Architecture Books – 09/2025
Drifting along with Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi
This newsletter for the week of February 24 features Drifting Symmetries, the monograph on New York’s Weiss/Manfredi being released this week in the US by Park Books, as Book of the Week. Fittingly, I grabbed a couple old Weiss/Manfredi monographs for the From the Archives section. In between are the usual Books Released This Week and Book News. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
Drifting Symmetries: Projects, Provocations, and other Enduring Models by Weiss/Manfredi, by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, edited by Eric Bellin (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
Drifting Symmetries, the latest monograph on Weiss/Manfredi, the New York studio founded by architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi in 1989, totals 496 pages. That length is suitable for a firm that is just over 35 years old and has numerous notable projects to their credit, including Olympic Sculpture Park and Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center. What I find remarkable is the fact 144 of those 496 pages are devoted to precedents — the “Enduring Models” of the book’s subtitle. I can’t think of any other monograph that gives over even a few pages to the work of other architects, to articulating how projects by other architects influenced their own thinking, their own designs. It speaks to the modesty of Weiss and Manfredi and their willingness to give credit to those who came before them, though it also speaks to their roles as educators and as insatiable learners. It’s not enough to be influenced by a precedent; they document, diagram, and explain the values of the Ljubljanica Riverwalk, Rockefeller Center, the Spanish Steps, and other places that, like the works of Weiss/Manfredi, blur architecture, landscape, and urbanism.
There are twelve such Enduring Models in the book, presented in two chapters of six each. In addition to the trio mentioned above are Khaju Bridge, Sydney Opera House, Hillside Terrace, Leça Pools, Agrasen Ki Baoli (an Indian stepwell, seen above), the George Washington Bridge Bus Station, Brooklyn Heights Promenade, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, and Park Güell (seen below). Outside of Jørn Utzon’s masterpiece in Sydney and Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard, the projects are less buildings than landscapes, pieces of infrastructure, or urban enclaves that span multiple blocks — the architects refer to the precedents overall as “Hybrids and Enduring Models.” Each precedent is documented via descriptive text, photographs, site plans and isometrics with lines of movement depicted in red, and models that sometimes look physical but are so polished and complex in viewpoint they must be virtual. Each precedent is prefaced by a paragraph from Weiss and Manfredi that accentuates its influence on their practice; at Washington Bridge Bus Station (the subject of a 2011 studio at Harvard GSD led by Weiss and Manfredi), for instance, the pair “were especially seduced by the extraordinary structural bravura of [Pier Luigi] Nervi’s concrete butterfly roof [that] supports the passive venting of bus exhaust [and] refracts light deep into the terminal.” One need only look to the recently completed Longwood Gardens, whose undulating roof incorporates passive ventilation, to see the most direct application of that predecessor.
Balancing the twelve precedents are twelve Weiss/Manfredi projects documented in depth, similarly found in two groups of six. Although the number is the same, their own projects take up a bigger chunk of the book: 200 pages, meaning more pages per project on average. Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Longwood Gardens are included, as are eight other completed projects: Kent State CAED, the McCann Residence, Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech, Artis—Naples Baker Museum, Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, Marshall Family Performing Arts Center, and Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking. Two in-progress projects round out the dozen: La Brea Tar Pits Museum and Park, and U.S. Embassy in New Dehli. Although their paper selection differs (note how the images on the reverse sides show through on the thinner pages of the precedents), the Weiss/Manfredi projects feature a similar documentation to the precedents: descriptive texts, photographs, sketches, renderings, hard-line drawings with movement lines in red, and the occasional model. The balance of projects and precedents is articulated by the pair in their introduction to the book: “Drifting Symmetries tells two intertwined stories: one about the contemporary relevance of selected historical case studies and another about our own aspiration to create projects that reach beyond property lines to offer enduring values to the sites and communities they engage.”
This quote starts to get at the meaning of the book’s title, which feels like an extension of the earlier Weiss/Manfredi monographs: Site Specific (2000), Surface/Subsurface (2008), and Public Natures (2015) (see the bottom of this newsletter for more information on the last two). Paramount in these monographs/titles is site, in all its guises: natural, cultural, social, infrastructural. The projects and precedents in Drifting Symmetries continue this emphasis, but the title strongly references architectural history, which is full of examples of bilateral symmetry that have “endured across geographies and centuries.” But for Weiss and Manfredi, symmetry “resists the open-ended dynamic of cultural, infrastructural, and environmental forces, and can preclude radical change.” Something of a definition is supplied in the sentence that follows: “When idealized clarity gives way to subtle adjustment—when symmetry drifts—the invitation to accommodate the contingent, unforeseen, or unpredictable can inform new terms and conditions that redefine opportunities for design.”
Refreshingly, the titular theme of the monograph is expressed in the structure of the book. So far I’ve described two of the book’s four parts: the Projects and Hybrids and Enduring Models, both split into two parts. More of their projects are touched upon in a third part, “Premise,” that consists of four thematic chapters: “Constructing Grounds,” “Lines of Movement,” “Cultivating Connections,” and “Surface Presence.” The Premises allow for the discussion of more projects but also a way of intertwining them together, expressly articulating the strands that are consistent through Weiss/Manfredi’s work. The fourth and final part of the book is “Reflections,” consisting of text contributed by fellow architects and educators, often specifically about Weiss/Manfredi’s work, but sometimes about similar themes or even responding to the inclusion of historical precedents in the book. All of these parts are gathered symmetrically across the book’s nearly 500 pages: Premise | Projects | Premise | Hybrids and Enduring Models | Reflections | Hybrids and Enduring Models | Premise | Projects | Premise. This structure may be symmetrical, but the contents are not. Or to put it another way: the book’s symmetry drifts, echoing the exquisite work of Weiss/Manfredi.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Gilardi House: Barragan’s Last Witness, by José Luis Alvarez Tinajero (Buy from Actar Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This masterpiece was the last built project of Pritzker Prize winner Luis Barragan’s prolific career. Gilardi House aims to disseminate the complete history of the project, from the first sketch to its construction.”
100 Rooms: Many Untold Parables of the Empty Room, by X (Buy from Actar Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — A sequel to The Empty Room: Fragmented thoughts on Space (Actar, 2020), Canadian architect Reza Aliabadi’s (RZLBD) 100 Rooms “elaborates the same theme with one hundred iterations of a square room, each of which tells a different story of the emptiness between the walls.”
Smoties Toolbox: Design Tools for the Creative Transformation of Public Spaces in Small and Remote Places, edited by Valentina Auricchio, et. al. (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — Stemming from a four-year project, started in 2020, and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, “The SMOTIES Toolbox aims to guide project experts through co-designing public spaces. It has already been prototyped in remote places in 10 European countries and tested in four higher education programs.
Urban-Rural Assembly: A Handbook for Co-visioning Interconnected Regions, edited by Anke Hagemann, et. al. (Buy from Jovis / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The Urban-Rural Assembly handbook brings together reflections and best practices using the example of dynamically transforming living labs in an urban-rural region in eastern China [… to provide] practical guidance on how to collaboratively investigate, envision, and plan today’s urban-rural regions worldwide.”
African Fabbers Atlas: Manual of Synthetic Vernacular Architecture, by Paolo Cascone (Buy from Actar Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A compendium of essays, conversations and paradigmatic projects conceived as an adaptive platform on synthetic-vernacular architecture in Africa and its potential role as cultural driver for global scenarios.”
The ReView 2: What is affordable?, edited by Andrea Bardon de Tena (Buy from Actar Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — The second ReView “showcases Tulane School of Architecture’s commitment to developing sustainable alternatives for our future built environment through the work of its students, faculty, and researchers.”
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 Kickstarter that launched last Wednesday to fund the creation of an authorized facsimile of all ten issues of Archigram: The Magazine has an Early Bird discount just for the campaign’s first week. If you’re interested, be sure to pledge by Wednesday, February 26, to get the discount.
“Outrage lives on: Ian Nairn’s critique still haunts Britain’s landscapes”: Ben Tosland reviews Nairn's classic yet hard-to-find Outrage (Architectural Review, 1955), as reissued by Notting Hill Editions, which did the same with Nairn's Paris, Nairn’s Towns, and Modern Buildings in London.
US Modernist Radio has the first of two episodes devoted to architecture books, featuring Aaron Betsky on Don't Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse in Architecture, Sam Lubell and Darren Bradley on American Icons: The Architecture of the United States, Visions and Defiance, and Carl D'Silva on Lost Danish Treasure.
Watch part 1 and part 2 of About Buildings + Cities' four-part analysis of S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhaas, OMA, and Bruce Mau. Suitably, the two episodes to date focus on small (S) and medium (M) projects in the book.
Over at The Arts Fuse, “Boston's premier online arts magazine,” urban designer Mark Favermann reviews three books “on structures on paper and in the world”: Outskirts of Vision, a graphic novel by by Nir Levie; Mies van der Rohe: An Architect in His Time, by Dietrich Neumann; and Beyond Architecture: The NEW New York, edited by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.
From the Archives:
Weiss/Manfredi’s previous monograph, Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures, was released ten years ago, at the end of 2015. Writing about it on my blog at the time, I focused on the structure of the book, its incorporation of conversations with other architects-slash-academics, and the firm’s appreciation of what I called “creative infrastructure.” My summary: “It's clear that [Weiss and Manfredi are] constantly probing their work and investigating its trajectory, and the book is a reflection of these considerations. In addition to a solid presentation of some of the most consistently rewarding architecture being produced today, the book is a solid argument for the wedding of practice and pedagogy, of designing, teaching and learning.” Read the rest of my 2015 review.
The Weiss/Manfredi monograph preceding Public Natures was Surface/Subsurface, released in 2008, one year after the opening of the Olympic Sculpture Park. As such, the book focused on it, and so did I in my review: “New York-based architects Weiss/Manfredi are defined by the Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism description […] The project that best illustrates this synthesis is the Seattle Art Museum's recent Olympic Sculpture Park, an 8.5-acre former industrial site where the architects stitched the city to the water via a continuous constructed landscape. The blurring of distinctions between architecture, landscape, and urbanism is abundantly clear at only a single glance, with the zigzagging lawn and paths physically connecting areas previously separated by both a roadway and train tracks. […] Even though (and most likely because) the project's strengths are clear, the design receives the most attention in this monograph on 11 of the firm's recent built and unbuilt projects. The coverage—including the requisite sketches, renderings, drawings, and photographs—features diagrams, such as a timeline, that help the reader further understand the design but also explain the creative process. The timeline shows how the architects see the Sculpture Park's current state as part of a continuum, as a part of something larger both in time and space. This is refreshing but not a surprise, coming as it is from the architects of the geologically-inspired Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, also featured in the monograph.” Read the rest of my 2008 review.
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
I had Marion Weiss as a studio professor at Penn. The studio felt like a rigorous precedent study. We started by modeling structures that were assigned by Marion and then we hybridized them to form novel spatial qualities. It's cool to see the focus on precedents in their professional practice as well.