Publications: The Latest Architecture and News

When architectural journalist Robert Sharoff and photographer William Zbaren created the series American City, the intention was to celebrate some of the States’ most architecturally impressive cities. For their St. Louis publication, the team has produced a beautiful large format book highlighting 50 projects scattered across the city. Organized with incredible photographs and insightful text, the book is the first of its kind, since the 1920s, to document the architecture of St. Louis.

More about the publication after the break.

For Jenn Kennedy’s recent publication, Success by Design, the author/photographer has chosen to explore how architectural firms survive the trials and tribulations of the fluctuating market. It is a focused work outlining the history of 25 architectural firms scattered across California. The book offers great insight for starting a firm, provides inspiration to persevere during difficult times, and truly allows the personalities of the architects to shine through.

More about the book after the break.

Edited: Bryan Bell, Katie Wakeford First Edition: 2008 Language: English ISBN: 1933045787

“This is the Barack Obama of books. It tells a story about the change we need in the fields of architecture and urban design, professions that have lost their way, easily seduced by wealthy clients. And much like the presidential Democrat, this book of slightly radical ideas is attractively packaged in a way that can’t be easily dismissed. Editors Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford have compiled 30 essays by leading architects and designers across the U.S. – all accompanied by gorgeous photography. Each focuses on issues of social justice and design, and most succeed in making a compelling case for architects, urban planners and landscape designers to stop whatever they’re doing and begin working for the greater public good…The authors’ earnest and passionate voices come through in almost every paragraph, making this book a heartfelt journey as much as an educational one.”

- Matthew Blackett, AZURE Magazine –AZURE Magazine November/December 2008

Full contents index and more photos after the break.

Interesting book on patterns in architecture written by Paul Andersen and David Salomon.

We first heard from Paul, founder of !ndie Architecture, when he was on the short list for the 2009 P.S.1 YAP competition with his entry Lawn Life, a surburban-inspired synthetic turf lawn related to Paul’s studies on suburbia.

The book analyzes projects from several firms (Atelier Manferdini, BIG, Ciro Najle, EMERGENT/Thomas Wiscombe, Foreign Office Architects, Jason Payne and Heather Roberge, Herzog & de Meuron, J. Mayer H. Architects, Reiser+Umemoto, Responsive Systems Group, and !ndie architecture) to discover the relation of patterns in architecture at several scales.

Full index, editorial and photos after the break.

“t is the territory that becomes the privileged protagonist of the post-industrial economy, acting as a place for working out the weak and diffuse energies of a powder-fine productivity.”

- Andrea Branzi, “Architecture and Agriculture”

Weak and Diffuse Modernity

An almanac, in its simplest form, is a book containing a calendar that includes notations for holidays and holy days, as well as astronomical information such as the rising and setting of the sun and moon, the phases of the moon and high and low tides, as we can read at Almanacs. Inspired by the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the editors of the first issue of Bracket had released a sort of almanac in the sense of those publications used during 19th century. With a series of contents that seeks to interrogate the fertile territory where architecture, environment, and digital culture collide, Bracket presents complete overview of what is architecture in the current times. As Mason White and Maya Przybylski pointed on the introduction On Farming: “Architecture is not only a byproduct of predictions, but Architecture itself is a prediction machine.”

We recently received this large format monograph on the work of Bohlin Cywinsky Jackson, one of the most renowned US firms. Their works include the Grand Teton Discovery and Visitor Center in Wyoming, several Apple Stores around the world, Pixar Studios, and a long list of award winning public and residential projects.

More info about their monograph after the break.

Author: Mary Guzowski Design: Godfrey Design ISBN: 978-1-8569-678-4

More info after the break.

“From the criticism of ideology it is necessary to pass on to the analysis of the techniques of programing and of the ways in which these techniques actually affect the vital relationships of production.”

Manfredo Tarfuri

It’s difficult to find new architecture magazines that balance architecture criticism with projects, interviews and interesting graphic work in the same issue. Abitare is one of these magazines and with its possible.

Starting with the Experts’ comments, this time in response to Stefano Boeri’s Manifesto The eye of the needle of local space , architects such as Emre Arolat, Odile Decq, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Srdjan Novanovic Weiss among others go deeper into Boeri’s ideas and give us a critic overview on planetary architecture and the role of the local and global into the realm of architecture. And as Gary Chang said, “Globalization and Locality might not necessarily be two opposite poles that come into conflict with each other in a world of growing complexity.”

Project: Marco Zanta Photographs: Marco Zanta Texts: Gabriel Bauret, Giovanna Calvenzi Edited: Massimiliano Bugno, Roberto Koch Graphic design: Stefano Martignago/ms-smart Translations: Contrasto, Roma – Just! s.n.c., Treviso Printed: Graficart, Resana ISBN: 978-88-6965-106-9

More info after the break.

DETAIL: Featuring Steeel

Authors: Andrea Bruno, Klaus Bollinger, J. Michael Davies, Markus Feldmann, Manfred Feldmann, Federico M. Mazzolani ISBN: 978-3-920034-32-4

More information about this publication after the break.

Authors: Manfred Hegger, Matthias Fuchs, Thomas Stark, Martin Zeumer ISBN: 978-3-7643-8764-8

More info about this publication after the break.

DETAIL ISBN: 978-3-920034-33-1

See full index after the break.

We received Detail Magazine‘s 6th issue of this year. Check the review after the break.

Full index after the break.

WORK ac was one of the first practices we interviewed here at ArchDaily. When we visited their office they were working in P.F.1 (Public Farm 1), their awarded entry for the 2008 P.S.1 summer installation – one of the best installations I’ve seen so far.

An interesting part of the conversation was on how they worked with a mixed group of experts for this project, bringing more into the discussion and finally into the installation. This becomes the central part of the book, with over 150 pages dedicated to a series of interviews with the parties involved, from structural engineers to growing soil experts, telling the story of the process behind P.F.1. This section is structured as a story, but you can still read it picking from any random page. Interesting interview format with no questions, just “answers” that become the narrative of the project.

On the appendix we found a series of recipes for the vegetables that grew on the urban farm, and also a foreword with an interview by Winy Maas with Dan Wood and Amale Andraos.

WORK ac has also edited 49 Cities, a highly recommended guide to unrealized urbanism.

More info on the book after the break.

I am very interested on the relation between architecture and weather. That’s why On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time by Moshen Mostafavi has a special place on my bookshelf.

That’s why enjoyed Arium so much.

Arium is the result of a studio led by Jürgen Mayer with Neeraj Bhatia at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. The book moves between a series of analytical articles on the relationship between weather and architecture, ranging from tourism to shopping. These concepts are then tested by the studio over the Victory Soya Mills Silos, a massive concrete structure sitting silent along Toronto’s waterfront, the perfect lab for a weatherized intervention: the Ariums (Algarium, Fogarium, Thermarium, etc).

The balance between weather analysis and the studio projects make this book a good reference on the subject, and not just a mere compilation of student’s work.

DETAIL Magazine is a very good reference to understand the details of contemporary buildings, grouped by materiality/program.

In DETAIL offers a compilation of works grouped under a given theme, in book format. In this case, Exhibitions and Displays covers a wide selection of projects (with highly detailed drawings, as usual in DETAIL) ranging from museums to a supermarket, along with articles on branding, sustainability on temporary projects, and more.

More info after the break.

DETAIL is one of my favorite periodic publications in terms of construction inspiration. The reason? It’s packed with highly detailed drawings of contemporary projects.

Each volume features a specific building system (concrete in this case), presented in the form of articles, short reports, new technologies, products, and the most attractive section, recent projects with the mentioned detailed drawings.

For example, in this issue we find an interesting article by Hubertus Adam on the current state of concrete in Switzerland illustrated with photos of Valerio Olgiati projects; and projects such as the Children’s Playhouse by LAN Architecture, the Bus Operation Center by ECDM, or the MAXXI Museum by Zaha Hadid with detailed sections of walls, roofs and more.

This magazine is a good reference material, and even if the projects presented on each issue are very recent, the technical information is timeless.

More info after the break.