Architecture Books – Week 11/2024
Let's get small.
Better yet, let’s get miniature. Last week’s newsletter featured accordion books, so this week we continue with a focus on atypical formats with a miniature monograph and related books from the archives. In between are the usual new releases and book news.
Book of the Week:
Irma Boom: Book Manifest by Irma Boom, published by Walther König (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
Released a year ago, Book Manifest is a mini-monograph on Dutch designer Irma Boom that measures just 2-3/4 inches (7 cm) tall, technically making it a miniature book. (Scroll to the bottom of this newsletter for more about miniature books, generally.) For those without correspondingly miniature bookcases for their collection of miniature books, Book Manifest comes in a cardboard box that measures 6 inches (15 cm) tall, helping it sit alongside small- and “normal”-sized books on one’s bookshelf.
Book Manifest is the third, revised and expanded edition of a miniature book that Boom first produced in 2010, as Biography in Books, coinciding with a retrospective exhibition at the University of Amsterdam Library. That miniature book presented, in reverse chronological order, nearly 25 years of Boom’s bookmaking career across 704 pages, while the second edition, The Architecture of the Book from 2013, bumped it up to 800 pages and offered an XXL version with a paper size of 13-1/2 x 18 inches (34.5 x 45.5 cm). The latest mini, again published to coincide with an exhibition of Boom’s work at the University of Amsterdam, is now an even 1,000 pages, illustrated with 600 images — nearly all of them covers and interior spreads of books, just a smattering of the many books she has designed since 1986. For fans of Boom and people interested in book design, Book Manifest is a must.
“A miniature book about books sounds interesting,” you might be saying to yourself, “but what does it have to do with architecture, with architecture books?” Those who do not know the name Irma Boom may not know that she is responsible for the design of numerous notable architecture books, many of them done with Rem Koolhaas and OMA, including Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (Taschen, 2011), Fundamentals: 14th International Architecture Exhibition (Marsilio, 2014), and Countryside, A Report (Taschen, 2020). Consistent among this Koolhaas trio and other books on architecture and design that Boom has done, such as Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References (Birkhäuser, 2012) and Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect (Bard Graduate Center, 2020), is the need to create logical structures and appealing designs for voluminous, almost excessive amounts of information. Boom is a go-to designer for such projects because she treats books like architecture: more like buildings with structure, components, and construction than as singular artworks that are difficult to mass produce.
One can see everyone’s favorite Mies quote in the spread above, from the first of around a dozen essays by her and others amongst the presentation of some of her books in Book Manifest. Plus, Boom’s penchant for books as architecture is explicit in the blurb she contributed for my 2021 book Buildings in Print: “Architects need books: books are architecture.” The mini format of her monographs is hardly arbitrary, or done merely as a contrast to big books like Elements of Architecture, as Boom’s working process usually involves making miniature mockups so she can glean the architecture and structure of a design. Only the late Massimo Vignelli springs to mind as a comparable graphic designer with as much importance to architects and architecture books.
About ten years transpired between the second and third editions of Boom’s mini-monographs, a period that saw two experiences instrumental to her career and the way she looks at the history of books. First was a residency at the American Academy of Rome in early 2018 and second was gaining access to the Vatican Apostolic Library (BAV); the first led to the second and the second culminated in the exhibition Book! Boom! The Vatican Library meets Irma Boom in late 2022 / early 2023. A fair number of the additional 200 pages in the third edition of Boom’s mini-monographs is given over to the books she worked on in the intervening years but also some of the books she discovered in the BAV, also presented in covers and interior spreads. In some cases, as in Countryside, A Report, the petit companion to the Koolhaas exhibition of the same name that had a truncated run at the Guggenheim in 2020, Boom’s months in the BAV yielded insights (about paper size, typography, economy of means, etc.) that directly impacted her own projects.
Further influence of the BAV experience can be seen in The Book in the Age of … exhibition, curated by Boom, Koolhaas, and Phillip Denny, that was held at Harvard GSD last year. The small yet ambitious exhibition was to the history of books what Koolhaas and company’s Elements was to architecture: an expansive presentation of the technologies and shifting approaches to making books over centuries. The display included an extra-large mockup of a book with the exhibition’s contents — hopefully a hint of a publication yet to come. If made, it will surely be one of the highlights of an inevitable fourth mini-monograph on the world’s most influential bookmaker.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
40 by Studio Piet Boon by Piet Boon and Herbert Ypma, published by Lannoo Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Holland's Studio Piet Boon turned 40 last year and celebrates that milestone with a monograph of 40 “design ideas.”
The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture by Christopher Mead, published by ORO Editions (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The latest by Mead, who has authored books on Antoine Predock (RIP) and Robert Venturi, is this title with “twin volumes of text and image [that] map the creative pathways taken by architects in post-atomic Japan.”
Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann by Veronique Boone, published by Birkhäuser (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Architect Ernest Weissmann shot candid films at the studio of Le Corbusier in the early 1930s; stills from them are presented in multiple editions (hardcover, paperback, and limited edition with photo prints).
Robert Konieczny KWK Promes: Buildings + Ideas edited by Philip Jodidio, published by Images Publishing (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Here’s the first monograph in English on KWK Promes, the Polish firm of architect Robert Konieczny, one of the finalists for this year’s EUmies Award.
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 Cooper Union remembers Jeffrey Brown, who, along with his wife Elise Jaffe, supported numerous lectures, exhibitions, and publications (Book Manifest among them) related to architecture.
At the Financial Times, John Grindrod reviews Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39, the “majestic final” book by Gavin Stamp that was completed by his wife, historian Rosemary Hill, after his death.
John Donatich, who “led the expansion of Yale University Press’ art and architecture list to encompass monographs, trade books, exhibition and collection catalogues,” will step down as Yale UP director next year.
From the Archives:
On this week in 2014 I reviewed — no joke — “two small books”: Horror in Architecture (ORO Editions, 2013) by Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing and Lost Landscapes (nai010 Publishers, 2013). Although divergent in theme and typology — the first is a theoretical treatise by a pair of architects while the latter is a monograph on Rotterdam's LOLA Landscape Architects — both books are roughly 4-1/2 by 7 inches (11.4 x 17.8 cm), making them pocket-sized regardless of their girth. In the ten years since these books were published, instead of more books opting for smaller trim sizes like theses, there has been a prevalence of larger books. In fact, the "reanimated edition" of Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing’s Horror book, which came out back in week 4, opts for a larger, more traditional paper size (7 x 9 inches; 17.8 x 23 cm) — one that makes it slimmer but not as reflective of the “horrors” within. Likewise, the second book by LOLA, Landscape Works with Piet Oudolf and LOLA: In Search of Sharawadgi, ditches the small format for a letter/A4 paper size.
Not just any book can be called miniature. It should be no more than three inches (7.6 cm) in height, with slightly bigger books (3 to 4 inches; 7.5 to 10 cm) called macrominiatures and even smaller books broken down into subcategories: microminiatures (1/4 to 1 inch; 6 to 25 mm) and ultra-microminiatures (less than 1/4” tall). A book less than a quarter inch?! Yes, they exist, as revealed in Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures (Abrams, 2007) by Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison, the companion book to a 2007 exhibition at The Grolier Club. I didn’t see the exhibition, but I’m guessing that seeing so many miniature books on display must have been quite an odd sight, given how most people are used to books of traditional sizes. The companion book does the next best thing: illustrating miniature and smaller books at 1:1 scale on the page (a special miniature edition, as illustrated above by one AbeBooks seller, was also made available during the run of the exhibition). The collected books range from illuminated manuscripts and bibles to Nazi propaganda and artists’ books. Not among them are architecture books; this is hardly surprising, considering that drawings and other conventional architectural illustrations would be too small in miniature form. Nevertheless, given the appealing aspects of Irma Boom’s mini-monograph, I’m hoping that someday an architect takes the leap into miniatures. (I don’t know of one, but if you, dear reader, are aware of a miniature architecture book, please comment with that information.)
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— John Hill