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In 1939, Otto Neurath’s Modern Man in the Making was released by Alfred A. Knopf. Neurath was director of the International Foundation of Visual Information and used the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) system to “teach through the eye.” A recent article describes Modern Man in the Making as a “pictorial statistical history of human technological […]
Over at World-Architects I reviewed As Found: Experiments in Preservation (Flanders Architecture Institute, 2023) edited by Sofie De Caigny, Hülya Ertas and Bie Plevoets, the companion to the exhibition of the same name at the Flanders Architecture Institute. Source link
The recent receipt of two review books got me thinking about the past and the future of architecture books. The first one is This is Architecture: Writing on Buildings, a collection of excerpted texts about buildings, spanning from the mid-1800s to the 2010s. Edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, respectively chair and executive director of […]
Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, the English architect who was born in 1869 and died in 1944, that is. Although a famous name, Lutyens was not an architect I had much familiarity with before I received a review copy of the first volume of The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens. Flipping through it prompted me to do a […]
Blue Dream is a house designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for Julia “Julie” Reyes Taubman and her husband Robert “Bobby” Taubman. The house, located in East Hampton, on the South Fork of Long Island, was completed in 2017, nearly 30 years after the architects were commissioned to design their first house on Long Island, the Slow […]
(Covers of some of the books discussed in this post) If your first reaction to the title of this post is something along the lines of, “Wait, isn’t critical regionalism just 40 years old?,” then everything you think know about critical regionalism is partial, in both senses of the term: incomplete and biased. Yes, Kenneth […]
Like many people with a lot of books, I keep track of my library with an app/website, tagging books with keywords to better filter and find them. The tags I use move from general terms like “architecture” (the most) and “fiction” (the least) to specific terms that reflect a high number of books by a […]
Before receiving Brutalist Paris from the folks at Blue Crow Media, I thought of the UK company simply as a maker of maps. I reviewed Concrete Map Chicago back in 2018 and since then have noticed them putting out maps of modern architecture, brutalist architecture, public transit — even trees. If the Chicago map is any indication, […]
Like most human beings, I can be contradictory at times. One area where this manifests is architectural surveys: books that usually collect buildings of a certain typology, but also ones spanning a particular timeframe or through some other theme. I’ve written a few of them myself, so I don’t inherently hate them. But I tend […]
Of the numerous books publishers send me for review — be they requested by me, pitched by them, or arriving at my doorstep unsolicited — the highest percentage of them are monographs. This fact goes against the occasional sirens over the irrelevance and anachronistic nature of monographs in our digital age, with free access (for […]