of text, photos, and drawings.

Suitably, the book is structured according to the many hats Volkmann figuratively wore, beginning with “The Developer,” “The Architect,” and “The Builder,” before moving onto chapters about “The Law” and “Academia,” and then a concluding chapter trying to make sense of the process in terms of architectural practice today. Volkmann was born and educated in Germany, so his perspective on things like craft and detail is decidedly different than in the United States and, particularly, New York City, thereby coloring his views on developers, contractors, and even lawyers. Ultimately, the decision to don the various professional hats—and take on much more risk than architects typically do—was based on money and the desire to better control the architectural outcome of the small, 20-foot-wide plot of land he and his partner bought in 2001. That the process was far from smooth can be grasped by the fact construction on the project did not start until 2018 and would wrap five years later.

Volkmann’s ambitions in taking care of nearly every part of the building process is paralleled in the book, which tells three parallel stories. First, in the text on white pages, are his “general observations about our multifaceted profession.” These pages are shorter than the second, the gray pages that find him recalling the actual process of realizing the design-build project in Harlem. The third story documents same building but is through construction photographs, as can be seen in the spread above. Specifically, there are 426 such photos, most of them small on the relatively small, 6.5 x 8.5 inch pages, moving from excavation work on page 13 to a finished building on page 137. Given the chronological nature of the photos and the thematic structure of the chapters in which the photos are found, there is a disconnect between text and images; this is not an issue, given the three ways the book can be read. Lastly, following the book’s conclusion, the project is documented in nearly 50 pages of technical drawings and professional photos.

Of the three main strands in the book, I find the narrative about the Harlem townhouse (on the gray pages) to be the most interesting—and the most effective at making me shake my head in disbelief at times. The white-page texts are too broad for me in a case study, and the captions to the numbered construction photos being tucked at the back of the book makes “reading” them as a story kind of frustrating. But Volkmann’s own frustrations encountered in the process of realizing the building come to the fore in the gray pages, especially in “The Law” chapter. Volkmann’s encounters with city inspectors sound like they would keep some architects from doing similar such projects in New York City, much less doing them as developer and builder as well, and his unfortunate experience with lawyers filing questionable lawsuits are even more perplexing and discouraging. Volkmann sounds cynical at times in the book, but mostly in this chapter—and for good reason.

In the end, Volkmann argues that “the true proof of our value as architects lies in producing results that are demonstrably better than what speculative development alone provides.” Having visited the now occupied project with Volkmann, I think those words can be applied to it. If “the future of good architecture lies in design-build management held by a single hand” … that I’m not so sure. I think Volkmann’s arguments and advice would resonate better with an editorial approach integrating bullet points and the like rather than a narrative with just long passages of text. His book aims to make a difference in architectural practice, but it’s hard to say how many people will glean the positives from his experiences rather than getting hung up on the downsides, as I found myself doing at times, like in the law chapter. Architect-led design-build has its success stories (GLUCK+ immediately comes to mind), but to have a bigger impact on the profession it needs more of them. Undercover Architect is one such story, though it often reads as a cautionary tale.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• 10 Innovations That Will Shape Tomorrow’s Architecture, by Agata and Pierre Toromanoff (Buy from Schiffer Publishing / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “10 Innovations That Will Shape Tomorrow’s Architecture explores the most significant breakthroughs redefining design and construction in the 21st century, ranging from 3-D printing and artificial intelligence to neuroarchitecture, biomaterials, weatherproofing, and biomimicry.”

• Monument to Instrument: Straight Talk About the Future of Architects, by Mike Mense (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book argues for a redefinition of architects as the experts on the relationships between humans and built environments. Architects must come to the public rather than asking the public to come to them.”

• Portmeirion: The Architecture of Pleasure, by Sarah Baylis (Buy from Yale University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Featuring new photography and unpublished archival material, this book shows Portmeirion [founded in 1926 by Welsh architect Clough Williams-Ellis (1883–1978)] as a living, continually evolving place shaped by the diverse people who have lived and worked there.”

• Transforming the Mid-Polis: Conversations on the Mid-Polis Condition, edited by Paul Lukez (Buy from Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The mid-polis is the transitional zone between urban centers and the suburban edges of the expanding metropolis. It is a shifting terrain that blends with adjacent districts and generates a range of urban configurations. This liminal metropolitan zone offers designers opportunities to rethink livability, connectivity, and sustainability.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• New titles surveying the work of Kengo Kuma, Francis Kéré, Will Bruder, and MASS are among the “14 recent monographs” recommended by Record. (Architectural Record)

• Archinect features “20 summer book recommendations,” not all of them new or recently published, as recommended by various architects, educators, critics, and publishers. (Archinect)

• The MIT Press, Graham Foundation and Storefront for Art and Architecture are launching the Publication Award in Contemporary Architecture (PACA). Every two years, “it will help develop editorial projects from ‘conception through publication,’ rather than recognize finished books.” (The Architect’s Newspaper)

• Young & Ayata’s redesign of the Nolen Study Room in the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Met opened on Wednesday. I went and took some photos:

• “Black and White and White All Over”: My look inside 100 Details: Drawn Reality. In Facade. In Construction. In Material, the new 416-page book from Edition DETAIL. (World-Architects)

• Locus: Identified by the History is a 2016 book by architecture scholar Fang Xiaofeng and book designer Lu Jingren that is unique in the way it is pierced by two rectangular openings. (Books on Books) Related, I looked at some books with holes on my old blog, back in 2012.

• Ben Tosland reviews Irénée Scalbert’s Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, a “sensitive, resonant collection of writing.” (Building Design)

• “Retired Harper professor [Trygve Thoreson] explores lives behind Chicago architecture icons” in Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan: Personal Histories of Two Icons of American Architecture. (Harper College)

• The team behind the Booker Prizes pick their favorite bookstores, including the Architectural Association Bookshop in London. (The Booker Prizes)

From the Archives

Undercover Architect can be seen as fitting within the lineage of book-length case studies on residential projects put out by Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers. Also in-depth abut also more aligned with a coffee table book is Miner Road House by Faulkner Architects, published in 2020. I covered it for World-Architects in May 2020 and reviewed it on my blog one month later; the text from the latter is below.

Best I can tell, Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers has been putting out building monographs in various series for at least twenty years. The oldest one I have is from 1999, a slim volume devoted to Vincent James’s Type/Variant House that was part of the “Single Building Series,” which had at least eight titles. I’m not sure if there were other series between it and the recent “Masterpiece Series,” which is made up of nine recently published and forthcoming books, and one of which is devoted to Faulkner Architects’ Miner Road House in California. The house actually shares some traits with the VJAA house in Wisconsin: L-shaped plans, treed sites, metal exteriors, and wood interiors. Both are impressive modern houses that might also illustrate Ojeda’s own architectural preferences when it comes to residential architecture.

I wrote about the house and book a couple weeks ago for World-Architects, so I won’t go too much further into them here. But I will say that the structure of the book works very well. It follows the order of an architectural project: after some brief words on the house come sketches, which are followed by presentation plans and models, then construction photos, and finally professional photographs of the finished house. It’s a logical order whose visual narrative slowly reveals more of the house’s design and its realization.

Given that each book in the series has the same cover, minus the variations of the cover photograph and title, I’m guessing this internal structure is also consistent. (Actually I’m not guessing, as the book on Joseph N. Biondo’s House Equanimity that I have is basically the same.) A consistent format is necessary to create a cohesive series, but the selection of projects that fit into the series is also important; if the buildings don’t deserve full-length books, the series crumbles. The two books I have in the Masterpiece Series bode well for the whole, which is mainly made up of houses but will eventually veer into cultural buildings.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

A Builder’s Life Done Well: The Story of Prutting + Co., by David L. Prutting (Buy from Images Publishing Group / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Back in 2012, in my first visit to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, I spied a contemporary house on the way into town, took some photos, and later learned it was designed by Joeb Moore & Partners from nearby Greenwich. That such a striking house would be located just a couple blocks from New Canaan’s town center was no surprise, given how the town was home to the famed “Harvard Five” in the middle of last century: Philip Johnson, John Johansen, Landis Gores, Eliot Noyes, and Marcel Breuer. What I did not know about the house designed by Joeb Moore until now, upon reading A Builder’s Life Done Well, is that the house’s client, builder, and occupant were all one and the same: David L. Prutting.

Although the builder and his eponymous company undertook the project as a speculative “house of the future” they would sell for a profit, even a fabricated story that Derek Jeter was interested in buying it couldn’t help move the house upon its completion in 2010, just two years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and in the midst of the Great Recession. So David and Deborah, his late wife and co-founder of Prutting + Co., ended up living in the house for more than ten years. The special nature of the house in Prutting’s life and career is evident by it being featured on both the cover and slipcase of A Builder’s Life Done Well.

This book is both a monograph of a builder—a rarity in the genre of architectural monographs—and a survey of contemporary residential architecture in and around Connecticut, all of course built by Prutting. The 248-page book is full of large color photographs, one or two to a spread, but instead of just presenting them as stunning designs by some famous names (Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Steven Holl, Toshiko Mori, KieranTimberlake, Olson Kundig, and a lot of Joeb Moore, among others), Prutting puts them into three chapters accompanied by lessons he has learned over his fifty-year career and now proffers to the three main players involved in homebuilding: clients, architects, and builders. The descriptions for each house are brief, letting the photographs and occasional drawings do most of the work, but Prutting’s introductory essays find him expounding at some length, with anecdotes usually leading up to advice on things the various players would normally learn in the field—or after the client has moved in and calls up the architect or contractor, disgruntled about something.

Memorable are Prutting’s words about James Cutler, who had a very particular way of working with clients and drew details by hand on plane rides to and from his office in Washington State (a couple of them are included in the book), and his sensible advice to do things like provide a second, outdoor means of access to a basement so tradespeople don’t need to trudge through the house to service mechanical equipment after the house is done and occupied. Prutting’s advice to architects might be met with “no duh” reactions from seasoned residential architects, but his straightforward way of explaining things and his attention to the needs of clients as well as fellow builders should make his words helpful to students and young architects wanting to excel at residential design.

With around ten pages per house, and most of those pages filled with photographs, and with nary a bullet point in his introductory essays, this is hardly a comprehensive how-to manual. And that’s quite alright. The book celebrates the work Prutting + Co. has pulled off over the years, with a focus squarely on modern architecture over the last couple of decades. As revealed by a few photos here and there alongside the essays, Prutting + Co. does not exclusively build modern houses, but the baker’s dozen they feature in the book’s three main chapters are extraordinary, especially Toshiko Mori’s House in Ghent, KieranTimberlake’s Mirror House, and Tsao & McKown’s Teahouse. A fourth chapter presents another six houses, but by then readers will understand just how much the beautiful modern houses they see in magazines and on websites depend to a great degree on capable and passionate builders like David Prutting.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Brutalist London, by Owen Hopkins and Nigel Green (Buy from Blue Crow Media / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Third in Blue Crow Media's new series of architectural guide books, Brutalist London builds on its map and offers an expanded guide to the impressive and shocking Brutalist masterpieces of London.”

• Living in Mexico City: 25 Collective Housing of the 21st Century, by Miquel Adria and Andrea Griborio (Buy Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Arquine] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Landmarks of contemporary urban development in Mexico City, where re-densification meets architectural quality.”

• Enrique Norten / TEN Arquitectos: Ideas in Transit, with texts by Miquel Adrià, Pedro Gadanho, Juan Herreros and Ana Elena Mallet (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Arquine] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In praise of what could have been: 15 unbuilt projects from the Mies van der Rohe Award–winning firm.”

• Atelier ARS: Nostalgia and Transgression, by Alejandro Guerrero and Andrea Soto (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Arquine] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book is the first survey of Atelier ARS, an emerging architectural firm led by Alejandro Guerrero and Andrea Soto, based in Guadalajara, Mexico.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Historian Michael R. Allen reviews C. G. Beck’s The Labor of Architecture, “a clarion call to office unionization, and a defense of architecture’s social potential.” (The Architect’s Newspaper) I reviewed the book in Week 2/2026.

• “Can Architecture Ever Save Us From Sickness?”: Read an article by Beatriz Colomina adapted from Sick Architecture, which Colomina edited with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga and e-flux Architecture. (The MIT Press Reader)

• “Bookshelf: Spring 2026” features brief reviews of eight recent books on architecture, landscape, and cities, including Japonica Brown-Saracino’s The Death and Life of Gentrification, reviewed by Susanne Schindler, and Bruno Carvalho’s The Invention of the Future, reviewed by David Graham Shane. (Places Journal)

• Congratulations to the recipients of the Graham Foundation’s Grants to Individuals for 2026, many of whom are receiving them for publications that may be reviewed in this newsletter someday. (Graham Foundation)

• “Construct your own Socialist Modernist circus with this new monograph, [Cirk], from Zupagrafika.” (Wallpaper*)

• Richard Plunz, author of the authoritative A History of Housing in New York City, reviews 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking, Encrypting the Sun, by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

From the Archives

Finding an old book review relevant to the Book of the Week was not hard, given that I’d only previously reviewed a couple books focused on builders, both by Mark Q. Kerson. I opted to highlight BUILDER: Builders & Tradesmen Tell Their Stories, his followup to The Elements of Building: A Business Handbook For Residential Builders & Tradesmen, since, like Prutting’s monograph, it gives advice via anecdotes. Below is the text from my March 2021 review of BUILDER.

Architecture is an infrequent subject of humor on The Simpsons. Most famously, one episode has Frank Gehry designing a concert hall for Springfield, a building Mr. Burns eventually buys and turns into a prison. Construction is the same. In another good episode, Ray Romano plays a roofer, Ray Magini, who befriends Homer at a bar and offers to help with his leaky roof. Ray starts on the roof but then fails to show on numerous occasions, leading the other Simpsons to think he is a figment of Homer’s imagination. Near the end of the show, the family sees Ray is real. Marge asks him, “Why did you start fixing our roof and then just disappear?” He replies “That’s easy, I’m a contractor!” Everybody laughs together and then Marge and Ray agree that all contractors are crooks.

Are all contractors crooks? Of course not, but there is a little bit of truth in Ray Romano’s caricature of a roofer, particularly in terms of how people perceive contractors: as unreliable, and as careless managers of their time. As an architect, I have an almost ingrained antagonism toward contractors, fostered in architecture school and its nonchalance toward construction, and strengthened in practice, when most of my construction administration experience dealt with pointing out the ways the contractor was departing from the specifications they bid on (my comments to them were rarely heeded). Given the importance of construction in the success of buildings, such antagonism is harmful—and increasingly outdated, as more and more design/build programs are offered in architecture schools, my alma mater included.

Although the target audience for BUILDER, the followup to Mark Q. Kerson’s The Elements of Building, are future contractors and tradespeople, some of the nearly 30 interviews should appeal to architects as well, particularly to architects who work on single-family houses in the United States. Most of the interviews are with general contractors, though there are also cabinet makers, an electrician, an automotive machinist, even a chimney sweep. Some highlights include Kerson’s talk with Jesper Kruse of Maine Passive House, who might be the “greenest” guy in the book; his talk with Heather Thompson, one of the few women in the book (evidence of the field’s gender slant, not Kerson’s selection); his lengthy conversation with Sal Alfano, a longtime former editor of the Journal of Light Construction; and his talk with Matt Risinger, who builds homes in Austin, Texas, but also has an immensely popular YouTube channel.

Of these, Kruse and Risinger should be especially appealing to architects, since they share many of the concerns of architects: sustainable architecture and architecture-driven projects. Although it’s clear Kerson visited his subjects in person, he has a number of set questions that appear throughout the book, some of them technical, many geared to business. Some questions touch on trade versus business skills. Kruse, for instance, treats each with similar principles—tidiness and precision, both on the job site and in the books—while Risinger talks about the tension between the two, since he “love[s] being in the field” but needs to “be selling jobs and managing [his] company well.” That most GCs start in the trade by learning how to build things, and then transition into business as owners and managers, gets at the joke that started this commentary: contractors aren’t crooks, they’re just skilled tradespeople trapped in the roles of managers and businesspeople.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House, edited by Iker Gil, photographs by James Florio (Buy from MAS Context)

Over the years, I’ve professed many times to liking books devoted to individual buildings, mainly for the reason that buildings are long, arduous creations worthy of such in-depth treatments—especially so-called masterpieces of architecture. It is even better, in my mind, if case studies are done in series, such as Phaidon’s slim, LP-sized Architecture in Detail series, Knowlton School’s Source Books in Architecture, and the Single Building series from Rockport Publishers. Most of these and other case-study series can only be spoken about in the past tense, so I was happy to read in February that, with the publication of Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House, MAS Context has begun “a new series focused on individual homes.” This first book is more than a promising start.

The Ford House, as it is commonly known, was built in 1950 in Aurora, the Illinois city about 40 miles west of Chicago’s Loop, known more for Wayne’s World and Spindle than avant-garde architecture. Although Bruce Goff is usually associated with Oklahoma, where he grew up and then practiced and taught for much of his career, his remains are actually buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, alongside markers for Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and other architects. Before Goff established himself at the University of Oklahoma in 1942, he practiced in Chicago, ultimately designing eight houses in the area; a few of them, such as the Ford House, were built after he moved back to Oklahoma. Also happening in these years was Goff’s military service, which exposed him to the ubiquitous Quonset hut that the architect would take apart and reconfigure in the radial plan of the Ford House.

While the celebrated Quonset Hut has been celebrated occasionally, architecturally it is very rigid: a half cylinder with an entrance and one end and perhaps some openings inserted into the metal shell. Like shipping containers, it’s not hard to find examples of Quonset Huts repurposed for residential uses, but most of them are uninspiring and force the residents to live within its platonic form. Goff used the bones of the Quonset Hut in a manner—as arching ribs radiating from a central mast—that its military origins are nearly impossible to grasp. The house that results from this structural system is no less complex, and much of the joy in reading Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House is grasping how the various domestic spaces fit into—or break through it, in the case of the outdoor living space—the unexpected form.

Unlike the other series mentioned above, this book—and I’m guessing the rest of the series it launches—is not interested in comprehensively documenting a single building. Under MAS Context founder Iker Gil’s direction, the book is a photographic narrative courtesy of longtime collaborator James Florio (see also: Radical Logic and Thirtysix Views of Inverted Portal), who stayed in the house for a few days to absorb it and present its spaces and details. Florio is not the only contributor though, as architect, educator and current Ford House owner Sidney K. Robinson provides some insight on his thirty years living in the house, while other voices (Petra Bachmaier, Leo Berk, Assaf Evron, Grant Gibson, David Skidmore, Mary Woolever) write about their impressions and relationships with the house. Skidmore, cofounder of Third Coast Percussion, and Bachmaier, cofounder of Luftwerk, each mention the sound and light performance they staged at the house in 2014, though sadly documentation of the production is not included in the book.

From its linen covers to its high-quality papers and no-nonsense design, Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House is a beautiful object. The photos look great on the page and they are ordered in such a way that one “moves” through the house and gains a greater understanding of it with each flip of the page. Regardless, it’s not always easy to grasp the vantage point for each photo, so Goff’s floor plan, section and elevation drawings at the back of the book are extremely helpful additions. It’s a stunning house that I only had rudimentary knowledge of before reading this book. My appreciation of the house now that much greater, I’m eager to see what house is next in the series.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Great Houses of the Arts and Crafts Movement: One Hundred Masterworks 1860–1914, by David Cole (Buy from Images Publishing Group / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Arts and Crafts Movement, founded in the philosophies of John Ruskin and William Morris, produced some of the world’s most enduring architectural masterpieces. Author and architect David Cole presents the 100 great Arts and Crafts houses, each individually described and analyzed with insightful detail and floor plans, and illustrated with stunning photography.”

• Today’s Comprehensive Plan: An Adaptive Approach, by John Zeanah (Buy from Princeton University Press/Island Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In Today’s Comprehensive Plan: An Adaptive Approach, planner John Zeanah builds on his experience leading the Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive Plan—the city’s first comprehensive plan in forty years—to help planners create better, more adaptive plans and more effective outcomes. Zeanah offers a new approach: the adaptive comprehensive plan, a model grounded in implementation, participatory adaptation, and structured intervals for recalibration.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• “The Cartoonist Who Mocked the Madness of Modernism,” an article by Gabriele Neri adapted from his book Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic. (The MIT Press Reader)

• Patrick Sherwood considers Reinier de Graaf’s Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto “and its attempt to answer the question of ‘what next?’” (Architecture Now) I reviewed de Graaf’s book in week 13.

• “To mark 130 years of The Architectural Review, Margaret Howell has personally selected five magazine covers from the archive, available to purchase as limited-edition prints.” Only until June 14. (The Architectural Review Shop)

• If you’re in London on Friday or Saturday, head to The Warburg Institute for the second edition of the Biblioteka Art Book Fair, which “spans artists’ books, photography, architecture, critical theory, philosophy, art writing and more.” (Biblioteka)

From the Archives

Perhaps one reason I wrote in my review of Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House that Goff is usually associated with Oklahoma is because that’s association I make. One reason for that is the book Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture, which was edited by Luca Guido, Stephanie Pilat and Angela Person, and published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. I’d never read any books on Goff back then, but I read this one, reviewing it on my blog. The text from my October 2021 review is below.

Before discovering and receiving this companion book to a traveling exhibition that was shown most recently at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman, Oklahoma, (from January 23 to April 5, 2020), I had no clue about the “American School.” According to the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma, “the American School refers to the imaginative school of design and practice that developed under the guidance of Bruce Goff, Herb Greene and others at the University of Oklahoma in the 1950s and ‘60s.” So the American School, even though it bears a trademark symbol on the Gibbs website, is an unofficial school, unlike the Beaux Arts and Bauhaus whose teachings it stood in staunch opposition to.

Individual creativity, organic forms, and experimentation were the hallmarks of a curriculum that, to architect Donald MacDonald, emerged from “a truly American ethic, which is being formulated without the usual influence of the European or Asian architectural forms and methodologies common on the East and West coasts of the United States.” MacDonald wrote those words in a special issue of A+U in 1981, an issue that, according to Christopher Curtis Mead in the first essay in Renegades, was when “the American School was first explicitly named.” The issue was published less than a year before the death of Bruce Goff (1904–1982), who taught at University of Oklahoma and chaired the Department of Architecture from 1947 to 1955.

Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture—both the book and the exhibition—appears to be the first major presentation of the American School since that November 1981 issue of A+U. Arising from a four-year-long research project at the University of Oklahoma, Renegades exhaustively examines the School of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma, Goff’s architecture and teachings, and the architects following in the footsteps of Goff, Greene and others who embraced certain aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture last century.

MacDonald described the American School as “probably the only indigenous [architecture school] in the United States,” echoing New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable’s assertion in 1970 that Goff was “part of an indigenous American tradition.” While the acknowledgment of truly indigenous cultures predating the arrival of European settlers has shifted views of “indigenous" in recent years, the sentiment is clear that Goff, his colleagues, and their followers did not abide by methods and models alien to the landscapes they built upon. While it’s not clear in my perusal of the book if American School architects were inspired by Native American structures, the designs documented in the Renegades book and exhibition come closer to such truly indigenous buildings than any modern American architecture in that time.

The book features eight essays split into two parts — “The American Schools of Architecture” and “Environmental, Cultural and Political Contexts” — that basically equate with architectural eduction and architectural practice. Those looking for a monograph of Bruce Goff will be disappointed, as there is more documentation of the designs of other architects than Goff’s buildings, but the book does reference monographs by David De Long and Arn Henderson that fans of his should search out. If anything, the book and exhibition (taking a virtual tour of the latter is highly recommended) convey how enthusiastically the teachings of Goff — stressing individual creativity, organic forms, and experimentation — were embraced by students at the time. That the architecture of the American School faded in the face of International Style modernism shouldn’t diminish its potential impact on architecture today, when a stronger land ethic should be fostered. Renegades, in this sense, is a valuable historical document but also one that might guide architects looking to determine what shape American architecture could take this century.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Out There: New Architecture Across America, by Robert Ivy, Cathleen McGuigan and Peter MacKeith (Buy from Merrell / from IndiePubs [now 25% off] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Twenty-five years ago, during Robert A. Ivy’s tenure as editor in chief of Architectural Record, the magazine’s February 2001 issue was released under the theme “Out There.” Prefaced by an interview with Samuel Mockbee—aka “Sambo,” the architect, Rural Studio co-founder, and 2000 MacArthur grant recipient—the issue was highlighted by six projects capturing “Architecture Outside the Centers of Fashion,” as the issue was subtitled. In addition to Marlon Blackwell’s Keenan TowerHouse in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which graced the cover, the featured projects were designed by Brian MacKay-Lyons, Huff+Gooden, Bart Prince, Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, and Frank Harmon.

Although focusing on the work of North American architects outside of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago must have been appealing to many of the architects subscribing to Record at the time, many of whom no doubt worked outside of those metropolises, the gap between that “Out There” issue and its extrapolation into a hefty, 500-page tome also carrying the same name is hinted at by the fact Ivy’s editorial in the issue is devoted to marketing, not the regional architecture found in Arkansas, Nova Sotia, Colorado, New Mexico, and the Carolinas. (The first of a three-part series on marketing for architecture firms rather in that issue, but still…)

Even if Ivy didn’t know the full weight of what he was presenting at the time, the fostering of “out there” work in the pages of Record makes it logical that he would be joined by Cathleen McGuigan, his editorial successor at the magazine, and Peter MacKeith, the outgoing dean at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, to survey fifty American practices working, in his words, “‘out there,’ where architecture meets the people.” A trio of essays by each preface the alphabetical survey of the 50 firms, whose profiles were written by them and three more contributors: Beth Broome, Clifford Pearson (both contributing editors to Record), and Jonathan Boelkins, who was formerly the studio director of Marlon Blackwell Architects. Rounding out the whole is a foreword by Marlon Blackwell himself, the February 2001 cover architect but now considered a “forebear” (per McGuigan’s essay on him and others) to the predominantly younger architects in the pages of Out There.

Although Blackwell seems to be, in addition to Ivy and Record, one of the pieces forming the backbone of Out There—in addition to the above points, it should be noted he taught at University of Arkansas for 33 years—one can go back further in time to architect E. Fay Jones, the Arkansas architect who won the AIA Gold Medal in 1990 and is best known for the design of Thorncrown Chapel, to find some “Out There” roots. MacKeith describes Jones, who would seek commissions no more than a day’s drive from his home in Fayetteville, as “one of the true antecedents of the ‘forebears’” like Blackwell, given the way he “asserted the same purposes and commitment to place throughout his career.” Put another way, one can find a through line from Jones to Blackwell to modus studio, which also practices in Arkansas, plus the other 49 Out There firms. That Ivy authored an excellent 1992 monograph on Jones and the late architect is celebrated in the name of the school where Blackwell taught and MacKeith has served as dean doesn’t hurt my argument.

But Out There is much more than Architectural Record and Arkansas connections. The book’s subtitle, New Architecture Across America, hints at how it is a sweeping survey of architecture across much of the United States in the 25 years since that issue of Record. Opening the book to the map that lists and locates the 50 practices, I immediately thought back to the “50x50 - 50 States in 50 Weeks” Building of the Week feature that I curated for World-Architects back in 2013. It looked, in alphabetical order, at one recent building in each state—from Rural Studio’s Safe House Museum in Alabama in January to Carney Logan Burke Architects’ Butte Residence in Wyoming in December. While the effort was difficult at times, as in states like Alaska, a state missing from Out There, it connected me to architects “outside the centers of fashion” and made me discover and appreciate some of the regional aspects of the buildings they were designing.

While Ivy, McGuigan, and MacKeith don’t take such a strongly (and restrictive, I’ll admit) structured approach to their survey—they hit all but 16 of the 48 contiguous states on their US map—their list of 50 firms is commendable and the work presented is high quality across the board. There are numerous firms that are well established and have extensive portfolios (Aidlin Darling Design, archimania, Brian Healy Architects, Duvall Decker Architects, LEVER Architecture, Miró Rivera Architects, Rand Elliott Architects, Salmela Architect), but also ones that are new even to me (ARCADE, BAU_Butzer Architects and Urbanism, Belinda Stewart Architects, BOSS.architecture, candid-works, EVOKE Studio Architecture, NICK DEAVER JES DEAVER architecture, Renée del Gaudio Architecture, Rhotenberry Wellen Architects), as well as a few firms found in LA, NYC, and Chicago (Bestor Architecture, Mariene Imirzian & Associates Architects, ARCHITECTUREFIRM, Worrell Yeung, Studio Dwell Architects). The last group were included, according to Ivy, “to test the model—if you will—of metropolitan practices that sometimes veer into specific geographies.”

The presentations for the 50 firms are consistent: a one-page narrative by one of the six contributors (on blue background, as in the spreads above) followed by between two and six projects documented in photographs, occasional drawings, and brief descriptions. For the most part, the selection of buildings (only one project among the 170 is unbuilt) is exceptional, but also tying the whole together are the narratives that are considerably better than a lot of what passes for writing in architectural surveys these days. Based on firsthand interviews/studio visits, the narratives foreground what make the practices worthy of inclusion while making the book an enjoyable read—even if it is not a book meant to be read cover to cover.

The biggest downside to the book is its size: 9.5 x 11.5” pages, nearly 2” thick, weighing nearly 7 pounds. Perhaps the authors and publisher were trying to make a statement, equating size and importance, but I’m not convinced the book would have been less effective or impressive with a small paper size and more lightweight paper—two commendable traits in publishing today, when we should be doing more with less. To me, Out There: New Architecture Across America is more impressive for the work contained within rather than its coffee table book size and heft.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• No Time, No Space, by Massimiliano Fuksas (Buy from Actar / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book presents a rich collection of ideas, concepts, and intentions, stripped of any context, scale, or other details that might limit their expression.”

• Future or Eclipse of Criticism, edited by Lina Malfona, with Lucia Giorgetti, Cecilia Marcheschi and Elisa Barsanti (Buy from Actar / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Has architectural criticism disappeared for good or has it adapted to the pressures, exigencies, and fashions of the present? … In fact, in a cultural landscape stuck between the horizontality of social media and the verticality of powerful cultural institutions, research centers, think tanks, museums, and biennials, the heroic figure of the critic has been replaced by the more appealing one of the architectural journalist and curator.”

• Denise Scott Brown: The Architect’s Album 02, edited by María Pía Fontana (Buy from Actar / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A visual journey through Denise Scott Brown’s 1955 honeymoon in Illyria, a region of the Balkans between Albania and the former Yugoslavia, with her first husband, Robert Scott Brown.”

• Forest First: Timber Building, by Kiel Moe (Buy from Actar / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book puts the forest first and offers a detailed immersion into forest history, forest stand dynamics, forest ecology, forest-building carbon dynamics, and possible future forest trajectories as the pretext for thinking about timber building technics.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Michael J. Crosbie reviews Michael Murphy’s Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. (Common Edge)

• Maria Mitsoula unboxes Records of the Sixth Somewhat Annual Meeting and the thematic issue of AD Reimagining Architectural Drawing: Print and Process. (Drawing Matter)

• Elias Baumgarten has good things to say about Reprise – Aita Flury, Works 2005–2025, the monograph on the Swiss architect. (World-Architects) Full disclosure: I edited the English translation of Baumgarten’s original German-language review.

• Lloyd Alter unpacks some old architecture and design magazines—a House and Home from 1952, an Architectural Forum from 1963, and a Progressive Architecture from 1972—from his library. (Carbon Upfront!)

• “High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building,” an excerpt from Stefan Al’s Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home. (Common Edge)

From the Archives

A hefty book with connections to Out There is Radical Practice: The Work of Marlon Blackwell Architects, which was edited by by Peter MacKeith and Jonathan Boelkins and released by Princeton Architectural Press in 2022. Below is the text from my August 2022 “brief”:

What comprises a “radical” practice? Is it designing buildings that appear radical, akin to the angular red shape on the cover of this hefty monograph? Or is it veering from the norms of practice through, for instance, employee ownership, or by recommending to clients that they reconsider building a project because it might do ecological harm? One hint to the term’s application to the practice of Fayetteville, Arkansas’s Marlon Blackwell Architects can be found in an essay by Robert McCarter in which he references a text by Frank Lloyd Wright from 1930: “Radical, meaning ‘of the roots.’” Although McCarter is writing about St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church in Springdale, Arkansas, this quote points to a couple of things: Blackwell staying put in Arkansas, rather than decamping for one of the coasts or a big Midwestern city like Chicago; and his ability to create buildings that tap into the vernacular of a place but are dramatic, contemporary updates cognizant of changing societal needs.

McCarter’s text is one of fifteen essays that are inserted between the thirteen projects completed over roughly the last two decades. The alternating text and projects give the monograph a definite rhythm, one that is reinforced by a consistent structure for the documentation of the projects: a spread with text on a red background signaling the radical nature of the project (e.g., “Radical Site” for the Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion, the project pictured above); two pages of inspiration, mostly of nature, vernacular buildings, and notable buildings photographed by Blackwell; followed by the usual descriptive text, drawings, and photographs — lots of photographs. Most monographs are marketing, and Radical Practice is no different. But the solid list of contributors offering up some praise (among them are James Corner, Brian McKay-Lyons, Guy Nordenson, and John Ronan), as well as the insertion of photographs of the rural South by Tim Hursley between the projects and essays, among other pieces, make this book very hard to resist for fans of Blackwell’s buildings.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week Not-a-Monograph of the Week

Unfinished Atlas: 19 Projects by Manuel Herz Architects, edited by Ludovic Balland, Francesca Mautone and Manuel Herz (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

“This is not a monograph.” So write architect Manuel Herz and graphic designer Ludovic Balland in their introductory explainer for Unfinished Atlas. There is the obligatory reference to René Magritte’s famous The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) and an admitted frustration with the monograph format, which “fetishizes” completed buildings via chronological or typological presentations that “hide more than explain … the process of making architecture.” While the book’s title hints at a geographic means of presenting Herz’s work, a format echoed by its folio size and the five pages of maps locating the nineteen projects that preface the introduction, the editors opt instead to organize the projects in five thematic chapters. This is hardly novel or un-monograph-like (I can think of a few monographs by marketing-savvy architects that are organized thematically), but the handful of themes (“Diaspora/Weaving,” “Tricksters,” “Triad,” “Nation/State,” “Metabolism”) are both unexpected for an architectural monograph and wholly appropriate for Herz, whose projects run the gamut from books and exhibitions to carpets and buildings.

Another reference raised by Balland and Herz in the intro is The Whole Earth Catalog, the famous series of publications produced by Stewart Brand starting in 1968 as a countercultural resource for anyone who wanted to shape their own environment without harming it. They were fascinated by the “graphic quality” of the publication, which was subtitled “Access to Tools” and packed large, diverse amounts of information into its large pages; they found that it “resonated with our ambition to shape a monograph that could also act as a kind of manual.” Aha! Manual is an excellent alternative term to monograph for Unfinished Atlas, given both the large amounts of textual and visual information presented across its pages and the equal space afforded to process as much as to product.

Accordingly, one of the standout moments in my first flip through the book was reading Herz’s reply to an email from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation inviting him to participate in a competition for the expansion of Tambacounda Hospital in Senegal. He turned down the invite because of a lack of resources in his office at the time but mainly because he believed “the project should develop out of a collaborative—not a competitive—process.” His assertion was strong enough for the Albers Foundation to reverse course on the competition and commission Herz directly. (The resulting building is a beauty.)

Although the book’s three editors explicitly depart from a chronological presentation of Herz’s projects, the book so happens to begin with Eruv, his 1995 diploma project at the Architectural Association London, and it ends with the Swiss Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, the most recent completed project before the book’s publication last year (it was released in early March 2026 in the US). These chronological bookends can be seen as a means of illustrating how Herz the student evolved into Herz the architect, with his eponymous Basel firm doing work well outside of Switzerland—in Africa, Asia, and other European countries. His three most well-known buildings exhibit the formal diversity found across his larger portfolio: the very contemporary Mainz Synagogue (2010) in Germany, with its jagged profile and green tile facades; Ballet Méchanique (2017), a small apartment building in Zurich cloaked in movable triangular panels; and Babyn Yar Synagogue (2021) in Kyiv, a small kinetic building that commemorates the massacre of approximately 35,000 Jews over two days in September 1941. What, if anything, unites these projects?

Herz contends that the goal of Unfinished Atlas is “to gain an understanding of our own work: knowing that the office has worked in radically different geographies and economies, with very different materials, programs, and formal expressions, we wanted to understand better what holds these projects together.” This goal led to the book’s thematic structure and resulted in the Mainz Synagogue falling into the “Diaspora/Weaving” chapter, and both Babyn Yar and Ballet Méchanique in the “Tricksters” chapter. Even before looking at their presentations, these three projects are united, in my view, by the paradoxical quality of being both opaque and revealing. The green-tile building in Mainz, for instance, hardly screams “synagogue,” but its silhouette acts as an abstraction of the five Hebrew characters used in the word “blessing” and the interior surfaces are covered with letters from religious poetry. Similarly, when closed Babyn Yar barely reveals its function, but when opened—like a book—it takes on the evident qualities of a space for prayer. Lastly, Ballet Méchanique also hides its function when fully closed but reveals the living spaces behind it when open even in varying degrees, not just when fully open.

Although the spreads above do not illustrate the three projects I have chosen to focus on in this review, they give a clear indication of just how much information is packed into each page of Unfinished Atlas. They also reveal the diversity of Balland’s design, which veers from pages with four columns of dense text to pages with just a single image. Most page layouts are somewhere in between, but all of them are surprising—I can’t remember the last time I turned the pages in a book not knowing what would be coming next and finding joy in each spread. The book is a delight to absorb, be it reading the sometimes lengthy texts and interviews in depth or just looking at the photographs, drawings, and other images. It seems that Herz’s search for understanding his work was aided by how Balland turned the architect’s words and projects into book form. And while some design touches are questionable (e.g., the white text on black boxes for keying figures are hard to read and the near lack of margins results in some paragraphs uncomfortably close to the fold), Unfinished Atlas as an object is exquisite: a thing of beauty comparable to Herz’s best projects.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• A Builder’s Life Done Well: The Story of Prutting + Co., by David L. Prutting (Buy from Images Publishing Group / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Custom homebuilder David Prutting takes readers behind the scenes to offer a unique perspective on building some of the most distinguished contemporary homes in the United States.”

• The Making of Alpine Architecture: Media, Awards, and Exhibitions in Vorarlberg and Grisons, by Matteo Tempestini (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “What makes some regional architecture more famous than others? The Making of Alpine Architecture investigates the cultural construction behind contemporary Alpine architecture, exploring the events, publications, and buildings that have shaped architectural discourse on an international scale.”

• The Houses of Guadalajara: Ghosts of Modernity, by X (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book studies the origins and late evolution of modern Mexican architecture through a series of houses built by two generations of architects during the 1920s and 1980s in Guadalajara.”

• History of Dubai’s Future: The Visionary Perspective From 1960 to 2000, by Ahmed and Rashid bin Shabib (Buy from Rizzoli / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first publication devoted to the remarkable history of Dubai and how the leadership of its people steered its forward-looking vision of the future.”

• Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic, by Gabriele Neri (Buy from MIT Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first in-depth study of American artist Alan Dunn (1900–1974), whose incisive cartoons mocked twentieth-century architecture and urban environments, expanding the field of architectural criticism.”

• Material Variance, edited by Lola Ben-Alon (Buy from Columbia University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Convening material researchers, building scientists, architects, and artists, Material Variance aims to collectively expand architecture and design’s material lexicon and unsettle its disciplinary boundaries.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• The first installment in the new Book Review column in Jarrett Fuller’s Scratching the Surface newsletter features an interview with Mario Mainetti from Fondazione Prada about Diagrams: A Project by AMO/OMA, the 2025 exhibition in Venice and companion book designed by Irma Boom. (Scratching the Surface)

• “What defines the best American architecture today?”: Mark Lamster reviews Out There: New Architecture Across America. (Dallas Morning News) A review on that book in this newsletter is forthcoming.

• Congratulations to New York Review of Architecture in winning the 2026 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). Specifically, it won for “The Brutalist,” by Thomas de Monchaux, “Megalopolis,” by Mark Krotov, and “Frickrolled,” by Thomas de Monchaux.” (ASME)

• A highlight of Unbuilding Ageism, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Chair of Architecture and Care in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich, is Deane Simpson’s “Forever Young-Old in the Villages.” The essay basically updates the chapter on The Villages from his excellent, now 11-year-old book Young-Old: Urban Utopias of an Aging Society, which I reviewed for the Architect’s Newspaper back in 2015. (e-flux architecture)

• “XYZ Books, Lisbon: endorsing experimentation without compromise,” an interview with Pedro Guimarães and Tiago Casanova about their bookstore-cum-publishing house. (Lampoon)

• The Society of Architectural Historians has posted some photos of bookstores from their SAHARA photo archive, including one by Dell Upton of Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, and one of Alvar Aalto’s “Book Palace” in Helsinki. (SAH)

This Is Not a Review

If Unfinished Atlas is not a monograph, then my short review of Manuel Herz’s African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia (Park Books, 2015), posted on my blog in 2018, is not a review. I say that partly because my write-up was part of my “Book Brief” series that I featured books with short first-hand reviews rather than long reviews, and partly because I revisited that 35th Book Brief five years later, amending my words with those generated by ChatGPT. That was in June 2023, a half-year after OpenAI released ChatGPT; I was among many writers playing with the technology at the time to see what it was like and when it would be replacing us. This week I decided to revisit that revisitation and see if the latest ChatGPT has made noticeable improvements over the last three years. So, below are the book blurb, my brief review, and two ChatGPT “reviews” of Manuel Herz’s African Modernism.

Here is the blurb from Park Books:
“In the 1950s and 1960s, most African countries gained independence from their respective colonial power. Architecture became one of the principal means by which the newly formed countries expressed their national identity. African Modernism investigates the close relationship between architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It features one hundred buildings with brief descriptive texts, images, site plans, and selected floor plans and sections. The vast majority of images were newly taken by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster for the book’s first edition. Their photographs document the buildings in their present state. Each country is portrayed in an introductory text and a timeline of historic events. Further essays on postcolonial Africa and specific aspects and topics, also illustrated with images and documents, round out this outstanding volume.”

This is what I wrote on my blog back in 2018:
Although the size of a coffee table book and graced by full-page Iwan Baan photographs, African Modernism is a deep, scholarly work, not just something to flip through. Focused on the five subtitled African countries that gained their independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s (5 of 32 countries on the continent that did so), the book examines how architecture played a role in expressing their independence and modernity. Each country is given an introduction, a timeline, a photo spread by Baan, documentation of important buildings in photos (most by Baan) and words, and an in-depth academic essay. Though many buildings show signs of wear (not surprising, given the time between their realization and today), the architectural quality is astounding. That the buildings in the book are largely unknown points to a deficit in architectural education and publishing — and the need for more books like this one and Adjaye Africa Architecture.

This is what Chat GPT-3.5 produced in June 2023 with the prompt, “Give a short, one-paragraph review of ‘African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia’ edited by Manuel Herz.”:
“African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia edited by Manuel Herz is a groundbreaking book that sheds light on the architectural legacy of African modernism. With a focus on five countries, the book explores the post-independence era and the architectural projects that emerged during this period of political and cultural transformation. The book’s rich collection of photographs, plans, and essays provides valuable insight into the unique blend of local and international influences that shaped African modernist architecture. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the intersection of architecture, history, and cultural identity in Africa.”

This is what Chat GPT-5 Mini produced in May 2026 with the prompt, “Give a short, one-paragraph review of ‘African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia’ edited by Manuel Herz.”:
“African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence — edited by Manuel Herz — is a visually rich, well-researched survey that compellingly documents the ambitious postcolonial architectural projects across Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. Combining archival photographs, contemporary imagery, primary texts, and thoughtful essays, the volume situates these buildings within the politics of nation-building and international modernist discourse, revealing both bold formal experimentation and the complex realities of maintenance, climate, and cultural adaptation. While occasionally uneven in depth between countries, the book succeeds as an important corrective to Eurocentric architectural histories and a valuable resource for scholars, architects, and anyone interested in the material legacies of independence in Africa.”

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Henley Halebrown: Building for Society 2010–2022, by Tom Neville, Simon Henley and Gavin Hale-Brown (Buy from Lund Humphries / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

As someone who edits two weekly newsletters—one for World-Architects and this one devoted to architecture books—most of the monographs I come across are about architects I’m familiar with, architects whose reputations precede their publications. It is rare that a monograph catches me by surprise, but such is the case with Building for Society 2010–2022, the new monograph on Henley Halebrown, the London practice of Simon Henley and Gavin Hale-Brown, whom I had no familiarity with before being sent the book. I write that reluctantly and with a tinge of embarassment, since the twelve buildings spanning the book’s 336 pages are impressive and my job precludes me not knowing about a firm doing such good work. The lengthy selected bibliography at the back of the book reveals my ignorance was not from the firm’s lack of exposure. Although I’m at a loss as to why Henley Halebrown is new to me, it made flipping through Building for Society that much more enjoyable, with each page revealing more qualities about their projects.

Before reaching the projects, readers see the dozen projects on a two-page spread as floor plans and a couple spreads with white-on-black planometric drawings (à la San Rocco covers), both exhibiting the size of the projects relative to each other and revealing the architects’ formal consistencies. There is not a huge range between the smallest and largest projects, with buildings tending to be in the range of medium, in Koolhaas parlance. Also coming across is a clear focus on the wall—i.e., not curtain walls—as means of constructing and containing buildings. These are just two qualities that make their buildings appealing to me.

Readers also encounter a few text contributions before the first project: a conversation between Henley, Hale-Brown, and book editor Tom Neville; a 2023 conference paper by Henley that touches on some of the buildings in the book; and an essay by Rosamund Diamond that deeply examines various aspects of Henley Halebrown’s work. Diamond has two other pieces in the book, one previously published in an architecture magazine, the other consisting of walking tours of Henley Halebrown’s projects in Hackney—this text explicitly echoes Peter Smithson’s Bath: Walks within the Walls, which was first published in 1969 but, like Henley Halebrown, is completely new to me. The inclusion of texts—previously published and newly released—by Henley, Diamond, and a slew of other architects and critics (Tony Fretton, Hugh Strange, Adam Khan, Jay Merrick, Edwin Heathcote, and others) interspersed with the projects reminds me of Caruso St. John’s series of monographs, which also balance thorough project documentation and critical essays from various sources.

The first of the twelve projects in the book is Copper Lane, a grouping of seven houses around a central communal court. Completed in 2014, it is billed as “London’s first co-housing project.” Sitting in the middle of a large block that has terraced houses at its perimeter, the project is like an introverted oasis, with houses labeled accordingly: “A house for two academics and their two boys,” “A house and studio for a designer,” “A house and studio for an artist,” and so forth. The interior/outdoor, private/semi-private spaces are complex, and the photos and drawings are presented in a way that slowly reveals, page by page, how the houses fit together. The book’s back-cover contends that Henley Halebrown “produces buildings that take account of the way people actually use them and how they affect our sense of well-being.” They make buildings that “promote social interaction.” Validation of these statements is clearly visible at Copper Lane.

Curiously, given the emphasis on people using buildings, a sense of well-being, and social interaction, there are very few photos in the book that include people. There is one photo showing a party at Copper Hall, plus some photos of furnished houses that show signs of life there. Hackney New School (2015) has a couple photographs with students, as does the later Thames Christian School and Battersea Chapel (2022) and Hackney New Primary School & 333 Kingsland Road London (2020). (A great addition to the last is Suzanne Deakin’s elaborate drawing of “life” at the school, complete with an octopus, pterodactyl, and other creatures in addition to children.) But that is about it in terms of photographic displays of Henley Halebrown’s buildings for people. Instead, we primarily see their buildings as muted backdrops for living, learning, working, and playing—but what beautiful backdrops they are.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Architecture Is a Tool to Improve Lives, by Anna Heringer, photographs by Iwan Baan (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “For her new book, [Heringer] traveled to Bangladesh with Iwan Baan to visit the buildings created there as well as her women’s empowerment project, Dipdii Textiles.” (A companion to Form Follows Love.)

• Earth Works: Houses by Byoung Cho, by Byoung Cho (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A new monograph on Korea’s most important architect, offering an exclusive look at his seldom-­published houses.”

• Royal Festival Hall: A Living Icon, edited by Sandy Rattray and Eleanor Jolliffe, photographs by Edmund Sumner (Buy from Merrell / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book offers an invaluable record of the history of this celebrated building in the first 75 years of its life, and looks to its future as a center of cultural programming—both weathering and shaping change—for many more decades to come.”

• White Compositions, by Anthony Ames (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The White Compositions are symbolically charged with highly specific references that speak to Ames’s work and life as an architect in Georgia preoccupied with modernism, art and basketball, among other cultural and literary meanings.”

• Monsters and Mutants: Explorations in the Architecture-Nature Continuum, by Winka Dubbeldam (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Spotlights Archi-Tectonics’ novel architectural taxonomies that were implemented in the firm’s award-winning master plan from the 2023 Asian Games.”

• SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, edited by Florencia Rodriguez, et. al. (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change is published in conjunction with the sixth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 2025) under the artistic direction of Florencia Rodriguez.”

• Eight Meditations on Architecture, by Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Campo Baeza, edited by Matteo Zambelli (Buy from Wiley / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Eight Meditations on Architecture offers a rare and illuminating dialogue between two of Europe’s most reflective architectural voices—Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Campo Baeza.”

• Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, by Irénée Scalbert (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Totems brings together ten texts by architect, historian, and critic Irénée Scalbert … written between 2001 and 2025…”

• Pairs 06, edited by students at Harvard GSD (Buy from Harvard University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Pairs 06 features conversations with Francesca Benedetto, Sahel Al Hiyari, Agnes Denes, Mark Lee, Jimenez Lai, David Chipperfield, Sandra Barclay, Stan Allen, Ronan Bouroullec, Anne Holtrop, Dima Srouji, Tim Rohan, Joshua Bennett, and Alexandra Arenes.”

• Scottish Modern: Brown & Brown, by Andrew Brown and Kate Brown (Buy from Artifice Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Scottish Modern is the first book by award-winning architecture studio Brown & Brown, showcasing its placing of contemporary homes in sensitive Scottish landscapes.”

• Zurich Atlas / Zurich Primer 2 Vol. Set, edited by Jonathan Sergison, Tom Avermaete and Giulia Scotto (Buy from Simon & Schuster [US distributor for Quart Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Zurich Atlas is aimed at a broad audience interested in the dynamics of urban development and reveals the network of relationships between Zurich’s urban form and its urban codes. The Zurich Primer addresses urban growth and transformation in relation to urban codes and proposes densification scenarios for the city of Zurich in the context of the projected population increase.”

• Seoul Urban Architecture: Rising from the Crushing Bowl, by Sung Hong Kim (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Seoul Urban Architecture is a powerful and original study of Seoul’s urban and architectural evolution, told through the lens of an architect and educator who has lived and worked in the city for over four decades.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Guiomar Martín, an associate professor at ETSAM Madrid, reviews architect and educator José Aragüez’s Dispositional Intelligence in Architecture, released by Actar last year. (World-Architects) Full disclosure: I edited this review for World-Architects.

• Read some praise on Dean Karau’s “ground-breaking work on Kewanee [Illinois] Black American architect Walter Thomas Bailey.” (The Kewanee Voice)

• “A book that asks all the right questions but hasn’t thought through all the answers,” the book being Jan-Werner Müller’s Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spaces. (The Critic)

• Not architecture books, per se, but the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is displaying The Architecture of the Book until June 7. (Meer)

From the Archives

One of the essays by Simon Henley in this week’s Book of the Week is “On Not Living in a Victorian Terrace House,” a pointed critique of the contextual qualities (or lack thereof) of Neave Brown’s housing projects in Camden, primarily Alexandra Road. That essay brought to mind Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing by Mark Swenarton, published by Lund Humphries in 2018. Below is the text from my June 208 review.

At the end of 1999, I took a trip with my family to London for the millennium festivities. Each day I would venture around the city looking at architecture and then join my family for dinner at a pub near the hotel. Most of my day outings focused on newer buildings, such as the Jubilee Line stations and Future Systems’ Natwest Media Center, but one of the older buildings I went to see was Alexandra Road Estate, a housing project designed by Neave Brown and completed in 1979. (It’s near Abbey Road, making it a two-in-one visit for an architect who is a Beatles fan.) The project is most noticeable for the long, curving concrete terraces facing a pedestrian walk, depicted on the cover of Cook’s Camden, an impressive history of modern housing projects built in that corner of London under Camden borough architect Sydney Cook. Although the book tells the stories of numerous projects undertaken by different architects under Cook in the 1960s and 70s, Neave Brown’s presence dominates, given that its 2017 release happened to coincide with the awarding of the RIBA Gold Medal to Brown, who died in early 2018 at the age of 88.

In turn, having only visited Alexandra Road, my reading of the book focused on it and Brown’s slightly earlier Fleet Road project (now Dunboyne Road Estate). There was some overlap between the two projects in terms of approaches to stacking, unit plans, and shared outdoor spaces, but the impact of Alexandra Road has been more lasting. It was given Grade II* listing status in 1993 (Dunboyne Road Estate was listed later, in 2010) and its park—also a notable work of architecture designed with Janet Jack, which I included in 100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs—was restored just a few years ago. The latter is significant since it was spearheaded by residents, signifying the appreciation of the estate by those who live there, not just by fans of modern architecture or architectural historians like Mark Swenarton.

Three of the book’s twelve chapters are devoted to Brown and Alexandra Road. Two of them tell the in-depth stories of Fleet Road and Alexandra Road estates, while the third is titled “Politics versus architecture: the Alexandra Road public enquiry of 1978-81.” (An appendix also reprints Neave Brown’s “The Form of Housing” essay from 1967.) This last chapter, the book’s eleventh, digs into why such a lauded project—lauded both at the time of its inception in the late 1960s and its listing three decades later—was seen in the interim as a “constructional disaster.” One product of the three-year inquiry was the near-impossibility for Brown to gain work in the UK; even though the protracted inquiry exonerated him, his subsequent notable projects were located in the Netherlands. Those drawn to Brown after his RIBA Gold Medal award will find much to learn in Swenarton’s book, though it’s also recommended to architects who prefer dense low-rise housing to the residential high-rises that tend to garner more attention today.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World, by Ralph Johnson, published by Images Publishing (Buy from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Released this week, this two-volume slipcased monograph on one architect in a massive architecture firm coincides with the 50th anniversary of Ralph Johnson working at Perkins&Will. The Chicago-based architecture firm was 41 years old when Johnson started there in 1976, having been founded by Lawrence B. Perkins and Philip Will, Jr. in 1935. Upon Johnson’s arrival, Perkins&Will had grown to encompass branch offices in New York, Washington, DC, Florida, and Tehran, but ten years later its purchase by Dubai-based Dar Al-Handasah (now Sidara) prompted a huge period of growth that saw the firm acquiring other firms and eventually growing tenfold, to its current size of 2,700 employees in 33 offices worldwide. Directing the whole firm’s design efforts is the nearly 80-year-old Johnson, an architect who is often seen as synonymous with the firm of which he is—numerically, at least—a small part of. As such, this book effectively doubles as a Perkins&Will monograph.

Perkins&Will made a name for itself with Crow Island School, a low-rise elementary school that opened in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka in 1940. Now a US National Historic Landmark, the school designed in collaboration with Eliel and Eero Saarinen was celebrated for its modern, human-centered design that gave each classroom its own small outdoor space. Its symbol was a simple brick clock tower—a feature that would become a staple of similar looking grade schools in the area in the years that followed (including my own). Although Perkins&Will’s portfolio subsequently branched out into other typologies outside of education, most prominently health care and offices, it was also schools in which Ralph Johnson first made a name for himself.

One example presented in the first volume of Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World, titled Creative Journey, is the Desert View Elementary School (now Riverside Elementary) in Sunland Park, New Mexico. It was one of a number of K–12 schools Johnson designed with partner Bill Brubaker “with kit-of-parts tectonics and regional material palettes.” With Troy High School (Michigan), Perry Community Education Village (Ohio), Woodlands High School (Texas), and other schools designed and built in the 1990s, Johnson’s portfolio—and his first monograph, published by Rizzoli in 1995—was a source of inspiration for me when I started working on public schools in Chicago in the late 1990s. By the time of that monograph, Johnson had already served for close to a decade as global director of design at Perkins&Will—the position he holds to this day.

Although it covers roughly 40 years of work, the first volume is the slimmer of the two halves of Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World. The second volume, Recent Work, covers fifteen projects in considerable depth, with around sixteen pages given each project; most of them are built so they are documented in many photos alongside drawings and short descriptions. There is nothing groundbreaking in this presentation, but the quality of Johnson’s designs across the various types of buildings (education, medical, office, museums, transit) is remarkable, especially given how the often large projects still pay noticeably close attention to the human-scale, echoing the firm’s Crow Island School. With a relatively small selection of projects spanning from 2013 to present, the highlights are many (I’m partial to the smaller Chicago projects: Northtown Library and Apartments and Damen Green Line Station), while the omission of such controversial projects as Antilia Tower in Mumbai and the Iconic Tower and Central Business District in Egypt’s new administrative capital east of Cairo is hardly surprising.

The Egyptian project is nevertheless shown alongside an interview between Johnson and Ned Cramer that begins the second volume. The former editor of Architect magazine and, before that, curator at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (now CAC) also contributes an essay, “The Persistence of Modernism,” to the first volume, while Thomas Fisher, director of the Minnesota Design Center, has an essay, “Strange Tools,” in the second volume. (Fisher also penned an essay for Johnson’s previous monograph, discussed at the bottom of this newsletter.) These contributions help the monograph from sliding into a purely promotional production, though ultimately Architecture in a Rapidly Changing World is celebratory. After all, it comes just a few years after AIA Chicago awarded him the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award. Furthermore, Johnson now shares design responsibilities at Perkins&Will with a “collective” of other partners, including Casey Jones, Andrew Frontini, and Chris Hardie—the last was elevated to firmwide design director just two months ago. No doubt, Johnson’s consistently high-quality designs have made Perkins&Will an appealing place for them and the thousands of other architects working at the firm.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Norman Foster: Networks, by Norman Foster (Buy from Taschen / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In richly visual essays, written and curated by Foster himself, the internationally celebrated architect examines the interconnected ideas that shape his work.”

• Norman Foster: Works, by Philip Jodidio (Buy from Taschen / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Encompassing [Norman Foster’s] entire oeuvre, and packed with unpublished sketches and handpicked images, this is a chronicle of six decades of brilliant, beautiful, boundary-pushing architecture.”

• Carlo Scarpa: The Message of the Structure, edited by Bruno Person (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Silvana Editoriale / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first in-depth study on the structural design integral to Scarpa’s projects.”

• The Architecture of Participation, by Giancarlo De Carlo (Buy from MIT Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Seminal texts by renowned Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo on architecture, education, and anarchy.”

• Faro Modernism: Buildings, Heritage, Culture, by Richard Walker (Buy from Rizzoli [US distributor for Batsford] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A stylish exploration of one of the greatest cities for Modernist architecture in the world.”

• The Irvine Ranch: Fulfilling the Vision, 1977-2025, by H. Pike Oliver and C. Michael Stockstill (Buy from Routledge / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Irvine Ranch: Fulfilling the Vision, 1977‒2025 continues the story of the planning and development of the Irvine Ranch under a partnership of high-powered businessmen to the single ownership of Donald Bren.” (The authors’ first book, Transforming the Irvine Ranch: Joan Irvine, William Pereira, Ray Watson, and the Big Plan, was published in 2022.)

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Congratulations to Mark Lamster of the Dallas Morning News for winning the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Criticism “for his rigorous and passionate architecture criticism, using wit and expertise to amplify his opinions and advocate for city residents.” (Dallas Morning News/Pulitzer Prize) Book-wise, Lamster is author of the excellent 2018 biography The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century.

• Mark Alan Hewitt laments “The Trouble With Architectural Publishing” today, when the output of many publishers “is a trickle of what it was during the 1970s,” several “dependable publishers” are no longer in business, some publishers “charge prices that most students cannot afford,” and “subventions paid directly to the publisher [are needed] to offset publication costs.” (Common Edge)

• Publishers Weekly gives a starred review to Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, Eyal Weizman’s forthcoming book that “outlines how Israel uses environmental destruction as a tool of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Palestinians.” (Publishers Weekly)

• The 50th issue of the New York Review of Architecture comes with a supplemental Guide to New York City. (NYRA) Both the guide and the 50th issue feature covers by Madelon Vriesendorp.

• “A New Book Charts the Career of Architectural Cartoonist Alan Dunn”: Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic, by Gabriele Neri. (Architectural Record)

• “Out There Surveys 50 Architecture Practices Transforming Regional Cities and Small Towns.” (Architectural Record)

• “The Royal Festival Hall is 75 years old – and I have played a small part in keeping it very much alive,” writes Eleanor Jolliffe about he new book, Royal Festival Hall: A Living Icon. (Building Design)

• From architecture books to branding government websites: “Peter Arnell selected as America’s first chief brand architect” within the newly formed National Design Studio. (Dezeen) Worth adding here is that Arnell began his career in the early 1980s with a contract to produce, with Ted Bickford, a half-dozen architecture books for Rizzoli, including a monograph on Michael Graves, whom the two had previously worked for.

• Wallpaper* spoke to photographers Francesco Russo and Luca Piffaretti, the creators of a new book that charts architecture in Ecuador: Ecuador: A Journey through Architecture, Culture and Land. (Wallpaper*)

• “From concrete council housing to monumental theatres, [Owen Hopkins’ and Nigel Green’s] Brutalist London documents the myriad examples of brutalism in the UK capital.” (Dezeen)

From the Archives

If my quick research is accurate, the Book of the Week is just the third monograph on architect Ralph Johnson over his half-century-long career. The first, as mentioned above, was put out by Rizzoli in 1995 and the second, published by Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, came out sometime in the 2010s (the copyright is 2012 but Amazon indicates a 2015 release). I did not see the latter, Ralph Johnson of Perkins+Will: Recent Works, until around 2021, when I reviewed it on my blog. My text is copy-pasted below.

A couple decades ago, when I was working as an architect in Chicago and spending most of my days designing public schools, the firm’s monograph on Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will was a near constant presence on my desk. Johnson was not the first architect at Perkins & Will to focus on schools and do them so well (it is the firm that designed Crow Island School with the Saarinens, after all), but the schools he designed in the 1990s were miles better than those of any other US firm at the time—including the one I worked at. But searching for schools from that era on Perkins & Will’s website is futile since the firm, like most these days, uses its website as a marketing tool rather than as a professional archive. Accordingly, magazines and monographs take on important roles as archives, particularly in regard to pre-internet creations.

If the monograph linked above (published by Rizzoli in 1995) captures the output of Ralph Johnson in the 1980s and 90s, then this most recent monograph, published by Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, does the same for his work at the start of the millennium. It compiles 35 built and unbuilt projects in seven typological “ing” chapters: Living, Learning, Working, Healing, Experiencing, Envisioning, and Traveling. Ironically, at least relative to my comments above, the Learning chapter is one of the shorter chapters, with just four projects; apartment buildings, offices, and museums seem to have preoccupied Johnson more in the first decade of the 21st century. Regardless, each of the four Learning projects—in Chicago, Tempe, Duluth, and overseas, in Luanda, Angola—is built and documented at length through the usual triumvirate of architectural monographs: photos, drawings, and text. Which means the four schools are actually spread across the same number of pages as the seven Working projects. Oh, and none of those four projects is found on Perkins & Will’s website, though two of them are on my blog, as is his firm’s hypothetical proposal to cap the Kennedy west of the Loop.

Yet, with nine years between the 2012 copyright of Ralph Johnson of Perkins+Will and now (the firm tweaked their branding, including a change to “Perkins&Will,” a couple years ago), it looks like it’s time for another monograph on Johnson. It could cover the buildings designed and completed since this monograph, whose most recent project is the Rush University Medical Center, completed in Chicago in 2012. Or perhaps it could go one step further and become a “complete works” and include everything Johnson has designed since he joined Perkins & Will in 1976, after working at Stanley Tigerman’s office (something I just learned in this book’s bio, not the bio on the firm’s website). Both the monographs and website clearly depict the consistent design quality of Johnson’s buildings, but having more than forty years of output in one place, in one book, would be valuable for at least the reasons mentioned above. Yes, this monograph’s back matter includes some snapshots of a few of Johnson’s pre-21st century buildings (plus, it should be noted, Chinese translations of the essays and projects descriptions), but they just further the argument for a more comprehensive treatment of his oeuvre in print.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

BIG Atlas, by Bjarke Ingels Group (Buy from Phaidon / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

In 2015, ten years after Bjarke Ingels split from PLOT to start BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, the National Building Museum hosted a large-scale exhibition presenting sixty BIG projects on the second-floor walkway ringing the museum’s impressive atrium. Titled HOT TO COLD, the exhibition and companion book adopted a color-coded geographical format, with projects moving in the titular order, from red in the Middle East to blue in the firm’s native Copenhagen. In hindsight, it appears BIG created their first Atlas in 2015, eleven years before the release of BIG Atlas.

In HOT TO COLD, the reader sees the world in relation to the location of BIG’s projects (both built and in-progress) and, fittingly given its focus on “hedonistic sustainability,” in climatic terms, not as landmasses or nations with political boundaries. The 2015 monograph followed Yes Is More (2009), which reads like a graphic novel, and preceded Formgiving (2020), a monograph exhibiting the firm’s sci-fi predilections. Together, the three monographs (all accompanying exhibitions and all published by Taschen) find BIG making fairly compact monographs that present their work in creative ways—like their buildings, the only conventions they follow are their own. Can the same be said about BIG Atlas?

Alas, no. BIG Atlas is a thick, 504-page coffee table book with fairly straightforward, primarily photographic presentations of roughly fifty buildings and some landscapes completed between 2000 and 2025. Surprisingly, there are none of BIG’s distinctive diagrams that I’ve attributed to Ingels’s earlier ambitions to become a cartoonist, and which have influenced many other architects in explaining their designs to people outside of the profession. With the book’s focus on built work, the preponderance of photos makes sense, but the lack of diagrams begs the question: Who is this monograph for? If for other architects, there are not nearly enough drawings: one per project, as the spreads above and below reveal; occasionally two, but neve more.

One answer can be gleaned by the book’s ordering, which is not, as the title would indicate, geographical; it is chronological, moving from 2000 to 2025 in five chapters of five years each: “Evolutionary Design, 2000–2005,” “Modern Vernacular, 2005–2010,” “Collective Intimacy, 2010-2015,” “World Craft, 2015–2020,” and “Plan for the Future, 2020–2025.” So, like many architectural monographs, BIG Atlas is aimed at potential clients—at companies, institutions, and even individuals who want to situate themselves into the expanding timeline of Bjarke Ingels Group. (The chapters grow from three in the first few to more than twenty in the last.) I’ll admit BIG is savvy in the realm of marketing, but their previous track record in monographs had me expecting something less typical, something that would further set them apart from other firms.

How about the texts? Unfortunately, the projects descriptions read as marketing copy and don’t include any revealing or particularly useful information. To cite one example, VIA 57 West (above spread, a project I’m familiar with from giving walking tours along 57th Street) is described as a “Courtscraper” whose form “comes from BIG’s vision to bring density and green space together without compromising views for the building’s residents or neighbors.” It is “one moment a soaring addition to Manhattan’s skyline, the next a communal retreat.” The courtyard is “an inner green oasis that calibrates the vertical rise with expansive open space.” In total, VIA 57 West “reinforces the idea of open space as essential to urban life, contributing to a collective architectural discourse, a reimagining of how New Yorkers might live.”

These statements come across as too subtle or ringing hollow. Yes, the tetrahedral form doesn’t compromise views for the building’s neighbors, but we don’t learn here that those neighbors are in the Helena apartment done by the same developer (The Durst Organization) with a different architect a few years earlier; nor do we read how the form is practical, requiring just one elevator core. The residents of VIA 57 West get their sunlight because of the building’s sloping form but also because it sits across the street from a low-rise Department of Sanitation garage, a tidbit not shared here. Readers do not learn that the double-loaded corridors put many of the building’s 709 units to the north, with only an hour or two of morning sunlight thanks to bay windows. Lastly, the courtyard is clearly a benefit, but it costs residents $1,000 a year to use it as part of an amenity package, meaning it “and other communal spaces may be out of reach for lower-income tenants” who live there due to a rezoning that mandated the inclusion of affordable housing. While I don’t expect all of this information to be spelled out like this is a monograph, the nuances and compromises of the project do not come across in its saccharine presentation.

What about the projects themselves? Anyone who follows BIG—it’s hard not to, given their skill in getting their buildings published just about everywhere—will not find anything to surprise them here, given that all of the projects are built and are documented with the photos that feel familiar from their initial presentations online and in magazines. Most beneficial, given the book’s timeline and abundance of photos, is seeing the projects relative to each other, one after another. There is some consistency in the early projects (the first two are pools, followed by three housing projects), but overall it is not a straight line of ascension, from small to big or short to tall; instead, there are jumps in scale and formal variety: from a high-rise in Quito to a factory in a Norweigan forest, from a zoo in Copenhagen to a renovated department store in Paris.

My own inclinations found me gravitating to buildings that seem to disappear, that make statements through their unobtrusiveness rather than their scale or formal innovation. I’ll take the Danish Maritime Museum and Tirpitz Museum any day over the Kaktus Towers or similar attention-getting projects. I’m also partial to buildings that mix conventions, like The Twist (below), a museum that doubles as a bridge over a river.

A similar embrace of BIG’s “unified solutions” is found in the introductory essay by Joseph Grima, who, as director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, brought Bjarke Ingels to New York City for an exhibition in 2007. Grima’s essays capably tackles the 25-year history of BIG, then wraps up by focusing on BIG HQ in Copenhagen, photos of which accompany his words: “BIG HQ feels inevitable, as if all the threads of the practice’s evolution had been quietly converging toward this moment.”

At the end of the book are two more contributions that break free from the project presentations in the five chronological chapters: “BIG KID,” a journey by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and his kids to some of BIG’s buildings (unfortunately presented in hard-to-read silver text on red pages), and some photos of Ingels and child in Bukken Bruse, a houseboat that is his family’s “floating dreamhouse.” The latter has a domestic charm that belies the fact it is a 126-foot-long decommissioned ferryboat. This project is an odd ending to BIG’s latest monograph, though it bookends nicely with BIG HQ at the beginning: I can’t help think of Ingels pulling up anchor and commuting to work via the Bukken Bruse, as if he remade a portion of Copenhagen as his own private playground.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• Brutal Scotland, by Simon Phipps (Buy from September Publishing / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Brilliantly designed and beautifully produced, Simon Phipps’ major new book—arguably his richest collection of architecture since Brutal London—is a celebration of Scotland’s best Brutalist and Modernist buildings.”

• Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship, by Femke Speelberg (Buy from The Met / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Rare architectural drawings from the Gothic period uncover a flourishing tradition of design and draftsmanship, making this book essential for understanding the roots of modern architecture.”

• A House in Japan: Lessons in Living (Buy from gestalten / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A House in Japan examines the Japanese home as a site of architectural inquiry—an intimate scale through which ideas about space, structure, and domesticity are continually reimagined.”

• Not a Penguin Pool: Echoes of More-Than-Human Entanglements, edited by Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and Regina Bittner (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Spector Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Iconic in design yet inadequate in purpose, the London Zoo’s Penguin Pool comes under the microscope in this focused study on non-human architecture.”

• Nothing About Interior Architecture, by Javier Fernández Contreras, et. al. (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Set Margins’] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A rigorous interrogation of design pedagogy and practice from members of the Space Design Department at HEAD, Geneva University of Art and Design.”

• Rem Before Koolhaas: Journalism by an Architect, by Antonio Cantero (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for nai010 Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A compact primer on Koolhaas’ early, lesser-known journalistic career.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Elizabeth Blasius reviews Lilly Reich in Barcelona: The Materialization of a Neglected Authorship, the 2025 book by Laura Martinez de Guereñu “that brings to light the brilliance and obfuscation of the work of architect, designer, and creative director Lilly Reich.” (MAS Context)

• WeTransfer’s arts platform features The Utopia Map, “a very special poster that celebrates The Streets’ Mike Skinner’s long-running interest in Brutalism.” (WePresent)

• “Your House Is Changing You—Plus Every Other Building You Step Inside”: Michael Murphy shares five key insights from his new book, Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. (Next Big Idea Club)

• Mark your calendars: May 17 is the inaugural National Little Free Library Day, which coincides with the anniversary of Little Free Library having become a nonprofit on May 17, 2012. (Little Free Library)

From the Book Fair

I scoured the New York Antiquarian Book Fair at Park Avenue Armory on Thursday but only made one discovery worth sharing (on Instagram): a “deluxe edition” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that was published by Arion Press in 1984. Illustrated and signed by Michael Graves, it comes in a box with an inset terra-cotta bas relief featuring Graves’s drawing of Gatsby’s house—a pretty special object:

Jeff Hirsch Books from Wadsworth, Illinois, was selling it for $15,000. (Yes, you read that right.) If there were no takers at Park Avenue Armory—and you have $15k to spare—you can find his listing for it on AbeBooks.

From the Archives

Rather than dig out one of BIG’s older monographs—of which I’ve reviewed three of them—here I’m featuring the first issue of CLOG, focused as it is on Bjarke Ingels Group. Ddited by Kyle May, Julia van den Hout, Jacob Reidel, Human Wu, and the Office of PlayLab, it was was released in 2011, one year after BIG opened its New York office. While the issue is sold out on the CLOG website, occasionally a used copy can be found on Amazon. Below is an edited transcript of my October 2011 review.

The title of the new architecture journal CLOG is pretty close to BLOG. Coincidence? Probably not, since the editors assert that the “online press,” which includes blogs, “have drastically increased the speed at which architectural imagery is distributed and consumed today.” In reaction, CLOG “slows things down.” (A clog in the internet pipes, perhaps?) Each issue “explores, from multiple viewpoints and through a variety of means, a single subject particularly relevant to architecture now.” The now of the first issue is Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the Danish architect and studio who recently opened an office in New York City after a high-profile commission from Durst Fetner Residential on Manhattan's west side.

While the journal talks about slowing things down, a gaggle of contributors (about 50) address the topic in 500 words or less, bite-size chunks (most fit on a two-page spread) on par with blogs and other online press; sure it's longer than a tweet, but tweets can also tie together to become a longer strand on par with this length. The takes on Mr. Ingels and his office range from his savvy PR abilities, his formal consistencies (something I covered on my blog with “BIG Peaks”), his web page and monograph, his “hedonistic sustainability,” and his choice of clients. The placement of the contributions appears intentional, giving the journal a flow throughout as essays with a particular area of focus are grouped together. This gives the reader various viewpoints on particular aspects within a short span.

It might be easy to argue that CLOG could exist just as easily online instead of in print, given the short length of each “post,” if you will. But as executed, CLOG is an ideal format for its goals: it is portable, like a small sketchbook; the ordering helps to give the criticisms and other takes a flow, as mentioned; the page layout and design feature large pull quotes that allow the book to be read either quickly and cursorily or slowly, as intended; and of course, having it in one place means that all those online distractions can be set aside for a little while. (At just over 100 pages and with a roughly 50/50 balance of text and image, the whole is still a fairly quick read.)

A unique aspect of this first issue is the addition of responses from Bjarke Ingels himself at the back of the book. I'm not sure if contributors knew about this before they wrote their pieces, but the architect chose a range of essays to respond to (not all of them), be it critiques of his PR tactics, his payment of interns, or his book and web page. These responses allow the reader to get a more balanced view of things, but ultimately truth is not the goal. Like the internet, of which CLOG sets itself apart, the journal offers myriad takes on a topic over one or a few voices dispensing the truth, if such were even possible. In this regard CLOG can be seen as a print outpost of thinking and writing that has been transformed by the permeation of digital content.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago, by Will Quam (Buy from University of Chicago Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Like many people, for me the hardest part of writing is the beginning: finding the right perspective, idea, sentence, even word with which to start writing an article. For this review of Fire and Clay, that idea hit me on Thursday evening, as I found myself enjoying one of the early chapters in the book right after its release. But as I readied myself to start typing, the usually occasional sound of sirens that comes with living in Queens was different: longer, constant. The last time there was a cavalcade of fire trucks streaming down our busy street, it was a laundromat catching fire at the base of a small apartment building nearly a mile away. But this time it was the First Reformed Church of Astoria, an abandoned 19th-century church just a few blocks away. First seeing the huge plume of dark smoke from the bedroom window, and then walking over to see the rectory on fire and smoke rising from the gaps between the church’s brick walls and roof, I figured the church would be rubble the following day. But returning on Friday morning to see, I was greeted by a gutted but relatively intact church and the charred remains of the rectory:

This situation—of a wood structure, where the fire actually started, being incinerated, while most of the adjacent structure’s masonry walls were sooty but standing—should not have surprised me at all, given the images of brick chimneys “rising up like headstones from plots of blackened debris” following the Palisades fire last year that have stuck with me, and the fact wood, brick, and fire are at the heart of photographer and tour guide Will Quam’s aptly titled Fire and Clay. For Quam, the fire is a distant one, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which laid waste to more than three square miles of the primarily wood-framed city on Lake Michigan. Whereas historian Donald L. Miller wrote that “Chicago had not burned down before 1871 because it was lucky,” Quam contends that “Chicago was also very luck that it burned down when it did.” This is because the rebuilding that naturally followed the destruction happened to coincide with the industrialization of brick manufacturing—of the city’s ability to make tens of millions (and eventually hundreds of millions) of bricks per year, enough to rebuild the city in a material that is highly fire-resistant. That bricks are also born from fire—baked in kilns—gives the title of Quam’s book a nice double meaning.

Although the subtitle How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago hints that Fire and Clay is a historical narrative from the Great Fire of 1871 to the present, this is not just a book about buildings in brick; it is a book about bricks themselves: how they are made, who made them and where, how their use and appearance have changed, and how they have been celebrated and derided over time. The book is full of Quam’s photos of brick buildings that are alternately famous (Monadnock, Robie House) and anonymous (rows of bungalows other hometown vernacular buildings) but also close-ups of brick walls, like the one on the cover, that reveal the immense amount of variation in something just nominally 8 inches wide and 2-1/4 inches tall.

The main distinction he makes is between common brick and face brick. As described in the book’s glossary, the common brick made in Chicago is “a notoriously varied-looking brick full of pebbles and stones and with a huge amount of color and tones.” It is cheap and therefore “used for the backing and structure of buildings.” Face brick, on the other hand, is “used to cover the front facades of buildings” and is therefore “made with greater care and careful selection than common brick.” As such, buildings built after 1871 tended to have fronts with bricks imported from other parts of the US but visible side walls and hidden structural walls of common brick made in and around Chicago. Yet Quam reveals how views toward common bricks shifted over time, from “badly made” and “ugly” in the 1890s to “natural” in 1940, when it was used at Crow Island School in suburban Winnetka, and “symbolic of Chicago,” as in Tadao Ando’s Wrightwood 659 gallery in Lincoln Park.

The twelve chapters that comprise Fire and Clay are thematic and roughly chronological, moving through different trends in architecture as well as accompanying trends and innovations in the manufacturing of brick and terra-cotta. The relationship between bricks and buildings is obvious on the surface, but in Quam’s telling it takes on many interesting shades. There is corruption, as in 27th Ward alderman Spencer S. Kimball’s pushing of red brick made by the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company of St. Louis, which he happed to run; and there is monopolization, with R. C. Penfield’s invention of a machine for moving and setting bricks that “allowed Penfield to essentially put himself in charge of brickmaking in Chicago between 1909 and 1933.” Given these and myriad other stories illustrating how the making of bricks influenced the design of buildings, it’s not surprising to see as many references in the pages of Fire and Clay to Brick, Brick and Clay Record, The Brickbuilder, Clay Record, The Clay Journal, and other technical/trade journals as there are Architectural Forum, Architectural Record, and other architecture magazines. (Fun fact: The Brickbuilder, the “monthly magazine devoted to brick architecture” that started in Boston in 1892, changed its name to The Architectural Forum in 1917.)

The “hidden history of Chicago” is revealed throughout the book in subtle but unexpected ways. I lived in the city’s Lincoln Square neighborhood for close to ten years a couple decades ago, just steps away from Louis Sullivan’s last project, the Krause Music Store. I loved walking by (and occasionally inside, when it was a shop called the Museum of Decorative Arts) and admiring the terra-cotta facade, but did I have the same admiration for the facade of Merz Apothecary just a couple blocks up the street? I can’t say I ever paid attention to the building beyond the wares in the storefront windows. But Quam reveals in his book that the terra-cotta medallions set into the brick facade above the second-floor windows are off-the-shelf pieces made by Midland Terra Cotta. Put another way, a century ago architects could come up with exuberant designs rendered in terra-cotta, or they could incorporate standard decorative shapes, in turn unifying parts of the city through masonry flourishes.

To take but one more Lincoln Square example, I had no idea that nearby Horner Park, on the edge of the North Branch of the Chicago River south of Montrose, was built on the site of a garbage dump that filled in the hole left by the Bach Brick plant when it closed in 1935. That Depression-era closure was due to a logical slowdown in brick production in Chicago, but many more plants closed in the ensuing decades as other materials were used instead of bricks on facades (concrete, glass curtain walls, aluminum), further reducing demand for brick, and environmental concerns led to the passing of the Clean Air Act, which effectively ended the production of common brick in Illinois and other states. As such, some of the contemporary examples in common brick highlighted by Quam, including the Goose Island Barrel House by SPACE Architects + Planners, use reclaimed bricks.

The eleventh, penultimate chapter of Fire and Clay features numerous recent buildings, such as the nine-year-old Goose Island Barrel House, that find architects building with brick once again and often doing it expressively. But with his focus on material and production, Quam is more than happy discussing a fairly lackluster replacement McDonald’s in Lincoln Square—”a flat-roofed brick box with dark metal accents and a few strips of warm wood trim”—on one page and highlighting two standouts of contemporary brick architecture (UrbanLab’s Mohawk Residence in Old Town and Studio Gang’s Brick Weave House in West Town) on the next. Here and throughout the book, Quam describes more buildings than he has room to accompany with photographs, which is unfortunate, but he takes readers across the whole of Chicago and some of its suburbs, and that is refreshing. Similarly, his walking tours run the gamut, from Rogers Park and Uptown in the north to Bronzeville and Beverly in the south. While Fire and Clay will harness an appreciation of brick as a building material, it might also spark readers to want to see some of the brick buildings in the book up close, hearing about them straight from the author’s mouth.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• 100 Iconic Buildings to See Before You Die: Explore the World’s Most Amazing Architecture (Buy from Penguin/DK Travel / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Organized by continent, the book takes you on a global tour of must-see sights, from ancient temples and Art Deco hotels to Modernist marvels and mega-tall megastructures.”

• This Is Where We Live: Illustrated Stories of Place and Space, edited by Antonis Antoniou (Buy from gestalten / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A curated visual journey through the minds of today’s most imaginative illustrators--artists who use cutaways and spatial drawing to explore how we live, move, build, and dream.”

• Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright: How Ornament Led to Architecture, by Sidney K Robinson (Buy from Organic Architecture + Design / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Crossing Boundaries with Frank Lloyd Wright traces how Wright extrapolated the principles that structured Sullivan’s ornament to the design of a whole building.”

• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Jacobs Houses: Experiments in Modern Living, edited by Neil Levine (Buy from Organic Architecture + Design / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “[Featuring essays and] scores of never-before-published photographs and drawings of both Jacobs Houses, it’s the most definitive publication on the history and experience of living in these icons of American architecture.”

• Spaces of Belonging – The Architecture of Muzharul Islam, edited by Niklaus Graber (Buy from Quart Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Muzharul Islam (1923–2012) has left behind an outstanding architectural legacy in Bangladesh. Yet until now, his work has remained relatively unknown despite its relevance and singularity.”

• Reprise – Aita Flury, Works 2005–2025, by Aita Flury (Buy from Quart Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A personal architectural autobiography covering 20 years of the Swiss female architect’s practice.”

• The Architectural Casino: Conversations about Modernism in Haifa, by Ines Weizman (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Diaphanes] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The edition offers a new approach to what Weizman names ‘documentary architecture,’ meaning that to write about the history of a building is also to map the world in which it is located.”

• Uncanny Revivals: Designing an American Identity, by K. L. H. Wells (Buy from Yale University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An examination of how immersive colonial revival projects contributed to the formation of a White nationalist identity by inviting viewers to step into the past.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Jose Pedro Sousa’s new eponymous Substack “on architecture, technology and digital culture” looks at Reinier de Graaf’s Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto. (Jose Pedro Sousa)

• My Earth Day write-up of Julia Watson’s Lo—TEK Water: A Field Guide for TEKnology. (World-Architects)

• “With notes and creative scribbles, Francis Kéré: Building Stories is a fascinating insight into the creative work of one of the world’s leading architects.” (Wallpaper*)

• At the Monocle Design Awards 2026, Lisbon’s monade—whose books I reviewed a few times on my old blog—was named best design imprint. (monade)

• Reinier de Graaf’s Architecture Against Architecture lays out the architect’s perspective on the profession as it stands (The Architect’s Newspaper)

• A review of Brutal Scotland, “a book and exhibition by photographer Simon Phipps documenting 160 buildings across the country.” (Building Design)

• Randy Deutsch needs help because his forthcoming book is “priced too high,” a lament many authors of books with academic publishers face, I reckon. (Who We Need To Be)

From the Archives

In 1979, Paul Gapp from the Chicago Tribune became the second architecture critic (following Ada Louise Huxtable) to receive the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. To celebrate his victory, the Trib put out Paul Gapp’s Chicago the following year. The slim publication features a selection of Gapp’s critiques and other articles spanning a five-year period—or starting in 1974, when he became the paper’s architecture critic, a post he would have until his death in 1992 at the age of 64.

One of the ten critiques in Paul Gapp’s Chicago happens to be his review of Hyatt Regency Chicago, the hotel at 151 East Wacker Drive that was designed by Epstein & Sons and completed in 1974 (an expansion was completed in 1980, in time for a postscript in the Pulitzer publication). Gapp focused on the tower’s brick facade in his review, and accordingly Will Quam mentions the review in Fire and Clay; hence I’m including a scan of the review here (click the image to read it bigger on the screen):

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Gilardi House: Barragan’s Last Witness, by José Luis Alvarez Tinajero and Martín Luque Pérez (Buy from Actar / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Tucked at the bottom of page 123 of The Architecture of Luis Barragan, the 128-page companion to the 1976 MoMA exhibition of the same name, is a small black-and-white sketch of the “House for Mr. Gilardi.” The project, whose construction was set to start that spring, comes last in the book’s 12-page list of Barragán’s works, which span from 1927 to the year of the exhibition. The catalog, which was written by Emilio Ambasz and can be downloaded via the MoMA website, does not mention the Gilardi House anywhere else besides a caption to the sketch, in which the standout feature of the “residence for a small family on a plot of land 30 feet wide and 100 feet deep” is “a covered pool which, in addition to serving as a swimming pool, will have alongside it an area for lounging which can also be used for dining.” The photo below, one of many in Gilardi House: Barragan’s Last Witness, reveals how the house was built just as Mexican architect Luis Barragán intended.

Early in Barragán’s Last Witness, we learn about the relationship between the Gilardi House and Ambasz’s exhibition/catalog via an interview between Martín Luque Pérez and his father, Martín Luque Valle, who was the partner of Pancho Gilardi and therefore one of Barragán’s clients on the project. In 1976, the advertising agency of Gilardi and Luque was booming, and after obtaining a piece of land “without any particular idea in mind” they approached Barragán, then in his mid-70s, asking if he would design a house for them. He declined, saying, “I’m sorry, but I’ve been retired for 10 years. So, no. I can’t design your house.” But three months later Barragán surprised them by calling and asking to see the property. Unbeknownst to Gilardi and Luque, the architect showed up with Ambasz, who had come to Mexico to work on the monograph—the first one on Barragán—but had one condition from MoMA: include a new, previously unpublished design. Without any current work due to his retirement, Barragán said yes to Gilardi and Luque, quickly generating a sketch for Ambasz and eventually shaping the building that would be his last.

While the insights gleaned from the father-son interview are valuable, especially the jaw-dropping reveal of how fortuitous the commission was, it comprises just 10 pages in this 208-page monograph on Gilardi House. The interview is followed by 80 pages of color photographs (by César Béjar and Eduardo Luque), archival drawings, testimonials from architects who have visited the house and been influenced by it, a trio of critical essays (by Jorge Vázques del Mercado, Julio Jiménez Sarabia and Ricardo Devesa), and a short bibliography. The order makes sense, given that photography is how most architects know the architecture of Luis Barragán; here they see many photos that have not been previously published. Béjar’s photographs do a great job of putting the Giraldi House in context and then following the promenade architecturale from the street to the courtyard designed around an existing tree to the pool, while Luque’s photographs are more abstract, honing in on the overlapping planes of color. The reproductions of Barragán’s drawing that follow are important to include, but they are severely incomplete, given both a lack of captions and the fact Barragán directed the construction on site—in other words, his drawings, by their nature, convey just part of the completed picture.

After digesting photos and drawings, readers then discover sketches and texts by architects who have experienced Gilardi House in person: Toyo Ito, Junya Ishigami, Neil Denari, Charles Renfro, Paul Lewis, Kengo Kuma … all are fans. The sketches drawn while visiting the house veer to the playful, while the texts range from the scholarly to the poetic and personal. The three critical essays that wrap up the book examine how Gilardi House can offer lessons for architects working today, how the project is infused with joy, and how building and garden relate to each other. Ultimately, the book’s value is found not in individual pieces, texts or images, but in the whole—in the fact a whole book is devoted to the project, much like earlier titles on Casa Barragan and Las Torres de Ciudad Satélite, the latter of which is discussed at the bottom of this newsletter.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• BIG Atlas, by Bjarke Ingels Group (Buy from Phaidon / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first comprehensive monograph focusing on the built work of BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, one of the most innovative and creative architecture practices working today.”

• Antifascist Architecture: A Genealogy of Antifascist Architects, Buildings, History, and Theory, by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche, illustrations by Lane Rick (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Architects, historians, and theorists have been obsessed with fascist architecture since postmodernism. But who are the antifascist architects? What does antifascist architecture look like? This book is the first attempt at creating a working definition.”

• Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live, by Michael Murphy (Buy from Simon & Schuster / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Author and architectural designer Michael Murphy takes us through ten milestone projects in his career he lays bare the physical, political, and intellectual labor at work shaping the world we live in.”

• David Chipperfield: Reflections on Architectural Practice, by David Chipperfield, edited by Sarah Handelman (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Walther König] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A small but mighty compilation of Chipperfield’s manifold writings on architectural theory and praxis.”

• Architectural Guide Helsinki: Buildings and projects from 1917 to the Present Day, by Ulf Meyer (Buy from DOM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “As well as works by modern classics such as Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto, [this book’s third edition] presents buildings by important contemporary architects such as Juhani Pallasmaa and Pekka Helin, as well as the latest projects by innovative firms including Anttinen Oiva, JKMM and Verstas Architects.”

• City in Transition: Urban Dialogues on the Future of Lviv, by Andreas Hofer, Anastasia Hujvan and Bohdan Cherkes (Buy from DOM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book discusses practical and academic proposals for the urban transformation of Lviv, particularly during the ongoing crisis. It thereby offers valuable insights for urbanists, architects, city managers, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and the general public.”

• Norway: Architectural Guide, by Anna Martovitskaya (Buy from DOM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This architectural guide showcases 270 buildings, primarily from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These buildings are located not only in the largest and most visited cities, such as Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, and Trondheim, but also in the northern regions of Bodø, Tromsø, and Svalbard.”

• Seismic Modernism, by Philipp Meuser (Buy from DOM Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The rebuilding of Tashkent provides a perfect example of Soviet ideas about urban planning – in which technical standardization and social requirements were no more of a contradiction than the design of experimental living concepts and the simultaneous search for an expression of national identity in building.”

• At Home with the Collective: A Report from the Future of Housing, by Alexander Eisenschmidt (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The housing shortage is a global problem that cannot be resolved through market-driven models of home ownership. This book, therefore, postulates a radical shift from house to housing and from the individual to the collective.”

• Mark Cavagnero Architect (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Born of the Modernist tradition of clean lines, abundant natural light, and functional, flowing open space plans, the [San Francisco] firm’s work expands on these values, encompassing a deep understanding of the city and Bay Area.”

• Collaborations in Architecture and Sociology, by Anita Bakshi and Zaire Dinzey-Flores (Buy from Routledge / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book, by an architect and a sociologist, addresses the disconnect between the design of the built environment and social life and lays out a pathway for interdisciplinary engagement.”

• Prefab & Modular Housing: back again - and better than ever, by Sibylle Kramer (Buy from Braun / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Discovering how prefab and modular innovation are redefining the way we build and live.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• Listen to the latest Design Emergency podcast, in which Alice Rawsthorn speaks with book designer Irma Boom, best known to architects for Countryside, Project Japan, and other books done with Rem Koolhaas. (Spotify)

• Zach Mortice reviews Antifascist Architecture, the new book by Andrew Santa Lucia and Daniel Jonas Roche that “proposes new modes of practice for a collective political future.” (The Architect’s Newspaper)

• “The Case for the Non-Reading Architect”: Among other things, Randy Deutsch, in his new Substack newsletter on AI and architecture, makes “the case for a book-free future” in architecture schools. Ironically, the piece ends with recommendations for fiction and non-fiction books to read. (Who We Need To Be)

• Get to know South Korean architect Byoung Cho in the new “richly-illustrated” monograph Earth Works: Houses by Byoung Cho. (Wallpaper*)

• Read a review of Impossible Toronto—On the Courtyard, by Studio VAARO (Aleris Rodgers and Francesco Valente-Gorjup) and Gabriel Fain Architects, published by the Neptis Foundation. (Canadian Architect)

• Architecture critic Paulina Minet has started Der Architektur-Lesezirkel (The Architecture Reading Circle), a book club where participants read and discuss architecture books [in German]. The kickoff event, taking place at Hochparterre in Zurich, will feature Stefan Kurath’s Baukultur mit Bestand. (Swiss-Architects)

• The 2026 SAH Publication Awards have been announced. Among them, the Alice David Hitchcock Book Award has been awarded to Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement and Richard Wittman’s Rebuilding St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. (Society of Architectural Historians)

• Read Natalie Tweedie’s review of Simon Phipps’s Brutal Scotland, which, instead of giving us a visual taste of some of Phipps’s photographic survey, is accompanied by Tweedie’s own architectural illustrations, for some reason. (BellaCaledonia)

From the Archives

In 2022, four years after the release of Jill Magid’s The Proposal and my review of Las Torres de Ciudad Satélite (2015) by Fernando González Gortázar, the Barragan Foundation opened an archive on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. While the inclusion of the Barragán Gallery inside Vitra Schaudepot would seem to signal a shift from away from the difficulties in accessing the archive since Federica Zanco took it over in 1996, it seems the foundation’s strict gatekeeping prevails. I discussed some of this in my 2018 review of Gortázar’s book, which is copy-pasted below.

I picked up this book in June 2016 after coming across it in a bookstore, but I didn't actually read it until this week. The reason I pulled it off the bookshelf was a screening of Jill Magid's The Proposal, a documentary film focused on the Brooklyn artist's obsessions with Mexican architect Luis Barragán, the holding of his professional archive in Switzerland, and Magid's attempt (the proposal of the film's title) to get the archive returned to Mexico. I have other books on Barragán, but I read this one before and after seeing the film since Federica Zanco, the wife of Vitra chairman Rolf Fehlbaum and the caretaker of the archive, wrote the lengthy foreword to the book, a historical case study of one of Barragán's most unique and exceptional projects: the Torres de Satélite, entry markers to a large development north of Mexico City.

Magid's biggest bone of contention with Zanco, who prizes the Barragán archive but refuses to share it with anyone else (she claims a comprehensive catalog of his works is ongoing), is how the Barragan Foundation also "owns complete rights to the oeuvre of Luis Barragán." Therefore any publication with Barragán's work requires the Foundation's written consent—and a payment. The frustration that Magid and other artists or architects or researchers encounter when attempting to access the archive and research the architect's work is undeniable. In fact, Fernando González Gortázar, who contributed the main essay for this book and spends a good deal of it trying to reconcile the proper dates and attribution of the Torres de Satélite, puts his frustration into words:

It is essential, for this and a thousand other reasons, that the Luis Barragan Foundation in Switzerland opens up to researchers, so that we can clarify so many doubts about the chronology of the work of this towering figure. For example, in the constantly cited book by Ambasz, and those based on it, several dates seem to be slightly too early.

Gortázar’s essay is based on a 2007 lecture at the Casa Barragán, given to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Torres de Satélite. But this anniversary was based on the commonly held belief of their 1957 completion, a date that Gortázar contests as too early—something he argues only up to a point, given the lack of access to the archive. Zanco, who wrote her contribution in 2014, illuminates her own difficulties in navigating and making sense of Barragán’s huge archive, saying at one point:

[One] of the problems related to the analysis of Barragán’s work ... lies in the imprecise references to sources and credits, as well as the lack of a nomenclature and of an organically definitive chronology. This partly justifies the slow process of study and organization of the original material and of the previous and ongoing research in general.

Indeed the “ongoing research” has been going on since about 1997, not long after Fehlbaum purchased the entire archive for Zanco as a $2.5 million engagement gift. The comprehensive catalog has always been a few years off, but twenty years later it’s hard to see any end in sight.

But does a reader of this book need to know the back story of the archive to appreciate the project or learn from the materials on display? I’d say no, since the relevant comments, such as those above, are the rarity, and because the text contributions are balanced by many illustrations of the Torres de Satélite: drawings and models by Barragán; the same by artist Mathias Goeritz, whose involvement is one area of confusion; photographs of the towers under construction and completed, many in color to reveal the various ways the five concrete towers have been painted over time, and some fairly recent photos showing how the towers are unfortunately penned in by taller buildings, huge billboards, and pedestrian bridges (since removed, apparently); photos of the towers in pop culture; and what appears to be full-scale photos of the tower’s concrete surfaces, with one color per page at the back of the book. The layout of the book’s visual elements, including heavyweight glossy pages near the back of the book, combines with the texts to create a beautiful object that is insightful yet still—at a time when Barragán’s archive remains closed—incomplete.

Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!

— John Hill

Book of the Week

Puzzling Assemblies, by Oyler Wu Collaborative (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu established Oyler Wu Collaborative in 2004, a few years after they both graduated from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Dwayne, whom I met in undergraduate architecture school at Kansas State University, moved from Manhattan, Kansas to New York City—from the Little Apple to the Big Apple—and collaborated with Lebbeus Woods for a few years, making phenomenal models that could hold their own alongside Lebbeus’s distinctive drawings. Upon graduating from GSD, I expected Dwayne and Jenny to return to New York, but they headed to Los Angeles, where they established themselves as architects with a predilection for experimenting in design, material research, and fabrication. They both teach at SCI-Arc and are hands-on in the making of their projects, which range from jewelry and furniture to pavilions and residential buildings. Although Puzzling Assemblies is not Oyler Wu’s first book (that is at the bottom of this newsletter), it is the most thorough presentation of their collaboration to date—and like their models and designs, an impressive object in its own right.

Befitting Oyler Wu’s Southern California presence, Puzzling Assemblies begins with a foreword by Morphosis’s Thom Mayne, who describes the duo’s work as “a testament to the relentless pursuit of complexity and the power of the unconventional.” Anyone who follows Jenny’s and/or Dwayne’s popular Instagram accounts will agree that complexity and unconventional are apt terms, as evidenced by the many posts of sketches, drawings, and models—many of the last show how those pursuits are carried on to their students at SCI-Arc. A good chunk of the 310-page book is given over to documentation of physical experimentation through models. Across numerous iterations in a half-dozen categories (Primitives, Sphericals, Active Inlays, Inlay Field, Bricks & Totems, Hybrids), near-Platonic forms made up of pieces fitting together like puzzles increase in complexity, as can be seen in the Primitive spread above and the Brick & Totem below. The formal complexity of each iteration is astonishing, but so is the fact that evidence of computer software (a must, I can only guess) is hidden, not overt: we see line drawings and step-by-step assemblies of models, not rendered images of complex solids and voids or any hints of 3D-printing.

Before arriving at the “Investigations” section and its presentation of models, readers are confronted with the “Ideas” behind Oyler Wu’s work. This section features a lengthy introduction by the couple, in which they describe the appeal of three-dimensional puzzles; discuss some of the artists, architects, and methods that have influenced them (Saloua Raouda Choucair, Carlo Scarpa, Japanese joinery, etc.); and convey how their approach can be applied from the scale of a detail up to buildings and the urban. “When considered at every scale,” they write, “puzzles offer a theoretical model that is unlike any other, one that is full of characteristics that inform the exploration of complex construction.” Following their words are essays contributed by architectural thinkers who are contemporaries (David Erdman, Anna Neimark, Marcelyn Gow) and who, like Mayne, can be seen as mentors (Paul Lewis, Nader Tehrani, Edward Ford). The “Ideas” contributions are valuable for parsing how such minds interpret the work of Oyler Wu, though I’m guessing most readers will zip ahead to the “Investigations” that follow and to the “Projects” that make up the third and last section of the book.

The sixteen projects that comprise the third section of Puzzling Assemblies are ordered in increasing scale, from jewelry to towers; though many architects find a similar jump in scale corresponding with time, this is not necessarily the case with Oyler Wu. The first project is LACE, the company founded by Jenny Wu in 2014 that uses 3D printing to “translate [her] architectural design sensibility into high fashion jewelry.” A number of the examples in the book, like the bracelet above, echo the puzzle investigations from the second section. Then come a few furniture projects, each of which combine wood surfaces with steel armatures. They are followed by a number of pavilions and installations that garner their complexity from continuous lines, be they treads and risers of Live Wire or the parabolic meshes of The Cube. Although the book does not include the SCI-Arc graduation pavilions or reALIze, the highly visible tribute to Mohammed Ali, the projects that are included capture the complexity and unconventional nature of their overall portfolio. The last two projects are a pair of residential towers in Taipei, for which the studio designed facade elements (screens, balconies, railings, windows) that manage to retain the complexity of their smaller-scale projects.

As presented in the book, the most telling project of Oyler Wu’s “puzzling” approach is The Exchange, their contribution to 2017 Exhibit Columbus. The construction sat on the plaza behind the Eero Saarinen-designed Irwin Conference Center (formerly the Irwin Union Bank), next to existing trees and engaging solid canopies that were originally used for the drive-thru bank tellers. Oyler Wu fabricated the pavilion in their LA studio, a move that necessitated the components to be sized for shipping. Beyond that, the duo devised the components to fit together, puzzle-like, into two shipping containers. Following 120 pages of small hand-held puzzles, the illustrations showing the filigree and solid pieces of The Exchange fitting snugly into rectilinear volumes is fitting (no pun intended). It is also evidence of how Oyler Wu’s unique approach to architecture is embedded in every aspect of the design process, from conceptualizing and sketching to model making and fabricating.

Books Released This Week

(In the United States; a partial, curated list)

• The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day, by Geoffrey Jellicoe and Susan Jellicoe, edited by Tim Richardson (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The seminal text on landscape architecture from prehistory until the present day, now in an updated edition and illustrated in full color.”

• Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home, by Stefan Al (Buy from W. W. Norton / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation—the home—and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves.”

• Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments, by Jo Farb Hernandez, photographed by Fred Scruton (Buy from Tra Publishing / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “From Miami’s Coral Castle to LA’s Watts Towers, Architectural Fantasies explores over 60 dwellings across more than 30 states. These artist-built spaces allow one to step directly into the artwork, and range from scratch-built creations and modified structures to monuments, sites of devotion, and intricately decorated interiors.”

• Robie House: A Frank Lloyd Wright Masterpiece, by Patrick F. Cannon, photographs by James Caulfield (Buy from University of Minnesota Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A lavishly illustrated guide to one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most important residential buildings.”

Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.

Book News

• The Architect’s Newspaper features an excerpt of Hanif Kara’s essay, “Metronomic Practice: From Despair to Possibility,” from MASS Design Group’s Seeking Abundance: Design, Ecology and a Flourishing Planet, published last month by ORO Editions.

• Architectural Record features an excerpt from Graeme Brooker’s The Story of the Interior: How We Have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us, published in November by Thames & Hudson.

• Over at World-Architects, I highlighted four books from two firms: two books by New York’s GLUCK+ and two books by Paris’s h2o architectes.

• And a week earlier I looked inside Vitra: The Anatomy of a Design Company by Deyan Sudjic, published by Phaidon late last year.

• David Perrine’s On Architecture takes a close look at Philip Johnson’s Library—more accurately, the studio that houses his library, not the books themselves.

• Live near Midland, Michigan? From April 24 to 26, the American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) Midland Branch will be holding its spring book sale at Midland Mall, with one of the highlights being “a special estate collection focused on mid-century modern architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Alden B. Dow.”

From the Archives

The first Oyler Wu Collaborative project I featured on my blog, back in 2008, was Suburban Intervention, a backyard deck on a house ten miles east of Los Angeles that the duo elevated to a work of art. The studio’s first book was Pendulum Plane: Oyler Wu Collaborative, a case study of a storefront gallery on Hollywood Boulevard, edited by Todd Gannon and published by the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design (the client, alongside the Woodbury School of Architecture) in 2009. Below is an edited transcript of my September 2009 review.

At a 2008 panel discussion at the Municipal Art Society on The Future of Architectural Publishing, one response to a question from an audience member, “What do you know doesn’t work?,” was “books on individual buildings.” Luckily another one of the panelists countered this position, pointing out the past successes of some book-length case studies on single buildings. I say luckily because I’m a big fan of books that document, present, analyze and critique one building; I agree that they can work well. A magazine article, a portion of a monograph, or a blog post are comparatively lacking when compared to the huge effort of designing and constructing a building. In that sense, this pamphlet-size case study for Oyler Wu Collaborative‘s small-scale storefront intervention for the LA Forum’s new headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard is just the right size: small like the project itself, but big enough to convey the multitude of ideas present in the project.

Architects Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu won a 2008 two-stage competition for the storefront with a proposal that falls somewhere between the spatial fullness and serene buoyancy of the other two finalists—F-lab and Kuth/Ranieri—according to Mohamed Sharif’s introduction. Their winning design proposes an intervention that inhabits the ceiling and acts as an armature for exhibition displays, important given that the Hollywood Boulevard space is shared with the Woodbury School of Architecture. This occurs via the hinging of the aluminum pipe structure, one of the many aspects of the design and construction documented in the book with sketches, models, renderings, architectural drawings, and photographs. A conversation between Wes Jones and Oyler and Wu, and an essay by Todd Gannon round out the information packed into the book’s 96 pages. Gannon’s essay is particularly insightful, situating the design within the historical de-emphasis of the ceiling in favor of vertical surfaces, walls of glass and other materials.

Oyler Wu’s complex, alien-like intervention appears to be generated within a computer environment, especially given the renderings that accompanied the drawings in the competition boards. But the models and sketches in the book complicate this assumption, one that is deflated in the conversation with Wes Jones, where Oyler and Wu situate the physical models above the virtual ones in terms of importance in shaping the design. Here the computer’s presence is in realizing the armature’s complex but repeating forms, whose bent corners simplify construction (fewer complicated and time-consuming aluminum welds) but also give the piece its particular presence: a dense overlay of lines and curves, ever-changing and challenging our preconceptions about what an architectural intervention should be.

The intervention fits into Oyler Wu’s portfolio alongside two other aluminum installations that predate Pendulum Plane: Live Wire, at SCI-Arc, where they both teach, and Density Fields, at Materials & Applications. These investigations activate their respective environments in similar yet unique ways, using structure to create a canopy, stairs and a ceiling, architectural elements typically constructed of planar materials. The most recent design throws the kinetic into the mix, extending the effects of the previous projects but making one hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Oyler Wu’s aluminum experiments.

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— John Hill