Architecture Books – Week 10/2024
Who loves accordions?
Accordion books, that is, or books with concertina bindings — not books that can be played like an accordion or concertina, or books about such musical instruments. Whatever one calls them, a few of these folded books are featured in this week’s newsletter, alongside the usual new releases and book news.
Book of the Week:
Chicago Reflected: A Skyline Drawing from the Chicago River by Ryan Chester, published by University of Chicago Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
When I rack my brain, it seems that the first book I bought with a concertina binding was not a book with words and/or images, it was a sketchbook — a goshuincho, or stamp book, that I bought in Japan in 2004 and had its pages adorned with stamps and calligraphy when visiting temples. I have quite a few souvenirs from this (so far only) trip to Japan, and the goshuincho I bought at Ryōan-ji is easily my favorite one, not only because each page is beautiful to look at, but because unfolding the book reminds me of the visits to the various temples, their names and my dates of visitation written in calligraphy on each page. With fourteen folds and two sides to the book but only a handful of stamps from my visits, my goshuincho is far from complete — a further incentive to return to Japan and resume my temple visits.
Chicago Reflected, a recently published accordion book by architect Ryan Chester, can be considered similarly to a goshuincho. Though not a blank book, the two lengthy, folded panoramas present a journey: a trip up and down the Chicago River, a cruise that many tourists (and just as many locals, most likely) have taken via the Chicago Architecture Center’s popular boat tours. Unfolding it, it’s hard for me not to be reminded of the times I traversed the river in boats back when I worked in Chicago as an architect, sometimes with visiting friends or family, often for corporate events and parties, but once for a wedding in which the vows took place memorably while parked at the river’s bend. That bend means one side of the accordion book is “South Bank / East Bank,” while the other side is “North Bank / West Bank”; Chester’s basically frontal depiction of the buildings along the river, as well as his treatment of the space of the river itself, means the 90-degree changes in orientation are barely perceptible.
Just as the architectural boat tours are about the buildings facing the river, Chester’s drawings draw our attention to the same. Although the Chicago Riverwalk is a great amenity and the bridges are an undeniable presence on cruises, the former does not come across dramatically in the south/east drawing and the latter are cut in a way that they give the panoramas a noticeable rhythm but don’t distract from the buildings taking center stage. Like Matteo Pericoli’s Manhattan Unfurled from 2001 (see also bottom of this newsletter), which Chester’s book clearly recalls, the buildings lining the river are labeled in a separate booklet, which keeps the panoramas uncluttered minus the publisher’s title block at the farthest left panel of each drawing.
Also like that earlier accordion book, Chicago Reflected includes an essay in the booklet, but instead of one courtesy New Yorker Paul Goldberger it’s New Yorker Thomas Dyja, author of The Third Coast (a book on Chicago I cannot recommend highly enough), who contributes. Chester’s drawing takes Dyja on a historical, not personal, journey: to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable and his cabin near the mouth of the river in 1779, as depicted in a painting from a century ago. Although the skyline of Chicago from Lake Michigan is the most recognizable view of the city, the relatively diminutive river is arguably more important to the development of Chicago than the lake. The reversal of the river’s flow, completed in 1900, enabled the booming city to become a healthy one, as it pushed the city’s waste away from the city, not into the lake that was also the source of its drinking water.
Fast forward 124 years and the Chicago River is a place of leisure, recreation, and celebration. The buildings lining both sides make it one of the most remarkable urban spaces anywhere in the world, though one must be on a bridge or in a boat to be physically within that space. Chicago Reflected must have arisen from the appeal of the river as an urban space, though its format means we encounter just one side at a time (it’s not a literal reflection like the slipcase cover). What we lose in sensing space we gain in unfolding the book in its entirety and being confronted with panoramas about eight feet long (the originals are each 55’ long!), views we’d never be able to experience otherwise. This gets at an upside of accordion books — unfolded, they make great wall art — but also a downside: You have to buy two copies to see both panoramas on your walls.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
High Desert Retreat: Aidlin Darling Design by Aidlin Darling Design (Joshua Aidlin and David Darling), published by Images Publishing (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — A monograph on the firm's High Desert Retreat, a "soulful environment on a bluff" overlooking the Coachella Valley..
London Estates: Modernist Council Housing 1946–1981 by Thaddeus Zupančič, published by FUEL (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Denys Lasdun? Check. Ernő Goldfinger? Check. Robin Hood Gardens? Check. This book has photographs of 275 estates built between 1946 and 1981.
ODA: Office of Design and Architecture by Eran Chan, published by Rizzoli (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — A second monograph (here’s the first one) on ODA, the successful firm of Eran Chan, the architect who made Q*bert buildings a thing in NYC.
Solar Adobe: Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture by Albert Narath, published by University of Minnesota Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — A scholarly look at “how a centuries-old architectural tradition reemerged as a potential solution to the political and environmental crises of the 1970s.”
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 architects who have dreamt of impossible buildings”: Will Wiles, in this month's Apollo magazine, reviewing Aaron Betsky's The Monster Leviathan. (I reviewed it in this newsletter back in Week 7.)
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Julien Crockett interviews Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti about their book Atlas of the Senseable City, as part of Crockett’s “The Rules We Live By” series. (This, too, I reviewed in this newsletter, back in Week 6.)
Something I didn’t notice until the other day: Early last month the Avery Library at Columbia University announced “the major gift of Michael Sorkin’s papers, architectural records, and drawings to the Drawings & Archives department.” A program to celebrate the gift should take place sometime in the fall. (The Sorkin Reading Room at City Collage made news back in Week 23/2023, and I visited the Reading Room when it opened in December 2022.)
From the Archives:
Back in 2014 I reviewed Sunrise to High-Rise (Cicada Books, 2014) by Lucy Dalzell, describing how the book “opens like an accordion, telling the history of architecture through buildings on one side and through styles/periods on the other […] the former's colorful panorama by Lucy Dalzell is especially beautiful, particularly when it's unfurled to over 90 inches. The buildings […] overlap and blend into each other to create an undulating, architectural horizon line. Sure, the buildings are not scaled relative to each other, creating odd and ever-changing depths of field, but the whole expressively tells the story of major monuments over time.” And akin to what I wrote about Chicago Reflected: “It's not often that children's books have the option of becoming wall art, but in this case it's clear the illustrator and publisher wanted the history of architecture to be an ever-present part of a child's bedroom.”
One piece in Ryan Chester’s Chicago panorama comes close to marking a point in time: Bank of America Tower, though completed by the publication of Chicago Reflected, is depicted under construction. Few people will know what date this points to, but the same cannot be said of Matteo Pericoli’s Manhattan Unfurled, which Random House published in October 2001 but still features the Twin Towers. A short note from Pericolo from October 2001 is appended to the essay by Paul Goldberger in the booklet accompanying the concertina panoramas: “The drawings in this book were completed in December 2000. They belong to another time in history, since the skyline is no longer the same.” He also wrote on his website twenty years after the book came out that “the instant the book came out, it was already a memory of another era.” Today, not only has the WTC been nearly fully rebuilt, the first phase of Hudson Yards has been completed, residential towers along the East River have gone up, and other buildings and landscapes have reshaped how Manhattan is seen from the rivers that surround it. Yet, even more dramatic are the supertalls that have redefined the skyline at the south end of Central Park, which also relates to Pericolo, since he drew the view in 2003 in Manhattan Within, a 360-panorama of the skyline around Central Park. Drawing may be faster than building, but the changes in NYC over the last twenty years have been especially dramatic and rapid.
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— John Hill