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.

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

Housing Loops: Opulence, Precarity, Dignity, Prosperity and Fraternity, by the a+t research group (Javier Mozas and Aurora Fernández Per) (Buy from a+t architecture publishers)

When it comes to architectural surveys, what is more important: depth of analysis or selection of projects? The articulation of a theme binding the projects or the quality of presentation? Comparing projects to each other or treating each project as an individual case study? One publisher that has produced a lot of surveys and therefore explored the myriad ways of making them is a+t architectural publishers from Spain. These hypothetical questions are often answered by the number of projects collected in a single book, and books from a+t—many of them created by its corresponding a+t research group—have run the gamut: from ten projects across nearly 500 pages (see the bottom of this newsletter) to a whopping 178 projects over 472 pages, as in their latest book, Housing Loops. It goes without saying that the former has more analytical depth, arising from lots of illustrations and information on each project, while the latter prioritizes the selection of projects, how they relate, and connecting the dots between them.

For a+t’s latest book, instead of dots connecting the projects we find loops. Placed upon a timeline and inserted into five thematic chapters—the opulence, precarity, dignity, prosperity, and fraternity of the book’s subtitle—the projects of collective housing spanning from roughly the mid-1700s to the present day exhibit recurring trends that happen over time, at least when considered from social perspectives rather than in terms of style, authorship, or other strictly architectural concerns. Put another way, the precedents relevant to architects designing housing today need not be limited to recent examples; they can be pulled from decades or even centuries earlier, depending on the context that is focused upon. As articulated by Javier Mozas and Aurora Fernández Per, who comprise the a+t research group, “The act of inhabiting is envisioned here as a loop where even the smallest action reflects past patterns and has the potential to trigger unforeseen consequences.”

These “past patterns” are brief case studies that range from one to four pages, with photos (or perspective drawings for older projects, as in the spread above) and drawings accompanied by a few short paragraphs of descriptive text. The last, it should be noted, are always written in the present tense, a way of making even past projects seem situated within the present. For a relatively small book compared to other a+t books and magazines (6-3/4 x 9-1/4”), Housing Loops has a lot of images, particularly drawings, though naturally they tend to be small on the page. But with such brief presentations, the information here could hardly be expected to be definitive. Accordingly, sources are provided for each project—sometimes even pointing to previous a+t publications.

As the spread above indicates, each chapter is further broken down into smaller subchapters that narrow the focus of each social organization. A timeline across the top of each project spread situates the project alongside the others in the subchapter and further foregrounds the book’s theme. Ancillary to the loops, under each project name is a line that morphs into one or more curlicues that are labeled according to various characteristics: urbanscape, mixed-use, dissolved corridor, enfilade, evolutionary, participatory, and so on. These curlicues give each project its own “signature” based on a+t’s analysis and cross-referencing, though unfortunately the reader is not assisted in finding those connections. So, although there is a chronological index and an index of names, there is no thematic index where one can find all urbanscape projects, for instance. As such, the book’s organization elevates the loops that define the five chapters and myriad subchapters, but it relegates the carefully crafted curlicues that even comprise the book’s cover graphics to eye candy on the page.

Still, regardless of any missed opportunities, Housing Loops has value. I find it in the selection of projects and their groupings into the thematic loops. Readers looking at each loop will move forward (and sometimes backwards and then forwards again) in time across decades or centuries, seeing projects with shared social characteristics but often varied architectures. Some of the best sections of the book take readers on rides, if you will, that are probably surprising to every architect or architecture student besides the ones most learned in housing and architectural history. With housing shortages being prevalent around the world, architects interested in tackling the problem—and doing it from a socially grounded perspective—should be open to a wide range of applicable precedents. Housing Loops helps architects find them.

Books Released This Week

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

• Brutalist Korea: A Photographic Tour of Post-War Korean Architecture, by Paul Tulett (Buy from Prestel / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In this elegant follow-up to the bestselling Brutalist Japan, Paul Tulett brings his distinctive eye to South Korea’s post-war architecture, capturing the austere beauty of concrete across cities and decades.”

• Proximities: The Architecture of Jon Lott, edited by Julie Cirelli (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An exploration into the practice of Para Project, a design firm based in Amenia, NY, and the philosophies of its founder Jon Lott.”

• Frida Escobedo: Split Subject, edited by Ken Stewart and Marielle Suba (Buy from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Split Subject, an early project by architect Frida Escobedo, deconstructs a fraught allegory of national identity and architectural modernism in Mexico.”

• Where Future Grows: The Evolution of Work Environments, edited by Jan Teunen,

  Christoph Quarch and Martin Häusler (Buy from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An exploration of the shift towards work environments that foster creativity, well-being and meaningful growth – reimagining the future of work as a place where people really want to be.”

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 double dose of Reinier de Graaf:

  • Over at The Observer, Rowan Moore reviews Architecture Against Architecture, which was released (and I reviewed) a couple weeks ago.

  • De Graaf speaks with Dezeen about the book: “This is emphatically a book I wrote for people to either really agree or really disagree with. I think the worst possible reception of this book would be indifference.”

• House & Garden publishes the “The HG101 library,” featuring “books from our favorite designers and architects.”

From the Archives

More then a dozen years before Housing Loops, a+t research group put out 10 Stories of Collective Housing: Graphical Analysis of Inspiring Masterpieces. The relationship between the Book of the Week and this 2013 should be obvious. Below is an edited version of my October 2013 review.

Spain’s a+t separates its output into magazines and books, with titles in each often fitting into series. The last of the books I reviewed was Density Is Home, which documents 37 contemporary housing projects through the usual high-quality presentations that a+t is known for. But where the drawings, photographs, and statistics help readers learn about the projects and compare and contrast them, the 10 or 12 pages per project mean that there is still room for more to be learned about the buildings. Enter 10 Stories of Collective Housing, which steps back some decades (projects span from ca. 1920 to 1980) to give in-depth case studies on “inspiring masterpieces.”

Of course there are photos—both historical and contemporary—but also plenty of plans, axonometrics, diagrams, and other drawings that explain the projects but also how they developed over time. In this case of Fumihiko Maki’s Hillside Terrace in Tokyo, one of the ten “stories,” the three authors of the a+t research group—Aurora Fernandez Per, Javier Mozas, and Alex S. Ollero—included information on Maki’s ideas of collective form to help explain the project’s theoretical basis and how it was designed to change over time over phases. One spread shows three projects/places that inspired Maki’s design, indicative of the many projects—both inspiring and inspired by—included to give a greater context to the architectural solutions of collective housing.

Even though this book delves deeper into buildings than most a+t titles, the graphics, format, and layouts fit in with the publisher’s larger oeuvre, even as the book doesn’t directly resemble other titles. The consistency of these three pieces throughout the book allows the ten projects to be compared with each other, though this aspect is not as valuable here as it is in a+t’s relatively cursory studies of contemporary buildings.

What helps make 10 Stories so good is the selection of projects, which is not nearly as obvious as it could have been. Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation is not included, for example, nor are other projects that are easily masterpieces yet already studied extensively. I didn’t know about most of the projects in these pages and was glad to learn especially about Michiel Brinkman’s Justus Van Effen Complex (Rotterdam, 1919-22), Ignazio Gardella’s Housing for Borsalino Employees (Alessandria, 1948-56), Ralph Erskine’s Byker Regeneration (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1969-82), and Jean Renaudie’s Jeanne Hachette Complex (Paris, 1970-75). This book offers something for everybody, with plenty to learn in the thorough case studies that reveal many of the best ideas in housing have already happened.

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

This newsletter for the week of March 30 features brief commentaries on a half-dozen books that were sent to me by their authors or editors—not their publishers, as is the norm for reviewers like me. In addition to being books I might not have known about otherwise, they are indicative of the state of book publishing today, in which authors take on even more responsibilities on top of writing, most notably marketing their books. Also coming to the fore in the majority of the books is bringing lesser known architects and architectural works to the attention of readers. Happy reading!

Books of the Week

It’s About the People!: Unlocking the Social Art of Architecture, by Benjamin Clavan (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

This hardcover book documents 25 years of the Berkeley Prize, an annual student competition that was started by Raymond Lifchez (1932–2023), a professor at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED), in 1998. The title of the first competition, “The Architect Meets the Nursing Home,” clearly signals how its departed from the concerns of many architects at the time (keep in mind this was one year after Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao). Beyond its focus on users, and users often overlooked in academia, another way the competition eked out a niche for itself was format: soon after its first iteration, circumstances led it to shift online and also shift to an essay competition rather than a design competition.

The book was written and edited by Benjamin Clavan, an architect who was a founding member of the prize and organized it for much of its 25 years. Following a foreword Lifchez wrote before his 2023 passing, the first two of the book’s six chapters see Clavan giving a background of the prize and people-centered architecture more broadly. The third chapter selects briefs from some of the competitions and then the fourth chapter—the lengthiest in the book, appropriately—gives a taste of some of the winning essays and other aspects of the prize, such as traveling fellowships and community service. Two short chapters at the end of the book touch on the prize’s outreach into teaching and conclusions drawn from the 25-year experiment. While the Berkeley Prize appears to have ended when its founder died, Clavan optimistically sees its relevance today for students who may also see people-centered architecture as “the true Social Art of Architecture.”

The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe, edited by Steven Hurtt and James Tice (Buy from Applied Research + Design / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Between 2014 and 2019, five conferences devoted to urban design and Colin Rowe were held at universities in Rome and Baltimore. The first, “Urban Design and the Legacy of Colin Rowe,” held at Università Roma Tre Architettura in June 2014, provided most of the contents for this big, nearly 700-page book published last year. It features 31 essays contributed by 25 authors, many of whom should be familiar to architects with an interest in the book’s main subjects—Colin Rowe, urban design, and Rome—including Stuart Cohen, Judith DiMaio, Barbara M. Littenberg and Steven K. Peterson, David Graham Shane, and Dhiru Thadani. Editors Hurtt and Tice each contribute multiple essays. That many of the contributors are emeritus professors is illustrative of how Rowe’s impact was greatest on students who directly studied under him (he taught at Cornell from 1962 until 1990)—and a strong argument for putting Rowe’s legacy into book form at this point in time.

The size of this book is so impressive it needs to be mentioned twice. The essays average twenty pages in length, but with letter-size pages there is plenty of space for illustrations. And there are a lot: Rowe’s famous figure/ground drawings, maps and urban plans, images from inside books and magazines by Rowe, and many images of Rome. The images and words combine to create a lush, beautiful book; and thankfully one that is well constructed for its size and heft (I’ve had quite a few big books fall apart under their weight, but this is not one of them). The best part of the book, though, is the diversity of its contributions, which touch on just about every aspect of Rowe and urban design across five chapters: “Colin Rowe & Urban Design,” “Pedagogy,” “Rome,” “Praxis,” and “Diagnosis / Prognosis.” The in-depth essays delve into Rowe’s figure/ground drawings, the urban design studio he taught at Cornell for more than 25 years, the studio work as published in Cornell Journal of Architecture 2, the cartography of Rome, Rowe’s impact on New York City, and his influence on certain practitioners, among numerous other topics foregrounding Rowe’s lasting influence on those who entered his orbit.

Critical Regionalism Abroad: Aris Konstantinidis without Greece, by Stylianos Giamarelos (Buy from Idea Books [Distributor for gta Verlag] / from Amazon)

One of my favorite books of 2023 was Resisting Postmodern Architecture: Critical Regionalism before Globalisation by Stylianos Giamarelos, an architect, historian, and theorist based at the Bartlett School of Architecture. “Architects who appreciate Kenneth Frampton’s theorizing of critical regionalism starting in the 1980s,” I wrote in my summary of the book, “should read Stylianos Giamarelos’s scholarly book that explores and recenters the formulation of critical regionalism by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre ahead of Frampton.” The book has two halves, one articulating the formulation of critical regionalism by Tzonis and Lefaivre, long overshadowed by Frampton’s writings on it; and one exploring the cross-cultural roots of critical regionalism in Greece, the home of Tzonis, Lefaivre, and their original subjects, Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis. Add Aris Konstantinidis (1913–1993) to that mix with Giamarelos’s latest book, an analysis of the Greek architect’s life and work outside Greece.

Part of the gta edition series that provides open-access HTML and PDF formats alongside print versions (see also: Vitruvius Without Text), Critical Regionalism Abroad is a compact paperback that fits easily in a coat pocket. While the small size means landscape-oriented photos are turned perpendicular to the page for maximum size and some images suffer from being too small, the images are plenty big in the interactive online companion. Most valuable, at least to this reviewer, is Giamarelos bringing attention to an architect who is not as well known as the Antonakakises, Dimitris Pikionis, or other Greek architects of the same time period. Projects like the Weekend House in Anavyssos (1964), discussed in depth in the book, are revelations; somehow I never knew about the project, even though Giamarelos illustrates how the project was widely published outside of Greece. Also discussed in depth is Konstantinidis’s teaching position at ETH Zurich between 1967 and 1970, brought about by his design of hotels that the Swiss school found “so much more interesting than our old hotel boxes.” Like the Weekend House, projects like the Xenia Hotel in Olympia (1963) are revelatory, but also indicative, to Giamarelos, of a “critical stance against the commodifying trends of the tourism industry of the 1960s.” Who would have thought that critical regionalism would be found in hotels?

What a Building Does: The Hoosier Modernisms of Evans Woollen, by Phillip Cox, with photographs by Niall Cronin (Buy from Indiana University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

“Despite growing up in Indianapolis,” Phillip Cox admits in the introduction to this historical monograph published last fall, “we never knew Woollen’s name. But we knew his buildings.” Though I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and occasionally visited Indiana, I knew of neither Woollen nor his buildings. And I’m probably not alone. As such, What a Building Does is a welcome book, as it introduces a talented architect and a few of his many buildings to a wider audience. Evans Woollen III was born in Indianapolis in August 1927, studied architecture at Yale and then worked in nearby New Canaan, Connecticut, before returning to Indianapolis in 1955 to establish a firm and raise a family. “As an Ivy League graduate with real building experience,” Cox writes, “in Indianapolis Woollen would be a proverbial big fish in a small, Midwestern pond.” Although this book presents just ten projects completed between 1955 and Woollen’s retirement in 2008, after which he moved to Colorado (he died there in 2016), the back matter lists dozens of projects, most of them in the Indiana capital.

Not knowing Woollen’s work beforehand, each project was a surprise—aided by the way his architecture shifted from brutalism in the 1950s through to the early 70s, to postmodernism and historicism in the late 70s and the 80s, and to corporate modernism earlier this century. Clowes Memorial Hall (1963, depicted on the cover) can be seen as his most important project, though Cox delves into how Woollen partnered with John Johansen, a former employer in New Canaan, because the client didn’t want a local architect. There’s a great story about them winning the commission over Eero Saarinen in the book and evidence of at least one publication giving all the credit to Johansen, omitting Woollen. And although Woollen worked in New Harmony, designing the New Harmony Inn in 1975, a few years before Richard Meier plopped his bright white Atheneum in town, he was never asked by J. Irwin Miller to design a building in Columbus, Indiana’s bastion of modernism that is home to buildings designed by the Saarinens, Robert Venturi, I.M. Pei, and other big names.

These two projects among the ten in the book are signs that a Midwestern bias existed even within Indiana, no doubt making practice frustrating at times for Woollen. Still, the architecture presented in What a Building Does via Cox’s words and Niall Cronin’s photos show an architect who was skilled but also very attentive to both his clients and the people who lived, worked, played, and prayed in his buildings.

China – Crossroads of Modernism: East-West Encounters in 20th Century Architecture, edited by Thomas Flierl, Robert K. Huber and Eduard Kögel (Buy from Lukas Verlag)

In addition to curating the Chinese-Architects platform at World-Architects, where we are colleagues, Eduard Kögel has produced a number of exhibitions, symposia, and books focused on the “development of architecture and urban planning in Non-European countries,” especially China and other parts of Asia. His latest book, edited with Thomas Flierl and Robert K. Huber, is China – Crossroads of Modernism, the fifth numbered title in Lukas Verlag’s Gegenstand und Raum (Object and Space) series—and the only book in the series, so far, published in English rather than German. The book’s focus, per the inside flap, is on “Sino-German architectural relations in the 20th century,” which recalls Kögel’s earlier book on Indonesian architects trained in Germany (see the bottom of this newsletter). The book resulted from the symposium “Architecture Global Modern: China – Crossroads of Modernism,” held as part of the 2022 Triennial of Modernism in Berlin.

The first piece in the book is the longest (70 pages, about a third of the book) and most visually rich: a “Historical Introduction” by Kögel that highlights 32 buildings and typologies in China from the 1900s to the 1980s, from traditional Chinese architecture and the German Administration Headquarters in Qingdao to the Mao Mausoleum and the Great Wall Hotel, both in Beijing. The eight academic contributions that follow examine, among other things, how the Bauhaus influenced architecture in China in the 1930s and 40s, the planning of Shanghai after the Second World War, and the work of particular architects and artists in the latter half of the 20th century, including Hsia Changshi, Marianne Brandt, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, and Roland Rainer. This book, like others involving Kögel, shines a light on people, projects, and places that are otherwise overlooked in other histories of modern architecture.

Space Is Politics: A Manifesto on Architecture, by Hans Teerds (Buy from Ruby Press)

After decades of post-manifesto, apparently architecture is embracing the format once again, as evidenced by books like Thomas Heatherwick’s 2023 book Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building our World and, more recently, OMA partner Reiner de Graaf’s Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto, reviewed last week, and Space Is Politics, the 2025 book by architect and urban designer Hans Teerds that also puts the word manifesto in its subtitle. Unlike Heatherwick and earlier influential manifestos such as Towards a New Architecture, acceptera, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and A Pattern Language, neither de Graaf nor Teerds illustrate their books. This approach puts an emphasis on the ideas expressed through words, but while de Graaf tackles just about every hot-button issue in architecture today, Teerds focuses squarely on architecture as politics, a position strongly rooted in the texts of Hannah Arendt, whose ideas Teerds previously applied to architecture in A Politics of Space: Hannah Arendt and Architecture as World-making. While Arendt is at the heart of Space Is Politics, Teerds begins the book with a conversation he had with a bus driver. Largely real or imagined, I’m not entirely sure, but the conversation is a sign of how the book, though serious, is not abstruse. It is ideally suited for students.

To illustrate one way architecture is political, in one section Teerds discusses boundaries, first pointing out how border walls are political instruments (just think of the US–Mexico border wall and the Gaza–Israel barrier) but then exploring how, generally, boundaries are political by allowing access to a building or other space to some individuals or groups while excluding others. Architecture enters the picture because form matters: “That the border is inviting, or repulsive—a facade that can be slid open completely versus the famous barbed wire—is not just abstract,” Teerd writes, “but clearly a matter of form and materialization.” Ultimately, the book argues that an acceptance of architecture as politics ideally leads to process in which transforming the built environment involves all parties—citizens and users, not just architects and clients. Architects cognizant of this can, among other things, tailor their presentations toward increasing public understanding and participation, so they are not just sharing visions of projects that are foregone conclusions worked out without the public’s input.

Books Released This Week

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

• Building with Rammed Earth, edited by Felix Hilgert (Buy from DETAIL / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Building with Rammed Earth provides architects with the specialist knowledge they need to incorporate rammed earth into their everyday building and planning work.”

• KA ME RA: Modern Japanese Architecture through the Photographer’s Lens, by Ari Seligmann (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book of two halves is at once a gallery of jaw-­dropping modern Japanese buildings and an in-­depth explanation of how the photographs of them were made.”

• Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction, by V. Mitch McEwen (Buy from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.”

• High-Tech Britain: Futuristic Buildings 1968-Today, by Geraint Franklin, with photographs by John East (Buy from Batsford / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A showcase of Britain’s most astonishing examples of High-Tech buildings from the late twentieth century and beyond.”

• Planning the Future of Abu Dhabi: A Canadian-Emirati Collaboration for Sustainable Urbanism, by Larry Beasley and Michael White (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for View all books from University of British Columbia Press] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “From oil boom town to global model—how a bold Canadian–Emirati partnership reimagined Abu Dhabi for a sustainable future.”

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

• I missed the news last week, but Stiftung Buchkunst (German Foundation for Book Design) announced the 2026 Best Book Design from all over the World winners on March 12. A few should be of interest to architects: Heatwave by Andrea Faraguna (Bronze Medal, which I reviewed in Week 21/2025); Plates by Jan Kinsbergen Architects (Honorary Appreciation); and Territorial Urbanism Now! by Institut für Städtebau (Honorary Appreciation).

• Architectural Design (AD), now based in New York (not London) and under the editorial direction of Ashley Simone (following Neil Spiller), has rebranded:

• Is there something to be said that 13 of the “15 interior design books to inspire your shelves and your spaces” in this roundup at Wallpaper* were published by just a few publishing houses: Monacelli, Phaidon, and Taschen? (The other two books are from Random House and Blue Crow Media.)

• Whitehot Magazine has a review of Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture, & Ideas, published by Artvoices Books last year.

• Read a review of Alan Power’s At Home in the City: Domestic Architecture for Challenging Urban Sites at BD.

From the Archives

Here I’ve selected a book edited by one of the authors of one of the Books of the Week: Dipl.-Ing. Arsitek: German-trained Indonesian Architects from the 1960s, edited by Moritz Henning and Eduard Kögel, published by DOM Publishers in 2023. I featured it as a “Book Brief” on my blog in September 2023 and have copy-pasted that text below.

Indonesia and Germany. The two places don’t immediately strike me as intertwined, but editors Moritz Henning and Eduardo Kögel discovered a link between them that is quite interesting: a dozen architecture students from Indonesia who studied at TU Berlin and other schools in West Germany in 1960/61. The editors found out about them while working with the curators of Occupying Modernism, the Indonesian contribution to Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism, an ambitious, multifaceted program directed by Henning and Kögel with Sally Below and Christian Hiller. … Like other parts of Encounters, Dipl.–Ing. Arsitek focuses on cross-cultural cooperation between Southeast Asia and Western Europe, and it even comes across subtly in the book’s title, words that are probably enigmatic to English speakers: Dipl.–Ing. Arsitek is the Indonesian equivalent of the German Diplom–Ingenieur Architektur.

Dipl.–Ing. Arsitek is number 171 in DOM Publishers’ longstanding “Basics” series as evidenced by the square format and orange, geometric cover (like this one). While the subject seems too niche to me to be a “basics” book, the structure and presentation of the book are very clear and well done, aiding in one’s understanding of the subject and recognizing its importance. Following spreads of period photographs in West Berlin, Hannover, Aachen, and Jakarta, the book’s contents are fitted into five parts: “Context,” with a handful of essays give relevant background on Germany and Indonesia in the period of the book; “Diplomas,” a presentation of ten of the students’ final projects; in-depth “Biographies” of eight of the architects; “Positions,” excerpts of a few texts by some of the architects; and contemporary “Photographs” of buildings in Indonesia the architects designed after returning there to practice. So, who are these architects that studied in Germany but took their knowledge back home to Indonesia? Soejoedi Wirjoatmodjo and Han Awal were known by the editors beforehand, but the rest (Herianto Sulindro, Jan Beng Oei, Mustafa Pamuntjak, Bianpoen, Suwondo Bismo Sutedjo, Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya) were primarily discovered in the archives of TU Berlin, which kept their drawings, model photographs, and even some of the models. I can’t think of a better arguments for architecture schools—and the future architects attending them—to carefully document their thesis projects and maintain them in archives.

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

Books of the Week

Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto, by Reinier de Graaf (Buy from Verso / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Reinier de Graaf, partner at Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and co-founder of the firm’s AMO think tank, is celebrating his 30th anniversary at OMA by biting the hand that feeds him—and asking architects to do the same.

In “Time’s Up!,” the fourth of fourteen chapters in Architecture Against Architecture, published this week by Verso, de Graaf takes issue with the architectural profession “being held hostage to heroes well beyond their expiry date” and includes OMA founder Rem Koolhaas among a list of 42 architects 67 years and older who should “make way” for younger architects. (In the gap between manuscript and publication, 4 of the 42 architects made way by literally dying.) Mandating a retirement age of 67 for architects would, as argued by de Graaf, maintain innovation in architecture and make the profession less reliant on old figureheads (who are also the subject of the first chapter) past their prime. Koolhaas is 81 and therefore doesn’t need to come into the office anymore, while de Graaf himself is twenty years younger—or a scant six years before he walks the walk.

Ten chapters later, in “On Whose Terms?,” after exploring how some of the same listed architects have worked for oppressive leaders and how Donald Trump is making architecture “reflect the power of whoever holds power,” de Graaf contends it is “time architects openly declare their aims and bite the hand that feeds them if necessary.” The gap between these two recommendations among the fourteen that comprise de Graaf’s manifesto—”retire at sixty-seven” and “work not to have clients, have clients to work”—is huge. The first involves an individual and could derail their work right as they were hitting stride or impact the likelihood of the firm’s future commissions, while the second is nothing less than a wholesale reorientation of the architectural profession as it has come to be. De Graaf thinks architecture suffers from not having “an agenda of its own,” which keeps architects beholden to clients. Be they benevolent or oppressive, benign or polluting, clients appear to be an impediment to architects using their skills to the larger betterment of society in the face of the many crises the world faces.

Among the dozen other chapters and their manifesto-like recommendations in the book—evenly split between seven “Architect” chapters and seven “Architecture” chapters—de Graaf embraces labor unions as a counter to the exploitation of architectural workers, calls for a moratorium on new housing until the existing stock runs out, suggests architects “unlearn Vitruvius” and plan for obsolescence rather than firmness, and thinks architects should adapt to climate change rather than designing to mitigate it. Most of the calls fall somewhere between difficult and impossible, something de Graaf anticipates and therefore doesn’t want to hear. Occasionally the recommendations contradict each other—stop building and plan for obsolescence—though the OMA partner anticipates this as well and points out how the two ideas can be simpatico.

Most unsettling to me is his push for architects to pivot from mitigating climate change, which has been done by designing and reusing buildings in ways that minimize their carbon output, to adapting to the rising waters, droughts, food scarcity, species extinction, mass migration, and other effects of climate changes. If architecture had “an agenda of its own” this century, it was sustainability; without it guiding architects, they are basically left rudderless and even more beholden to the whims of clients across the spectrum.

A couple points raised by de Graaf numerous times throughout Architecture Against Architecture are the commodification of buildings and the contributions buildings make toward global warming. The first has seen architects used to elevate the value of buildings through design and name recognition, and the second has seen architects designing better performing buildings and focusing on adaptive reuse. Instead of making an argument for architects to use their skills to somehow merge these two facets into greater relevance, de Graaf spreads himself thin by choosing to address every pressing issue facing architects and architecture today. As such, the book is less a manifesto, as its subtitle suggests, than a list of recommendations, as de Graaf calls them—united by architecture but hardly giving architects a template for tackling the profession’s uncertain future.

Books Released Last Week and This Week

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

• Puzzling Assemblies, by Jenny Wu and Dwayne Oyler (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An in-depth investigation into the robust relationship between architectural concepts and puzzle logics through rigorous design investigations by Oyler Wu Collaborative.”

• Ispace: A Journey Into Emotions, by Davide Macullo (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Ispaces are a territorial redevelopment project born and developed in Rossa, in the canton of Grisons, Switzerland … a collection of artistic, architectural, and cultural activities aimed at engaging the local population in social and sustainable initiatives capable of generating interest from external audiences.”

• New York Geologics: Representations of Manhattan from the Anthropocene, by Tiago Torres-Campos (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The book explores [logics of land, water and ground] through relationships between three nineteenth-century plans of Manhattan and three late-twentieth-century architectural manifestos – Delirious New York (Rem Koolhaas), The Manhattan Transcripts (Bernard Tschumi), and Lower Manhattan (Lebbeus Woods).”

• Japanese Homes: Minimalism, Balance, Elegance, by Chris van Uffelen (Buy from Braun / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This volume offers a multifaceted overview of contemporary Japanese residential architecture and introduces the art of creating spaces that combine functionality and spirituality.”

• Seeking Abundance: Design, Ecology and a Flourishing Planet, by Alan Ricks and Sierra Bainbridge (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Regenerative design is a way of building that heals our planet and our communities by halting biodiversity loss, reversing climate change, and improving social equity.”

• Architecture in Conversion and the Work of Carlo Scarpa, by Federica Goffi, with photographs by Prakash Patel (Buy from Lund Humphries / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book discusses the notion of architecture in conversion, revealing it to be radically different from current conservation practices, and to entail more than a change of use. Scarpa’s work represents ‘a radical turn in how we see or understand something’.”

• The Particular and the Public, edited by Nina Rappaport and Saba Salekfard (Buy from Yale School of Architecture / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — This book “focuses on three Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professors’ architecture studios at Yale including Bangkok architect Rachapoorn Choochuey, Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley (Norman Kelley) of Chicago, and New York based practitioner Chat Travieso.”

• SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, edited by Florencia Rodriguez, Igo Kommers Wender, Isabella Moretti and Santiago Bogani (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — This book “is published in conjunction with the sixth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 2025) under the artistic direction of Florencia Rodriguez.”

• Architecture for Warfare: How Corporations Profit From Destruction and Reconstruction, by Ed Wall (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — This book “tells the story of a form of multidisciplinary corporation that employs architects skilled in designing structures alongside former military personnel with experience handling live-fire weapons.” (First featured in Week 9/2026, the book is actually released this week.)

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

• Devastating to learn that a fire in a neighboring building led to the complete loss of Idea Books’ warehouse and all its contents in Amsterdam. Thankfully no one was hurt in the fire.

• The shortlist for the Architectural Book Awards 2026, sponsored by Booklaunch, can be seen, appropriately enough, in the pages of the March 2026 issue of Booklaunch. Books have been shortlisted in four categories: Buildings, Architectural Practice, Architectural History, and Technical Studies.

• The Alcuin Society has announced the winners of its annual competition for Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada, and first place in the Pictorial category is How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949 – 1979, by Sonja Zagermann, published by Canadian Centre for Architecture and M Books.

• Over at the Chicago Tribune, Edward Keegan looks at Stanley Tigerman: Drawing on the Ineffable, the 2025 book that collects drawings by the famed Chicago architect who died in 2019.

• Over at Architect, Aaron Betsky looks at two books on infrastructure: Adventurous Vents (Particular Books, 2026), by Lucy Lavers, Judy Ovens and Suzanna Prizeman; and WATERWORKS: The Hidden Water System of New York (KGP Monolith Books, 2025), by Stanley Greenberg.

From the Archives

Architecture Against Architecture is the fourth book by Reinier de Graaf and the second with Verso, the first of which was the 2023 book architect, verb: The New Language of Building. Below is an excerpt from my March 2023 review of the book on World-Architects.

It’s incredible now, in the third decade of the 21st century, for the world of architecture to be focused on, at least for a moment, a single book. It’s even more amazing that this particular book does not have a single photograph, drawing, diagram, or any other image. Which means architects are actually reading it, not just flipping through it and looking at the pictures, as is the case with most architecture books. The only thing one can could call an image on OMA partner and AMO cofounder Reinier de Graaf’s third book, architect, verb, is the cover: a winking smiley-face emoji, its wide grin constructed with a protractor. The image seems to be telling us that this is not your average architecture book while also hinting that the contents don’t take themselves too seriously. But serious it is, even if it’s also considerably funnier than the average architecture book.

As mentioned, architect, verb is de Graaf’s third book, following Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, a collection of 44 essays released in 2017, and The Masterplan, a novel published in 2021. Anticipation over the new book that hit stores earlier this week seems to come from the popularity and critical reception of the first book rather than anything to do with the novel, which this reviewer admits to not reading (I did read the first). De Graaf actually positions architect, verb in relation to Four Walls on page four: “If Four Walls and a Roof was about debunking myths projected by architects, architect, verb aims to debunk myths projected onto architecture by the outside world — a rebuttal of doctrines which have been applied to architecture over the last twenty years.” So where the first book tackles such self-created myths as the presumed authority of architects and their devotion to progress, the new book turns the gaze around and explores how clients, the media, and society look at architects in terms of starchitecture, sustainability, wellbeing, beauty, innovation, and five other areas in its ten chapters.

Read the rest of my review here.

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: Next week will be this newsletter’s spring break, so the next edition will land in your inbox on Monday, March 23, aka Week 13/2026.**

Book of the Week

Strange Buildings, by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion (Buy from HarperCollins / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Released last week in its English translation, Strange Buildings is the third “Strange” book by Uketsu, an anonymous author and YouTuber from Japan who crafts horror stories that incorporate diagrams as part of the narrative, embedding clues in drawings that help the readers untangle the mysteries. I have not watched the videos Uketsu posts to YouTube, all of which appear to be in Japanese, but when I saw Strange Houses on a table at Barnes & Noble last year, I decided to give it a shot. After all, the idea of telling a mystery with the help of floor plans should be appealing to any architect.

While I was not totally enamored with the book’s text, which uses almost elementary-school language to tell truly disturbing stories, nor did I find the leaps of imagination that the author and his draftsman (not architect, mind you) friend Kurihara take in decoding the plans of houses entirely plausible, I liked the concept enough to also pick up and read Strange Pictures, which was released in English first but was actually published in its original Japanese second. (In their first Japanese editions, Strange Houses was released in 2021, Strange Pictures in 2022, and Strange Buildings in 2023. A fourth book, Strange Maps, just came out in Japan, so it will probably make its way into English in two or three years time. This info is thanks to a comment at Reddit by translator Jim Rion.)

Surprisingly, even though it lacks an architectural theme, I preferred Strange Pictures, whose mysteries are expressed with the help of nine childlike drawings, to Strange Houses, perhaps because Uketsu uses images as clues that can be rotated, layered, and modified in other ways to fit the story. The text is stable, in other words, but the drawings are malleable, at least in how we think they appear. And while the mysteries embedded in the floor plans of Strange Houses do make the jump to three-dimensional architectural space, how they do that might leave some readers scratching their heads.

After reading the first two books by Uketsu, I planned to write about them here, but as fortune would have it, Strange Buildings would be coming out soon; so I waited a couple months and read the third book following its release last week. The new book ups some of the tactics and themes from the first two books, all of which are anchored by the unnamed author and draftsman friend Kurihara but are otherwise distinct in their stories. These include the chapters intertwining into a single narrative being more complex, expanding and diversifying the ways drawings are used as clues, and correspondingly making a longer book, about twice as long as its two predecessors.

Given that the book is a mystery, I won’t say too much about the plot, but basically Strange Buildings finds the author sharing eleven “files”—interviews, basically, accompanied by drawings, as in the spread above—about houses and other buildings that people reached out to him about after the publication of Strange Houses, with a few of the files being archival stories bearing some relationship to those buildings. The files are not presented in chronological order, so the reader has to take some notes or make some mental effort in constructing the timeline, but otherwise the way the buildings/files/chapters relate is easily gleaned from the text and drawings as the story moves along. Still, by the end of the eleventh file, the mystery is not solved, so Kurihara enters the picture and proffers his interpretation of how the files relate and what mystery they reveal.

Similar to the first two books, Strange Buildings has numerous twists and disturbing themes, many of them revealed via approaches to interpreting the drawings that were also present in Strange Pictures and Strange Houses. I don’t read much mystery (much less fiction, for that matter), but readers attuned to mysteries who think they can solve the story after the eleventh file, but before Kurihara’s input, need to pay as much attention to the words on the page as the drawings that accompany them. The words and images relate in ways that Uketsu’s pared down approach makes ambiguous; major clues, in other words, are buried in simple words and straightforward drawings. And while there isn’t anything particularly architectural in Strange Buildings, given how Uketsu treats floor plans simply as clues to the story, architects should appreciate the puzzle-like structure of the story and the way the buildings interlock—sometimes even literally.

Books Released This Week

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

• Benedetta Tagliabue: EMBT – Weaving Architecture, by Benedetta Tagliabue, et. al. (Buy from DAP/Artbook [US distributor for Arquine] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This monograph brings together a selection of works by Benedetta Tagliabue – EMBT, an internationally acknowledged architecture studio founded in Barcelona in 1994 by Enric Miralles (1955–2000) and Benedetta Tagliabue (born 1963) that has shaped the face of European architecture.”

• Peter Cook: Art of Architecture, Peter Cook interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Buy from DAP/Artbook [US distributor for HENI Publishing] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The cofounder of Archigram reviews his career through 18 projects, enriched by his drawings and personal commentary.”

• Dear Axel…99 Postcards from Alison and Peter Smithson, by Anna Bach (Buy from DAP/Artbook [US distributor for Walther König] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Unexpected insights into the long process of designing the Hexenhaus, one of the most iconic buildings of the late 20th century.” (Related: my 2021 review of Alison & Peter Smithson: Hexenhaus from the same publisher.)

• Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings, by Tim Altenhof (Buy from Princeton University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An illuminating account of how new knowledge about human respiration impacted architectural design in the early twentieth century.”

• Between Land and Water: Narratives of Water-Based Rurban Landscape, by Sigrun Langner, et. al. (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Between Land and Water reveals topologies within the changing rurban landscape of the Yongning river plain in China.”

• Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization, by Grga Bašic, Neil Brenner, Mariano Gomez-Luque and Nikos Katsikis (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “How can we map the urbanization of the planet in an era of climate breakdown? The Urban Theory Lab’s Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization confronts this question by assembling a series of experimental visualizations of the worldwide urban fabric.”

• They asked me to design a house, I asked them to design a home, edited by Ilaria Palmieri and Georgina Pantazopoulou (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Set Margins’ Publications] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Exercises and conversations from architects, interior designers and educators that reconsider our definitions of domesticity and the concept of home.” (Previously announced in January; actually released this week.)

• Green-Roof Houses: Environmentally Responsive Architecture, by Oscar Riera Ojeda and James Moore McCown (Buy from Rizzoli / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Discover a wave of newly sustainable homes that blur the line between architecture and nature, where living rooftops elevate beauty, sustainability, and connection to the earth.”

• The Modern British City 1945-2000, edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith (Buy from Lund Humphries / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Bringing together architectural, urban and social historians, this book charts the extraordinary changes that took place in British cities between the end of the Second World War and the early 21st century.”

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] editors at Women Writing Architecture sought out some of the women behind the scenes—publishers, designers, editors and authors—to ask them why they make books, and what their advice is to those of us who want to.” Listen to all six podcast episodes in “Why Makes Books” at Acast.

• Over at the Architect’s Newspaper, Eva Hagberg reviews Jack Balderrama Morley’s “incisive, heavily researched new book,” Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV.

• Over at Building Design, Timothy Brittain-Catlin reviews Case Studies in Architecture and Landscape: Expanding the Legacy of Peter Blundell Jones, “an accessible and lively compendium that represents a wonderful tribute to a much-missed mentor.”

• Over at the Korea Herald, Park Yuna reviews Seoul Urban Architecture: Rising From the Crushing Bowl by Kim Sung-hong, who “challenges prevailing assumptions about the city, moving beyond market-driven narratives to examine the historical and social factors that have shaped Seoul’s urban landscape today.”

• Steven Heller looks inside the new 40th-anniversary edition of Jim Heimann’s California Crazy: American Pop Architecture.

• The New York Times tours (gift link) musician Richard Hell’s rent-stabilized East Village apartment. “The dominant message” of the place, he said, is ‘this person likes books.’”

From the Archives

Striving to find an old post from my blog related to Uketsu’s books, I recalled that back in March 2014 I attended a panel discussion at Syracuse University Fisher Center in New York City about narrative and architecture through the guise of three books: Deventer, which documents two projects by Dutch architect Matthijs Bouw’s One Architecture, Jimenez Lai’s graphic novel Citizens of No Place, and Bjarke Ingels’s comic monograph Yes Is More. In my write-up of the event, I also discussed a then recent, extra-thick issue of MAS Context, Narrative, guest edited by architectural scholar Koldo Lus Arana and architect-cartoonist Klaus that “tackles the intersection between architectural practices and different forms of visual narrative.” Read my piece here.

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

Books of the Week

Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 3 2010–2020, by Caruso St John (Buy from MACK / from Amazon)

Michael Mack, formerly of Steidl, founded MACK in London in 2010. After a dozen years of putting out books on art and photography, MACK branched out into architecture and began putting out a few titles per year, ranging from history/theory and sustainability to education and translations of important works. A staple of MACK’s architectural output since 2022 has been the collected works of Caruso St John, the London and Zurich firm founded by Adam Caruso and Peter St John in 1990. Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1 1990–2005 was released in 2022, when MACK began releasing architectural titles, with Collected Works: Volume 2 2000–2012 following in 2023.

The third volume, covering the years 2010 to 2020, is being released this week, though the architects admit in their brief introduction that the practice was so busy during that period (one indicator is how they opened the Zurich office in 2010) that the forthcoming Volume 4 will cover more projects from the same decade. Consistent among the volumes published to date is a presentation of Caruso St John projects alongside critical texts from journals and magazines—some directly related to their work, some inspiring to the duo—as well as a beautiful production that includes light-colored linen covers with printed drawings, and matte papers with an appropriately minimal page design for both projects and texts. Be forewarned that high production values equal high cover costs: $120 for each volume.

The collected works of the third volume are organized into five themes—The Urban Figure, Exhibitions, Colour, Residues of Memory, and Transformation—with the fourth volume promising to present five additional themes for projects over the same ten-year period. The book starts with a piece by Caruso, an interview he conducted with Louisiana Channel in 2017, whose title is very telling: “Novelty Is Nonsense.” One would be hard-pressed to see novelty driving the work of Caruso St John, especially given how their buildings go to great strides to relate to the urban contexts in which they reside.

A standout among the projects presented in “The Urban Figure” is the Bremer Landesbank Headquarters in Bremen (one of many projects in the book found in Germany), which combines historic stone facades with expressive brick facades made up of 64 different types of molded bricks. Befitting the way their monographs rely on external texts in lieu of project descriptions and the like, information on the bank headquarters is gleaned from a 2018 interview reprinted after the project. As such, the projects themselves rely greatly on the presentation of photographs and drawings, the latter ranging from floor plans and sections to details, such as the plan details of the bank’s undulating brick walls that are printed on the book’s soft pink cover.

Also standing out among Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 3 2010–2020 are the “Exhibition” and “Colour” sections in their entireties. The former consists of both exhibitions of their own work as well as designs they carried out for art and architecture exhibitions. Working with their students at ETH Zurich, the architects created and assembled models and drawings of their own buildings for exhibitions that have traveled from the Czech Republic to London, Chicago, Berlin, Venice, and back to Zurich (spreads above). A standout among the exhibitions they designed is Sigurd Lewerentz: Architecture of Life and Death (ArkDes, 2021–2022), particularly in the way each gallery was saturated in color.

The Lewerentz exhibition suitably transitions into the themed “Colour” section. Although not the longest section in the book, the very fact of its being signals how Caruso and St John, unlike a number of other architects of their same generation, are not afraid of color. Their careful, intellectual approach to using color is evident in a spread that consists solely of photos of the architects’ Post It-noted copy of Sanzo Wada’s A Dictionary of Color Combinations. Of course, color is not limited to this chapter; it permeates the book, sometimes boldly but often subtly, like the covers of the architects’ ongoing series of collected works.

Typology: Tashkent, Genoa, Tbilisi, Casablanca. Review No. IV, edited by Emanuel Christ, Christoph Gantenbein, et. al. (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

With the publication of Typology: Tashkent, Genoa, Tbilisi, Casablanca this week, Park Books has now published three books in the “Typology” series that collects architectural analyses carried out by Basel architects Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein with their research team at ETH Zurich. Before it, Typology: Hong Kong, Rome, New York, Buenos Aires was published in 2012 and Typology 2: Delhi, Paris, São Paulo, Athens was published in 2015. Okay, but why is the new book subtitled “Review No. IV”? Turns out Christ & Gantenbein first published, with gta Verlag, Hong Kong Typology: An architectural research on Hong Kong building types, in 2010, coinciding with the exhibition Hong Kong in Zurich: A Typological Transfer at the Istituto Svizzero in Venice.

The first review book, now out of print and very hard to find, is fairly small (14.8 x 21cm / 5-3/4 x 6-1/4”), with one typological building per spread (as can be seen on the architects’ website). The books put out by Park Books, on the other hand, are large—basically atlas-sized, with three or four buildings presented on each spread in the first half and large full-bleed photographs filling the second half. This format, visible in the below spreads, is consistent across the three Typology books, from Review No. II to Review No. III and Review No. IV. In their size and methodical documentation of buildings in different cities, the books remind me of the great Floor Plan Atlas: Housing edited by Friederike Schneider.

As the title of the series indicates, Christ and Gantenbein are not interested in outstanding singular buildings found in the various cities they visit with their students; they want to examine the building types that are generated by the different political, economic, and social contexts of each place. To them, cities today “are the result of real-estate operations, always with the aim of maximizing profit” and leading to “optimized buildings, in investor-friendly dimensions, with efficient layouts.” Similarly, spaces in office buildings “conform to generic standards … contrived designs that use clichéd codes to fulfill the demands of prestigious corporate imaging.” Instead of looking to historic examples out of touch with today’s way of life as antidotes to the above, the duo focuses on modern 20th-century buildings “that continue to function in vital ways.”

So in Tashkent (a city that has been receiving a lot of attention of late) we find reinterpretations of mahalla, or traditional neighborhood structures, as well as terraced houses, block fragments, gallery buildings, and so forth. Befitting Genoa’s coastal context, standout typologies there include the topoographic slab, in which long buildings undulate according to natural contours, and the stepped buildings that cascade down hillsides. The towers of Tbilis exhibit some Soviet-experimentation, while I found Casablanca’s patio carpet (a great phrase) and courtyard typologies very appealing.

Comparing the latest Typology book published by Park to its two predecessors, the only noticeable change is the addition of maps that locate and key some of the projects in the book; the maps come after four essays (one per city) that give historical context to the typological analyses, with references in the texts clearly keyed to the projects. In these details, Christ, Gantenbein, and their fellow editors were cognizant of the encyclopedic nature of the book, and as such they provided numerous references and therefore numerous ways to navigate the book. This is helpful, but so is having all three books, given the global reach of the series and the way the architects and their students have analyzed cities that range from the obvious (Hong Kong and New York) to the obscure (Genoa, Tbilisi) and many shades in between.

Books Released This Week

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

• Unfinished Atlas: 19 Projects by Manuel Herz Architects, edited by Ludovic Balland and Francesca Mautone (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first book on Basel-based firm Manuel Herz Architects features nineteen projects from their portfolio since 2004.”

• Meditations in Entropy: The Work of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA, by X (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book documents the innovative work of the Dhaka-based practice Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA as it adapts to the reality of climate change.”

• Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture, by Troy Schaum and Rosalyne Shieh (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first book on the work and vision of architecture firm Schaum/Shieh.”

• Kazuo Shinohara – 3 Houses: House in White, House in Uehara, House in Yokohama, edited by Christian Dehli and Andrea Grolimund (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A new edition of an award-winning book on three of Kazuo Shinohara’s designs.”

• Small Eco Houses: Living Green in Style, by Cristina Paredes Benitez and Alex Sanchez Vidiella (Buy from Rizzoli / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A fresh look at small homes that combine practicality, high design, and stylish living spaces with ecologically sensitivity - living small is living ‘green.’”

• Hong Kong Art Deco Architecture: Unveiling the Hidden Heritage, by Prudence Leung Kwok Lau and Vanessa Winghei Yeung (Buy from Columbia University Press [US distributor for The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “As surviving Art Deco buildings are hidden treasures and portals to forgotten marvels and little-known history of interwar Hong Kong, Lau and Yeung show us how Art Deco heritage bears witness to the city’s societal progress in various aspects, early efforts at modernization before the postwar era, and its aesthetic connections with the international stage.”

• British Interior Design since 1925: A Critical History, by Bruce Peter and Drew Plunkett Buy from Lund Humphries / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This is the first critical account of the history of Interior Design in Britain, one that is distinct from that of Architecture, and which gives the profession a sense of its own identity.”

• John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture, by Charles Saumarez Smith (Buy from Lund Humphries / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Charles Saumarez Smith paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose architecture was shaped by his personality. The book also explores Vanbrugh’s activities as a playwright and theatre manager, his circle of friends, his place in 18th-century society, and, in a final section, his influence on later architects from Robert Adam to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.”

• Composing Olana: A Journey on Foot Through Frederic Church’s Greatest Work of Art, by Annik LaFarge (Buy from Fordham University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first and only book devoted to the landscape Frederic Church designed at Olana—what he considered his greatest work of art—timed to coincide with the bicentennial of his birth.”

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 Brooklyn bookstore Head Hi on receiving one of the AIA New York chapter’s 2026 awards: the Architecture in Media Award.

• Last week I included a headline related to a new Kengo Kuma book, and here is a headline on yet another book on the prolific Japanese architect: an excerpt from KKAA: Kengo Kuma and Associates: The Details of Designing Soft and Small (Schiffer Publishing) at Common Edge.

• Whenever I come across an architecture-related post from Robert Bolick’s Books on Books collection, I share it here. One that I missed in January is Tony Broad’s Parallel Orders of Architecture, three differently structured volumes enclosed in a handmade illustrated box.

• Archisearch looks at MVRDV henchman Winy Maas’s The Why Factory (T?F) at TU Delft, “where books, speculative scenarios, and data-driven studies function as design tools.”

• The MIT Press Reader previews Silent Monoliths: The Coaling Tower Project, the recently published book of photographs by Jeff Brouws.

• Read Jarret Fuller’s interview with Charles Saumarez Smith about his newly published book John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture.

From the Archives

When putting together this week’s newsletter and trying to think of another book that was a third installment in a series, a monograph by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group came to mind. Yet, unlike the consistent formatting of the Caruso St John and Christ & Gantenbein titles above, Formgiving: An Architectural Future History (2020) looks completely different than its two predecessors: Yes Is More (2009) and HOT TO COLD (2015). What makes them a series, beyond them being BIG monographs, is the fact they accompanied major exhibitions on the Danish firm and were all published by Taschen in matching paper sizes. I reviewed Formgiving in January 2021 and copy-pasted a portion of it below.

A trilogy should end, ideally, with something that unites or summarizes what came before. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy brings the disparate stories of Blue, White, and Red together through a dramatic incident where all of the theretofore unrelated main characters are present. The title of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in Douglas Adams’ five-part Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” refers to “the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything”; although what should have been grand turns out to be absurd. Formgiving, the third book in BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group’s Taschen trilogy—following Yes Is More (2009) and HOT TO COLD (2015)—is different, delivering a twist at the end, albeit one that is strongly aligned with a sci-fi story that involves life beyond planet earth.

There, in the last pages of BIG’s new monograph … are City of New Hope, “a vision for a long-term human outpost on the Moon”; Mars Science City, “a prototypical test for a sustained city on Mars”; and Masterplanet, “a project that aims to establish a master plan for achieving a carbon-neutral planet Earth.” These global and extraterrestrial projects are far removed from the Danish Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010, the first built work in Yes Is More, as well as the Danish Maritime Museum and Superkilen, two projects in HOT TO COLD that are notable as being finalists for EU Mies Prizes. Buildings take up the most pages in Formgiving, to be sure, but they give way at the end to circumstances far removed from the lives shaped by BIG’s buildings.

[…]

Although I mentioned that this third book in BIG’s Taschen trilogy ends with the triumvirate of planetary projects, that’s literally not true. Following Masterplanet’s 40 pages (it’s given more space than any project in the book), are “Annexes”: numerous photos of their projects built with LEGOs, some musings on film and architecture, and photographs of Formgiving on display at the Danish Architecture Center (each book, it should be noted, accompanied a major retrospective exhibition). And then, following the requisite project credits, comes an epilogue Ingels wrote in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and yet another project: “Back to the Future,” BIG’s entry in the Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge competition (like the EU Mies Prizes, they were a finalist but not a winner).

With these Annexes, it seems that BIG doesn’t want the trilogy to end, or doesn’t know to wrap it up. Clearly they don’t want this book to end with Masterplanet, which generated a bit of criticism last year [in 2020]—criticism Ingels anticipated when he spoke with Time magazine about the ongoing project. Will BIG’s future be defined by space colonies and Hyperloops? (Oddly, BIG’s Hyperloop projects are missing from the book.) Or will it be more closely aligned with Noma 2.0, another standout project in Formgiving? (It stands out for being un-BIG-like, not using BIG’s familiar icons, and for being a truly inviting setting.) I’m guessing BIG wants both. They want it all. An architect doesn’t coin the phrase “hedonistic sustainability” without wanting the best of both worlds—on all worlds, apparently.

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

Thirtysix Views of Inverted Portal, by James Florio (Buy from MAS Context)

Last year was the 10th anniversary of Grace Farms, the cultural and humanitarian center in New Canaan, Connecticut, that opened its SANAA-designed River building in October 2015. The fairly low-key celebration last October featured musical performances, a opening of new long-term exhibition, the unveiling of new sculptural benches by Kazuyo Sejima, a new wood fascia detailed by architect Toshihiro Oki (formerly of SANAA), and Haida Gwaii, a photographic diptych by James Florio of the forest in Northwestern Canada that supplied the wood for the fascia. The original fascia was Western Red Cedar in a horizontal orientation: uniform in appearance but quickly impacted by the freeze-thaw cycle of cold Connecticut winters. The replacement consists of narrow solid wood boards arranged vertically: more varied in appearance but working with nature, rather than against it. Perhaps by accident, Florio’s photograph of gnarly trees rising from the mossy floor of the Taan forest in Haida Gwaii—mounted on the wall of the library in two side-by-side frames—visually aligns with the vertical fascia when seen from outside the library, in a way that weds architecture and its natural origins.

Appropriately, the 10th-anniversary celebration at Grace Farms included a discussion between Toshihiro Oki and James Florio, in which the former spoke about the new fascia and the latter described his working process, both generally and in regard to Haida Gwaii. Florio’s old-school approach of shooting on film rather than with a digital camera was accentuated by the 8x10 camera with bellows sitting on a trip next to the photographer in the library that cloudy October day. More than just film vs digital, Floria’s long-exposure photographs require a great amount of patience and physical fortitude, both arising from being embedded in a place for days or weeks, if not months and years off and on. While Florio’s trips to the Taan forest resulted in a single large photograph*, his documentation of Ensamble Studio’s Inverted Portal at Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, not far from his home, has resulted in a limited edition book that consists of one vantage point of the sculpture photographed 36 different times over the course of seven winters.

*A single photo for now at least; given that he is artist-in-residence at Grace Farms, we should expect more in the future.

When Tippet Rise Art Center opened in June 2016 on 11,500 acres of ranch land just north of Yellowstone in Fishtail, Montana, a few of its many inaugural artworks were created by architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa of Madrid’s Ensamble Studio. The duo described Beartooth Portal, Domo, and Inverted Portal as “cultivated structures,” since their solid forms were shaped by excavating the earth to create voids that served as formworks for the massive pieces. They described each element as “a cyclopean mass built with stone, earth and water, binded with concrete.” Inverted Portal is made of two roughly 24-foot-tall slabs that lean against each other to form the titular opening, allowing a person to walk between the two pieces while also framing views of the surrounding landscape.

Given that Inverted Portal, like any sculpture, changes as one moves around and, in this case, through it, the selection of the one vantage point for Florio’s Thirtysix Views of Inverted Portal must have been an important part of the years-long process. Although Floria writes in the brief text accompanying the publication that he “hiked up the hill to Inverted Portal 482 times with an 8x10 large format camera,” he does not elucidate the appeal of the singular view, in which the portal dominates the left half of the frame and the receding landscape occupies the right half. Its appeal is undeniable though, given that it is close enough to grasp the texture and materiality of the sculpture, while the long exposure allows even the distant mountains to be in focus. Of course, weather conditions and times of day are such that the background sometimes disappears, with the grass and gravel around the sculpture gaining prominence. In other shots snow extends to the horizon, stars streak across the sky, and the sun makes a rare but dramatic appearance across the sculpture and the distant mountains.

Very few people can immerse themselves into such a landscape as Florio has done with Inverted Portal at Tippet Rise, but the format of the publication allows others a level of immersion that is elevated from a typical book. The 9-1/2” x 11-1/2” landscape-oriented book, designed by Anna Mort and Rick Valicenti, features one photo per page, on accordion pages that are split into three volumes with a dozen photos per volume, all contained in a slipcase. The accordion, or concertina, format (one I’ve admitted to liking) allows more than two full-page views of Inverted Portal to be seen at any one time, as it would be limited to in a traditionally bound book. Furthermore, the accordion pages are tucked into a sleeve at the back of each volume, allowing them to be removed from the books and exhibited like in the gallery view above. In such a display, the qualities of light and space and the harsh realities of Montana weather are painted in a grid across the wall. However looked at, I would hope the 36 views open up the eyes of readers to the subtle, changing beauty found even in the everyday landscapes around them.

Books Released This Week

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

• Why WHY? Where Architecture Loves People, edited by Kulapat Yantrasast (Buy from Hatje Cantz / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The work and philosophy of WHY [founded in 2003 by Thai-born, Los Angeles–based Kulapat Yantrasast], a bicoastal architecture firm specializing in museums and cultural centers.”

• Hans Hollein’s Masterpiece: Art, Architecture and the City, by Eva Branscome (Buy from Lund Humphries / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Austrian architect-artist Hans Hollein was appointed in 1972 to design a new museum for the post-industrial city of Mönchengladbach in West Germany which transformed it into a centre for contemporary art. This book reveals the full story of this innovative masterpiece.”

• Architecture for Warfare: How Corporations Profit From Destruction and Reconstruction, by Ed Wall (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Architecture for Warfare tells the story of a form of multidisciplinary corporation that employs architects skilled in designing structures alongside former military personnel with experience handling live-fire weapons.”

• All to Play For: How to design child-friendly housing, by Dinah Bornat (Buy from RIBA Publishing / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In this book, leading architect Dinah Bornat shows how we can shape communities for and with children and young people, as well as the benefits this can achieve.”

• Plugin House: Modern Prefab Architecture, by People’s Architecture Office (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An inspirational handbook of innovative solutions to the urgent housing problems facing densely populated urban areas around the world.”

• Ridiculously Good-Looking Saunas, by Christopher Selman (Buy from gestalten / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Curated by Christopher Selman, sauna designer and maker, explorer, and Co-Founder of Out of the Valley, the book presents 36 remarkable projects that push the boundaries of retreat.”

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

• “Fire Up the Wayback Machine”: The Architect’s Newspaper laments the disappearance of Curbed’s “archive of urban reporting,” a victim of Vox Media, the publication’s owner, changing its content management system. Be sure to scroll down for tributes to the publication from former Curbed editors and contributors, architecture critics, and others.

• Wallpaper* takes a look at Substance, the new monograph from Japanese architect Kengo Kuma that features 35 pavilion projects from around the world.

• Wallpaper* has a “flick through the pages of Mexico Modern,” the new publication by Rizzoli, written by Tami Christiansen and featuring “lashings of striking photography “by Richard Powers.

• Armenian Weekly celebrates the publication of Dr. Alyson Wharton-Durgaryan’s Forms of Belonging: Armenian Architects, Vernacular Style and Architectural Placemaking in the Ottoman East.

From the Archives

About four or five years before the release of Thirtysix Views of Inverted Portal, MAS Context put out Radical Logic: On the Work of Ensamble Studio, a limited edition book edited by Iker Gil featuring a portfolio of Ensamble Studio’s work photographed by James Florio. I copy-pasted my August 2021 review below.

It must have been 2006 when I discovered the work of Ensamble Studio, for that November I wrote about the Musical Studies Centre in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on my old weekly blog. I described the work of Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa then as “refreshingly different: heavy rather than light, opaque rather than transparent, rough rather than smooth.” Those qualities have continued in the duo’s subsequent buildings, including the SGAE (General Society of Authors and Publishers) Central Office, also in Santiago de Compostela, the Hemeroscopium House in Madrid, and the Cyclopean House in Brookline, Massachusetts. Two of Ensamble’s most recent, and most high-profile, works can barely be called buildings: Structures of Landscape is made up of large sculptures—pieces of “Land Architecture”—at Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana; and Ca’n Terra is a house in an abandoned quarry in Menorca, Spain, a house that looks barely habitable in any conventional, architectural sense of the term.

Although Radical Logic, the new monograph on Ensamble Studio published by Chicago’s MAS Context, features all of these projects, and more, the last two are the stars of the book. Editor Iker Gil describes the book as “not a catalog of their built work but a conversation about the ideas and themes that drive their office.” The “conversation” is illustrated by the architect’s own models and other images (3d scans, mainly), but primarily by the photographs of James Florio, who apparently moved from Chile to Montana, via Colorado, to be closer to Tippet Rise, the project he started documenting in 2016. As such, Radical Logic is loaded with photos of the Structures of Landscape—images that are incredibly beautiful, jaw-dropping as much for the weather conditions as for the sculptures themselves and the rolling landscape they sit upon. Florio visited other Ensamble projects in the making of the book, though they are presented without captions and jump back and forth from one project to another, eschewing the conventional project presentations of most monographs in favor of a visual consistency that is interrupted by intertwining essays, an interview, and “model explorations.”

The carefully and beautifully constructed book (the Swiss binding and other details can be seen on MAS Context’s website) starts with some full-bleed photos by Florio and brief words from Ensamble explaining their manifesto: “We think with our hands, we experience. [...] If we do not have work, we invent it.” Ca’n Terra, a space for research, is very much a work of their invention, as is Ensamble Fabrica, the recently constructed industrial hangar that is the firm’s prototyping facility and fabrication laboratory (Ensamble Fabrica, more than by its name, can be seen to be as important to the studio as Tippet Rise and Ca’n Terra). Following an introduction by Gil, who first encountered two of the studio’s buildings when visiting Galicia in 2008, some words by Rafael Moneo, and the first of four “model explorations,” is a lengthy interview between García-Abril, Mesa, and Gil. The conversation starts on page 49 and ends on page 164, but, as alluded to above, the transcript is broken up by Florio’s photographs of their projects and brief texts by other contributors: Moneo, as well as K. Michael Hays, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, and Christian Kerez, among others.

Later in the book—following lots of photographs, images of the duo’s always provocative, sometimes messy models, and words of praise from these fellow architects—García-Abril and Mesa articulate, individually, five words that thematically tie their various projects together: Time, Uncertainty, Resolution, Freedom, and Reclamation. The monograph arrives as the studio nears its twentieth anniversary, and even though the terms describe the work completed in that time, the themes also look forward. For instance, Mesa describes their “long-term vision that gives meaning and content to our life as architects,” in relation to Time. “Having this perspective,” she continues, “as well as the time to research and think autonomously, is a luxury.” I’m not sure if the pandemic entered into these words, but the book comes as the coronavirus continues to spread, and as its potentially large impact on architecture is still being considered. Whatever the case, the duo is optimistic, telling Gil: “Through our academic, research, and professional endeavors, we are opening windows of architecture that allow us to see a brighter future ahead of us.” In Radical Logic, that optimism is infectious.

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 the Queens Gardens: Everyday Landscaping in New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough, by Rafael Herrin-Ferri (Buy from JOVIS / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

With roughly 8-1/2 million people spread across—or I should say packed into—New York City’s five boroughs, the amount of square feet afforded each NYC resident is around 500 square feet. This is one way of describing how even the smallest of spaces in the city are important, that eventually every bit of leftover or unused space will be occupied or find a use. And with so much area given over to roads, sidewalks, and buildings, many parks and gardens find themselves squeezed into the smallest of spaces, be it pocket parks like Septuagesimo Uno on West 71st Street or a planting bed wrapping the corner of an apartment building in my neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. The latter, seen below, was recently truncated to accommodate garbage bins following the city’s new Residential Waste Containerization rules, which have helped reduce the number of rats in the city but are now forcing a choice on some landlords and residents: garbage or green?

Thoughts of trash occupied part of my mind when I cracked open Rafael Herrin-Ferri’s All the Queens Gardens: Everyday Landscaping in New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough, a followup to his 2021 book All the Queens Houses: An Architectural Portrait of New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough. Although Queens, unlike Manhattan, does actually have some areas with alleys, they are typically lined with garages rather than dumpsters, so trash is still mainly picked up at the sidewalks in front of buildings. And given that the gardens in Herrin-Ferri’s book are “for the most part street-facing,” I wondered how much the “everyday landscaping” would be impacted by the needs of twice-weekly trash collection. Outside of a few instances, such as the aptly titled “Trash-and-Recycling Tableau” in Woodside, just east of Astoria, I needn’t have worried: the book is full of a diversity of curious and creative gardens that echo the diversity of the “world’s borough.”

Like All the Queens Houses, All the Queens Gardens highlights one garden per page, with some exceptional examples garnering two pages or even also a two-page spread. The gardens are given descriptive and often humorous titles and brief descriptions that highlight the plantings and/or formal attributes of the gardens, while also situating many examples within the borough’s wider context. While the first book opted for a geographical organization, the new book has typological chapters, ranging from “Formal Gardens” and “Fountains” to “Astroturf” and “All God’s Creatures,” the last going far beyond the ubiquitous lions that guard many houses in my and other Queens neighborhoods. I concur with Columbia University professor Lynnette Widder’s introductory essay, in which she finds Herrin-Ferri’s latest “at the intersection between an architectural study and an anthropological inventory.” Along those lines, the Houses book, in its consistently overcast photography, echoes Bernd and Hilla Becher’s documentation of industrial buildings last century, but as the photos shown here indicate, there are occasional blues skies to be found poking through the clouds in Gardens. One more notable difference between the two books is found in the almost squarish format for the new book, which makes sense given the horizontal orientation of many of Herrin-Ferri’s photos.

The primary shared characteristic and draw for readers is Herrin-Ferri’s focus on everyday architecture and landscapes—there is little to no capital-A architecture or capital-LA landscape architecture to be found in the pages of his two books. Sure, some of the formal gardens in the first chapter may have been created with the input of landscape designers, and maybe some of the gardens in the book front the homes of professional gardeners, but the “Astroturf” chapter is a not-so-subtle hint that these gardens prize utility, ease of maintenance, and frivolity over beauty and other formal concerns. Nevertheless, once the reader sets aside any preconceived notions over what a residential garden should look like and be planted with, the cleverness of the DIY creations comes to the fore.

The photographs shown here give a taste of what’s inside the book, but you’ll have to use your imagination to picture a few of the highlights that stood out to me. There’s the “Blue Plastic Wonderland” in Maspeth—found, like the cover photo, in the “Chinese Vegetable Gardens” chapter—where 55-gallon rain border a trellis of zucchini spanning across an alley. The “Fountains” chapter features “Salvatore’s Sea Shell Extravaganza,” which is just as its title says; Salvatore has been working on his monumental work of folk art since 2000, and in one photo we see him doing such (he is the only human I spied in the book). Finally, in the last chapter, “All God’s Creatures,” two gardens in Sunnyside and Auburndale feature “Shady Apes,” one tucked beneath a Japanese maple and one up in a tree, staring at passersby. All this goes to say that there are lots more treasures than trash in the pages of All the Queens Gardens.

Books Released This Week

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

• Stephan Maria Lang: Living with Gardens, edited by Björn Vedder (Buy from Hirmer Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A match made in heaven: Stephan Maria Lang’s top-class architecture in the midst of blooming gardens.”

• Mexico Modern: Architecture and Interiors, by Tami Christiansen (Buy from Rizzoli / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A captivating exploration of Mexican architecture, from iconic homes by legendary masters to new groundbreaking work shaping the future of design.”

• Summer Houses (Buy from Phaidon / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Explore fifty extraordinary architect-designed homes that capture the spirit of summer.”

• The Architecture of Will Bruder, by Will Bruder, et. al. (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In celebration of his 50+ years in practice, architect Will Bruder is pleased to share this selection of his most-exemplary projects, presented through hundreds of gorgeous photographs, drawings, and original sketches.”

• The Iconic Nordic House: Modern Masterworks Since 1900, by Dominic Bradbury, photography by Richard Powers (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This lavishly illustrated book explores the great exemplars of Nordic residential architecture from the past 120 years, featuring groundbreaking modernist homes and contemporary dream residences.”

• Toronto Edwardian: Frank Darling, Architect of Canada’s Imperial Age, by David E. Winterton (Buy from McGill-Queen’s University Press / from Amazon) — “Frank Darling gained prominence as the principal of Darling & Pearson Architects, designing a plethora of bank buildings in the early twentieth century. Toronto Edwardian positions Darling, whose work aligned with national ambitions and Britain’s global imperial project, as a leading figure of the era.”

• Structure and Type, by wulf architekten (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon) — “In their new book, wulf architekten present 17 buildings completed between 2014 and today. In a dialog with the renowned architecture critic Hubertus Adam, wulf architekten discuss questions that determine the current discourse on building culture.”

• Behind Office Doors: Use and Users in the History of Office Buildings, edited by Jens van de Maele (Buy from Cornell University Press [US distributor for Leuven University Press] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “[This book] examines how office spaces were conceived by architects, designers and managers, and how they were inhabited, experienced and sometimes contested by workers.” (An open-access PDF is available.)

• In Search of Spatial Scripts: Introspective Improvisations for Two Construction Sites: Parcel X Encampment (1994) and The Goodwin Memorial (2004), by Peter Waldman (Buy from ORO Editions / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This project [collection of collages [that] evolves into vellum scrims] traces two construction sites through the self-reflective eyes of generations of others.” (See also my 2019 review of Waldman’s Lessons from the Lawn: The Word Made Flesh: Dialogues Between Citizens and Strangers.)

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

• Over at World-Architects, in a piece I edited, Nishi Shah reviews The Global Turn: Six Journeys of Architecture and the City, 1945–1989 (nai010 Publishers) by Tom Avermaete and Michelangelo Sabatino.

• The Endless Sphere of Time, edited by Kate Jordahl, is one of the winners of the 2025 North Street Book Prize, which awards self-published books. “This luxuriously bound book pairs Geir Jordahl’s circular black-and-white images of liminal spaces in nature and architecture with short works by Norwegian modernist poet Rolf Jacobsen.”

• Over at Punch List, Christopher Hawthorne reviews Reineir de Graaf’s forthcoming Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto.

• House & Garden lists “19 of our favourite books on country houses and country house design.”

• Over at Common Edge, Mark Alan Hewitt reviews The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe, the “massive tome” edited by Steven W. Hurtt and James T. Tice,

• The Toronto Sun looks at Don Mikel’s Canadian Architectural Styles: A Field Guide (James Lorimer & Company), calling it “a panoramic survey of the buildings that have shaped communities across the country.”

• Over at ArchitectureAU, Michael Linzey, former teacher of architectural design and theory at the University of Auckland, presents his new book, Speaking with Houses: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Heidegger’s Ontology (Routledge).

From the Archives

Back in 2009, when I was out of work as an architect but had yet to land the book deal that would pivot me toward writing full-time, I tried my hand at freelance writing, submitting a few book reviews to The Architect’s Newspaper. One such review looked at a couple New York City guidebooks, one of them The Neighborhoods of Queens, published by Yale University Press in 2007 (the other was the fourth edition of Guide to New York City Landmarks). The book was written by Claudia Gryvatz Copquin as the second installment in the Neighborhoods of New York City series edited by historian Kenneth T. Jackson. Unfortunately, the series did not continue beyond Brooklyn and Queens. Below is an excerpt from the unedited text I submitted to The Architect’s Newspaper for my review.

In the Citizens Committee for New York City’s annual quality of life survey, residents of Queens were found to be the most satisfied with their neighborhoods. The survey's low sampling (4,400 residents across the five boroughs) makes the results far from conclusive, but an emphasis on neighborhoods as the defining area for community belonging and social interaction is an important one that, while fairly obvious, merits mention and attention.

The Citizens Committee extends this focus on neighborhoods to its series of five planned books, edited by historian Kenneth T. Jackson, presenting every neighborhood in the city's boroughs. The second installment, following 1993's book on Brooklyn, is last year's The Neighborhoods of Queens by Long Island City resident Claudia Gryvatz Copquin. All 99 neighborhoods in the “most diverse county in the country” are profiled in maps, facts, photographs, and text, broken up by “photo spreads” that present places and spaces that span neighborhood boundaries.

Being an Astoria resident, I immediately scanned the section on the Queens neighborhood I know best. In seven pages, the text touches upon many of the area's well-known places and defining characteristics (Steinway's factory town, Kaufman Astoria Studios, the large Greek population) and extols the virtues of the place today. Given its length and breadth, it is an accurate yet incomplete portrait of the neighborhood and its residents, missing some notable buildings, spaces and historical events. It stands to reason that the same criticism applies to the other neighborhoods. Granted, the chapters do successfully convey what makes each neighborhood special, but the portraits are lacking, bogged down in an erratic mix of history and boosterism.

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

We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture, by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Lars Müller Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley are partners in life and, apparently, mind. Together the couple has curated a pair of shows and written companion books that explore humanity and its relationship to the living world: Are We Human?, the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial in 2016; and We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture, the 24th Milan Triennale International Exhibition in 2025. Notes on the first were published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2017, and the book accompanying the latest was released in the US by the same publisher (in a similar compact format) just last month. The authors slash curators describe We the Bacteria as “the companion to Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design book” and “both an answer to the question Are We Human? and a deepening of the question.” By focusing a narrow lens on the invisible but pervasive realm of microorganisms, the couple believes they are touching on “the tremors of a paradigm shift.”

If Are We Human? focuses on the preponderance of design and the way humans have designed everything from the tools we use and buildings we occupy to the bodies we inhabit, We the Bacteria examines the bacteria that are “the real architects and inhabitants of the built environment” and whose presence in our bodies—especially our guts—means “we are microbial”: “We see, think, and feel with and through microbes.” We the Bacteria is basically an alternative history of architecture, one seen through the lens of microbes, but doing so involves delving deep into the “architecture” of microorganisms. These early chapters are, to me, the most fascinating parts of the book, with the knowledge gained directly applied to the ensuing chapters that take a more direct approach to designed environments, particularly 20th-century modern architecture. Although it’s a stretch to call the evolution of microbes into structures defining interiors architecture, as the authors do, the way those interiors interact with their surrounding environments could very well holds a key to how humans coexist with nature and survive into the future. “There is never a strict line between organism and environment,” they write. “All life is nothing other than the ingestion and transformation of its surroundings.”

One of the scientific theories described by Colomina and Wigley that resonates the strongest is Lynn Margulis’s idea of the “symbiotic planet,” in which “mutualism between cells rather than competition is the primary engine of evolutionary invention.” It’s hard not to think, while reading We the Bacteria, that societies embraced the wrong theory of evolution (Darwin’s) and made matters worse by misapplying it to a system (capitalism) in a way that is wrecking the planet and, in our current state of polarization and conflict, is hastening to make that wreckage total. The results of making a paradigm shift, and accepting a theory that acknowledges the evolutionary importance of collaboration rather than survival of the fittest, could benefit humanity in the political, economic, and social realms but also architecture: “Interiors don’t simply contain heterogenous life. They are formed by that life and part of that life.”

What is the state of architecture today that a theory of “biotic architecture” needs to be conceptualized? One could see buildings today, a quarter way through the 21st century, as its antithesis—antibiotic architecture—carried down to the present via modernity and notions of separation, hygiene, plasticity, and the like. Seeing humans and microbes as mutual creators of the built environment, the authors describe the evolution of architecture in the 20th century across a few chapters, some of their contents clearly recalling Colomina’s earlier X-Ray Architecture (see bottom of this newsletter). Microbes hit cities hard with epidemics and cities in turn were reshaped, earnestly starting in the 19th century, from infrastructure for moving excrement outside of their borders to the design of sanatoriums for patients with tuberculosis. A broad reliance on antibiotics in everything from child rearing and health care to product design and architecture—evidence is visible in the cleaning products in our cabinets and the easy-to-clean coatings on our walls and floors—has led to a reduction in microbial diversity but also bacteria evolving resistant strains.

“Deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance,” the authors write near the end of the book, “are predicted to rise 70 percent in the next twenty-five years to become the single largest global killer.” One counter is transforming antibiotic architecture into biotic architecture, not necessarily by tearing down everything and building anew, but by thinking differently about microbes—breaking down boundaries between humans and microbes, embracing microbial diversity, and moving away from positions that see bacteria as threats requiring disinfection. An architecture corresponding to such notions would be open and inviting rather than sealed off, thick-walled rather than thin, tended to rather than defended, connected to other buildings rather than singular, diverse rather than monocultural. With Lina Bo Bardi, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Alan Sonfist, and others touched on as pioneering exemplars of an approach to biotic architecture, it’s easy to be swayed by Colomina and Wigley’s book, yet it is also, as they contend, a paradigm shift, and therefore not, I imagine, an easy one for many people to get on board with. But the alternative to embracing diversity across the spectrum of life, and caring more about living beings beyond humans, would be even harder to accept.

Books Released This Week

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

• Autobiography of a Skyscraper, by Francis Greenburger and Rebecca Paley (Buy from OR Books / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “[An] unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the construction of Chicago’s 1000M tower, describing the way almost 1,000 people—from concrete workers to concierges, architects to investors—transformed an empty lot into a 74-story landmark.” (Fun fact: In an interview at Cultured, Developer Greenberg says this book “tells the story of how a lot that was once the site of a failed development effort was transformed into one of Chicago’s most successful and iconic new buildings.” One of the projects I worked on in my nearly ten years as an architect in Chicago was that “failed development effort.”)

• The Spaces That Make Us: Why Design Is Broken and How We Can Create a Happier, Healthier World, by Danish Kurani (Buy from Publisher / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Kurani unveils a life-changing design philosophy, Baaham (pronounced BAH-hum), a word from Urdu meaning ‘in tandem’—describing two interconnected things working in harmony. … Featuring seven core principles, Baaham helps everyone—from financially strapped college students to a manager looking to improve their team’s performance—create environments that are functional, beautiful, and life-changing.”

• Spaces for Learning: Inspirational School Architecture, by Lisa Baker (Buy from Braun / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Featuring projects from elementary to secondary schools, the book reveals how architecture and pedagogy can merge in contemporary and high-quality ways. The selection provides an inspiring look into the new worlds of open, diverse, and future-oriented learning.”

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

• Robert Bolick’s Books on Books Collection highlights a few artist’s books by French artist Laure Catugier—two of them titled Architecture is Frozen Music—that display “her fascination with architecture and especially the architectural theories and practice of Oskar and Zofia Hansen.”

• Wallpaper* takes a look inside Melissa Price’s Brick Bonds, a brick-sized artist’s book “that renders architectural history with elegance and style.”

• MAS Context has announced the publication of Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House, the first book in a new series focused on individual homes. The book documents the titular house designed by Bruce Goff in Aurora, Illinois.

From the Archives

Some of the chapters in We the Bacteria made me immediately think of Beatriz Colomina’s X-Ray Architecture, published in 2019 by Lars Müller Publishers. I reviewed it on my blog in May 2019 and copy-pasted that text below.

The first sentence in the Wikipedia entry for “Modern architecture” is closely aligned with how I learned about it in architecture school: “Modern architecture ... was based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel and reinforced concrete; the idea that form should follow function; an embrace of minimalism; and a rejection of ornament.” Although it broke with the past, modern architecture was seen as an extension of the train sheds and other industrial architecture of the 19th century. Iron, glass, and concrete were appropriate materials for the new typologies born from the industrial age. What this accepted view of modern architecture ignores are outliers like Alvar Aalto, whose version of modernism departed from Corbu and Mies and fell into what Colin St. John Wilson called The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture. Aalto was an important part of Wilson’s 1995 book and also Beatriz Colomina’s new book, a fascinating essay on the relationship between architecture and medicine in the early 20th century.

Although the name of the book, X-Ray Architecture, points to the x-ray as the most important medical technology influencing architecture, the most interesting part of Colomina’s book is the chapter devoted to tuberculosis. Before a vaccination was developed for TB and antibiotics was used to treat it, people with the infectious disease were sent to sanatoriums, which were designed since the mid-1800s to maximize patients’ exposure to fresh air and sunlight. For Colomina, TB was the perfect typology for form to follow function, in that the building, not medicine, was the treatment. Architects, including Aalto, designed sanatoriums that became masterpieces of modern architecture. (That their highly specific designs were no longer needed post-antibiotics meant they were either demolished or preservationists had to fight to save them.) The approach used in designing them ultimately infused other typologies, like schools, such that architecture as treatment became architecture as preventative medicine. After the chapter on TB, Colomina’s reading of x-rays relative to architecture feels shallow, as it is based on some architects incorporating x-rays into their books and designing buildings with x-ray-like qualities. In the end, although she can only touch upon the newest technologies (M2A) and the maladies affecting people today (sick building syndrome), the preceding chapters make a strong enough case for architects to seriously consider how the interiors of buildings relates to our interiors—if anything, so the former does not (continue to) harm the latter.

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

An Urban Odyssey: A Critic’s Search for the Soul of Cities and Self, by Sam Hall Kaplan (Buy from Cherry Orchard Books [imprint of Academic Studies Press] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)

Architecture critics, by virtue of their vocation, write a lot. But how many have penned their autobiographies? Ada Louise Huxtable? She wrote a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright but not one on her time as the first architecture critic at the New York Times. Ditto her successor, Paul Goldberger, who wrote Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry but has yet to write The Life and Work of Paul Goldberger. I’m not sure if Goldberger’s successor, Herbert Muschamp, would have written one, since he died in 2007 just shy of his 60th birthday. Ditto Reyner Banham, who died when he was 66, and fellow Brit Ian Nairn, who drank himself to death at the age of 52. Both Banham and Nairn were given posthumous biographical treatments, while Muschamp—like Huxtable and other critics, both dead and alive, including Goldberger as well as Blair Kamin and Martin Filler—had some of his writings packaged into book form. Did I find a critic who wrote their own biography? One: Lewis Mumford, whose Sketches from Life: The Early Years was released in 1982 and was a finalist in the National Book Awards in the Autobiography/Biography category in 1983.

Needless to say, in a job that involves a certain amount of subjectivity on behalf of the writer, architectural criticism is ultimately focused on the building, book, architect, landscape, masterplan, or other subject at hand. Which means the life of the architecture critic must be a fascinating one to justify an autobiography. Right?

My thoughts jumped to the dearth of autobiographies of architecture critics after receiving a review copy of An Urban Odyssey, the autobiography of Sam Hall Kaplan, who served as “urban affairs critic” at the Los Angeles Times for a dozen years, until 1991, and has been an outspoken critic of architecture and planning on various platforms since. I am too young to have been familiar with Kaplan’s Times writing when it was new, though I remember listening to his weekly City Observed show on KCRW, a public radio station at Santa Monica College. This was a good 25 years ago, when blogs were a thing, a radio station streaming on the internet was novel, and social media was nowhere in sight. So, in pieces like “The Future of LA’s Architecture,” Kaplan spoke about local issues but was broadcast to anyone, anywhere (like myself in Chicago), as long as you had an internet connection and some interest in architecture.

Given my albeit small familiarity with Kaplan via his KCRW radio show, I was surprised to see a photograph of the Flatiron Building on the cover of An Urban Odyssey. On the first page of the book, Kaplan describes the Daniel Burnham-designed building but also situates it within his personal history, having lived in the Flatiron District in the mid-1970s and worked a mile or so west of it on the High Line, when it was a working industrial railway, not an elevated park and tourist attraction as it is today. Turns out Kaplan was raised in Brooklyn and began as a journalist and critic at the New York Times.

Published in 2024 by Academic Studies Press, An Urban Odyssey is Kaplan’s fourth book. His first, as Samuel Kaplan, was co-written with Gilbert Tauber and put out in 1966: The New York City Handbook, billed as “a comprehensive, practical guide for natives and newcomers living and working in New York to the ins and outs of the five boroughs’ assets, systems, neighborhoods, services and opportunities.” So, before Kaplan ventured west and became an expert on architecture and planning in Los Angeles, he applied his critical faculties to the city where he was reared, writing hundreds of articles the Times and a 650-page guidebook.

But New York to Los Angeles, Times to Times, was not a straight shot. The years in between involved working in New Haven, living on Long Island, working for the New York City Educational Construction Fund, teaching at City College, and a brief stint in DC, among other things. Suffice it say, although Kaplan’s primary critical output can be counted on one hand—New York Times, Los Angeles Times, KCRW, KPCC, Fox News—his life’s journey has been, to borrow the phrase of his radio show at KPCC, like an “Off Ramp,” with opportunities taken and paths reoriented along the way.

Kaplan’s “odyssey” is told in nearly 30 chapters across about 300 pages, with most chapters therefore around ten pages. Instead of a cover-to-cover read, I dipped into chapters of interest here and there, eventually congealing those stories together into the chronological narrative that is Kaplan’s life. Bubbling above the rest are a few chapters in the middle of the book devoted to Frank Gehry and his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles.

Michael J. Crosbie’s review of An Urban Odyssey at Common Edge includes (scroll down) a photograph of Kaplan and Gehry in a friendly embrace. But Kaplan found Gehry “obsequious to a fault,” at least during their first meeting, and he was not swayed by the platitudes lavished over Disney Hall around the time of its opening in 2003. Centered on the chapter “Disney Hall and Its Discontents,” Kaplan honestly panned and praised the building across various realms: urban, formal, circulation, acoustics, etc. Gehry had none of it, particularly in regards to Kaplan labeling the building “plop architecture” and describing it as “a disappointment” that is “not particularly pedestrian friendly”—he confronted Kaplan in a public event soon after the Hall’s opening: “Sam, you don’t know a fucking thing about urban design.”

Of course, this is Kaplan’s book, not Gehry’s, so the author can use quotes like this to show, for instance, how a critic can get under an architect’s skin, something Kaplan seems proud of. Elsewhere, Kaplan is far from shy in mentioning his own accolades or quoting praise levied upon him. Thankfully, in other places Kaplan lets his words speak for themselves, by including passages from articles in the two Times dailies and other outlets, and putting the emphasis—as critics often do—on the people he met and places he experienced, as part of a long life devoted to improving architecture and urbanism for the greater public.

Books Released This Week

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

• Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture, by Mark Lee (Buy from MIT Press [US distributor for Sternberg Press] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “On the occasion of his fifth and final year as Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, architect and educator Mark Lee strings together five “footnotes”—on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point—to assess the relationship between architectural education, research, and professional practice.”

• The Legacy Sites: A History of Racial Injustice, by Equal Justice Initiative (Buy from Monacelli Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A powerful visual and narrative journey through the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites — the Legacy Museum, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park—three landmark sites confronting America’s history of racial injustice.”

• Sustainable Architecture & Design 2025 / 2026, edited by Andrea Herold and Tina Kammer (Buy from Simon & Schuster [US distributor for AVEdition] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Forty international projects in six categories present the most innovative and forward-looking solutions, whose contribution to building culture development is clearly evident. Text in English and German.”

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 calls Michael Murphy’s forthcoming Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live “an illuminating, optimistic take on how architecture might be harnessed to better the world.”

• Scratching the Surface highlights Sightlines, a new series of books from MACK “featuring essays about architecture, each taking a particular point of view.”

• Over at Third Coast Review, Patrick T. Reardon reviews Carla Bruni and Phil Thompson’s Chicago Homes: A Portrait of the City’s Everyday Architecture. (I reviewed the book in Week 41/2025.)

• DOM Publishers is asking people to take a brief survey (by February 16) “to gain a better understanding of your interests and the best ways to reach you,” and offering the chance of winning three books from their online shop.

• The Architect’s Newspaper interviews Eric Höweler about his new book Design for Construction: Tectonic Imagination in Contemporary Architecture, which “tours readers through major themes that shape architectural knowledge today.” (I reviewed the book in Week 48/2025.)

• Wallpaper* looks inside Future Homes: Domestic Architecture in a Changing World, Ellie Stathaki’s new book that “tackles the constantly shifting demands on home design without avoiding the realm of aesthetics and technology.”

From the Archives

Normally in this section I highlight a relevant book that I reviewed in the past and that corresponds to this week’s Book of the Week. Instead of doing that, I’ll just draw attention to another book by Sam Hall Kaplan: LA Lost and Found: An Architectural History of Los Angeles, first published in 1987 and later updated. I don’t have the book, have not read it, and didn’t have time to delve into it this week, so I’ll just point readers to the Internet Archive, where readers can borrow the book and read it on their screens.

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

Connective Urbanism – New York, by KPF (Buy from Amazon)

Last year’s Book of the Week featured a monograph celebrating the 60th anniversary of Maki and Associates, and this week we find another milestone: the 50th anniversary of Kohn Pedersen Fox, better known as KPF. Although Connective Urbanism – New York is not, best I can tell, explicitly part of KPF50, the firm’s year-long celebration of this milestone, the timing of the book is telling, particularly given that it examines the city that KPF has called home since it was established there by A. Eugene Kohn, William Pedersen, and Sheldon Fox in 1976. While the book does not present any projects from its first thirty years, the ten 21st-century projects in its pages are accompanied by essays that look at the city’s roots, its commercial cores this century, environmental justice as seen in its aging public housing stock, and speculations on its future. Put another way, the book’s focus on New York City reiterates the firm’s focus on the same, regardless of the fact KPF has eight other offices internationally and has realized hundreds of projects outside of the five boroughs.

The book—self-published, like its predecessor (see it at the bottom of this newsletter)—begins with an introductory essay by James von Klemperer, who has served as president of KPF since 2014, succeeding A. Eugene Kohn, who died in 2023. (Shelley Fox died in 2016 and William Pedersen, the other remaining partner, stepped down from an active role in the firm in 2015.) “Since its founding in 1976,” von Klemperer writes, “KPF has utilized a set of responsive design techniques to extend the benefits of each building beyond its site boundaries, strengthening the fabric of the surrounding streets and wider neighborhoods.” Here, then, is the firm’s definition of connective urbanism, and the ten projects that follow see KPF using the approach in New York City, a “laboratory for progressive design.” Although the input of developers and the city’s zoning laws greatly determine the shape of large-scale architecture in New York, von Klemperer further situates the ten projects within the context of the crises that have both literally and figuratively hit the city this century: September 11, 2001, the financial collapse of 2008, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and both Covid-19 and the George Floyd protests in 2020—dramatic events with prolonged impacts on the city, some of them still in flux and therefore fodder for speculations.

The first of the ten projects is One Vanderbilt Avenue, a supertall office tower directly west of Grand Central Terminal. Completed in 2020, One Vanderbilt is considered the first completed tower in the city’s East Midtown Rezoning, which allows for air rights swaps within the district and most (in)famously led to the demolition of Union Carbide and its replacement with Norman Foster’s supertall for JP Morgan Chase. The proximity to Grand Central led the One Vanderbilt developer, SL Green, to fund a new transit connection from the base of the tower to GCT and Grand Central Madison in exchange for additional floor area in the tower. In between the transit hub and tower is a plaza at grade level that happens to frame a northward view of the Chase tower, and next to the lobby is the entrance for SUMMIT, the three-story observatory near the top of the tapered tower, where mirrored surfaces contend with panoramic views of New York and New Jersey.

The projects that follow aren’t nearly as architecturally significant as One Vanderbilt (though I’ve long liked One Jackson Square), but the pair of towers at 10 and 30 Hudson Yards are just as important due to the development they are a major part of (a development masterplanned by KPF), while the NYCHA Red Hook Houses is notable as a clear departure from the other high-end residential, commercial, and institutional projects in the book. The HY and NYCHA projects are also projects/parts of the city that are addressed in two of the four essays that follow the ten projects.

“Polycentric New York: Two Decades after the Millennium,” by Lynne B. Sagalyn, author of books on Times Square and the World Trade Center rebuilding, and Carol Willis, founder of the Skyscraper Museum and author of Form Follows Finance, examine how government action contributed to the shaping of business districts in Lower Manhattan, Midtown, and at Hudson Yards between 2000 and 2020 (it was written pre-pandemic so doesn’t address its repercussions). In “Only Connect: Red Hook Houses and the Making of Modern New York,” James Sanders, architect and author of Celluloid Skyline and other books, gives a history of the Red Hook Houses, which opened in its eponymous Brooklyn neighborhood in 1939 but was otherwise disconnected from it in its layout, and the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the low-lying area.

The four essays also include “New York’s Roots and America’s Future,” beautifully written by by Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America and Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, and “What if… Urban Speculations: Four Scenarios for Connected Systems,” by the KPF Urban team. The latter essay, which closes the book, sees KPF continuing to treat NYC as a “laboratory for progressive design,” though here it is more overt than in the projects that precede it in the book—outside of, perhaps, NYCHA Red Hook Houses, which envisions raised “Lily Pads” and “Utility Pods” as means of addressing future storm surges like Sandy’s. Illustrated in colorful isometrics like the other projects in the book (see the second and third spreads above), the four scenarios in “What if…” congeal in a rendering (above) of a streetscape that is a bit like a hybrid between KPF’s corporate modernism and the later work of Michael Sorkin, where the city is striving for maximum greenness. With this, it appears KPF has some goals for New York’s future set as the firm begins its second half-century.

Books Released This Week

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

• Melnikov: An Investigation through Architectural Models, edited by Pavel Kuznetsov, Marianne Burkhalter and Christian Sumi (Buy from Artbook/DAP [US distributor for Lars Müller Publishers] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A guide to the pioneering modernist work of Konstantin Melnikov, as displayed through architectural models and their accompanying preparatory materials.” (I wrote about the book and its companion exhibition at World-Architects.)

• Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds, edited by Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani (Buy from Publisher / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This generously illustrated volume offers an unparalleled window into the architect’s working process and explores how his mastery of the graphic arts helped him harness the power of the press to disseminate architectural knowledge and spread ideologies based on antagonism, most notably nationalism and racism.”

• Carceral Architecture: From Within and Beyond the Prison Walls, edited by Basile Baudez and Victoria Bergbauer (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “For the first time, Carceral Architecture offers readers an account of prison design and its effects by centering the voices of people impacted by the correctional system in the United States alongside those of activists, architects, designers, scholars, artists, and students.”

• Spatial Justice: The Basics, by Roberto Rocco (Buy from Routledge / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Spatial Justice: The Basics offers a concise and accessible introduction to spatial justice as both a theoretical framework and a practical agenda for urban transformation. It examines how urban space is produced, contested, and governed, and how it is implicated in broader dynamics of inequality, recognition, and participation.”

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

• C. G. Beck, whose The Labor of Architecture was Book of the Week earlier this month, chimes in on the recent news of the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) issuing a complaint against Snøhetta for allegedly firing employees that were engaged in a unionization campaign in 2023.

• Over at BD, Ken Worpole reviews Dinah Bornat’s All To Play For: How to design child-friendly housing (RIBA Publishing), coming out next month in the US.

• The New York Times Style Magazine rounds up (gift link) its favorite home libraries “reading spots that will seem like paradise to book- and design-lovers alike,” as previously featured in its pages.

• “How to Arrange Your Desk,” a New York Times article (gift link) with tips from various designers and authors “for upgrading your work space and feeling both more organized and more creative.” (I learned about this article thanks to Flickr user .eventscape., who alerted me that it linked (once removed from my original) to a photo I took of Philip Johnson’s Studio back in 2016:

From the Archives

A few years before the publication of Connective Urbanism KPF put out its first self-published book, Design in Detail. For a piece at World-Architects in May 2023, I reached out to James von Klemperer with some questions about the firms decision to self-publish. Below are his responses.

KPF has done many books—monographs, mainly—with numerous publishers (Rizzoli, Images, ORO, Birkhäuser), but Design in Detail is different in that it is self-published. What led your firm to self-publish this book?
Naturally, a book about making things should call attention to its own physical assembly: how it was bound, the cloth chosen for the cover, paper weight, etc. Also, throughout the process of self-publication, the affiliated arts of graphic design, type setting, and photography were more directly within our control.

What do you hope to accomplish with Design in Detail and any other in-house publications that are made available to a wider audience?
As a firm whose design emerges not from one or two authors, but rather from the hands and minds of many, it is especially important for us to define the common ground that we occupy. This topic of craft illustrates many of the architectural values that are shared within our group of designers.

Do you recommend self-publishing to other architecture firms and, if yes, why?
Yes. It’s gratifying to see such an exemplary volume emerge from the efforts of a group of relative amateurs. Architects often thrive when taking on such new challenges. Since the scale of our buildings preclude the possibility of our creating them with our own hands, we can be especially proud to say the we produced our own 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