Architecture Books – Week 12/2024
What in the world is Behaviorology?
This newsletter for the week of March 18 features a trio of books — one newly released and two old ones — that are centered around a methodology known as Behaviorology. It’s not a widely used methodology in architecture, so, not surprisingly, all three books are by the same author and well-known Japanese studio. There’s also the usual new books and book headlines. Read on!
Book of the Week:
The Nordic Window: Window Behaviorology in Nordic Architecture edited by Tsukamoto Yoshiharu Lab. Tokyo Institute of Technology; contributions by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Siena Hirao, Akiko Tsukamoto and Daiki Chiba; published by Strandberg Publishing (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
In the realm of books, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Tokyo’s Atelier Bow-Wow are known for the atypical guidebooks Made in Tokyo and Pet Architecture Guide Book, published in 2001 and 2002, respectively. The documentation of mixed-used hybrids in the first and tiny buildings filling leftover spaces in the second capture their interest in buildings that are not designed with the involvement of architects and are overt expressions of users’ needs, something that also finds synergy with their interest in vernacular architecture. These interests combined with other concerns to push the duo to adopt “Behaviorology” — studying the relations between people and their environments, generally — as a methodology for thinking about architecture and approaching their own designs, resulting in buildings with a quirkiness and sense of humor that has set them apart from their peers. A comprehensive 2010 monograph (at the bottom of this newsletter) even puts Behaviorology in its name.
Tsukamoto and Kajima are nevertheless serious architects who thoroughly research and document their studio’s own designs (see Graphic Anatomy) as well as the buildings of important and influential architects. The latter are done through universities, as in the Tsukamoto Yoshiharu Lab at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where Tsukamoto and his students have been documenting windows in traditional buildings and modern architecture since 2007. I first encountered the lab’s so-called “Window Behaviorology” in the 2012 WindowScape book (also at the bottom of this newsletter) in English; two other books on the subject in Japanese followed, but The Nordic Window, released this week in the US, brings English readers another book loaded with photos and drawings documenting the wide-ranging designs of openings in walls and roofs.
The ongoing “Window Behaviorology” research focuses on the architectural elements that are the interfaces between inside and outside: where daylight and natural air enter a building, where views of the outside world are to be had, where the interaction between the private and public realms finds expression. If we think of windows in a wall (as opposed to skylights above), all too often they are relegated to standard catalog components or, in the case of window walls and curtain walls, don’t exist as differentiations from the rest of the wall surface. Tsukamoto, with his interest in vernacular and people-centric architecture, is basically rallying against the treatment of windows in most contemporary architecture, preferring to find idiosyncratic instances where modern manufacturing melds with bespoke designs. The Nordic Window is full of them.
The Nordic Countries focuses on just three of the Nordic countries and predominantly six architects within them: Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz in Sweden, Alvar Aalto in Finland, and Kay Fisker, Arne Jacobsen, and Jørn Utzon in Denmark. Two essays by Tsukamoto bookend the three country chapters, while contributions by Siena Hirao, Akiko Tsukamoto, and Daiki Chiba further elaborate on the context, the architects, and the technology of the windows presented in each chapter. (An introductory essay by Politiken editor Karsten R.S. Ifversen rounds out the texts.) The meat of the book is made up of the individual windows that are documented one per spread: photograph(s) on the left and drawings, accompanied by a few lines of descriptive text, on the right, as in the two examples shown here. Photos and drawing work together to provide a clear understanding of each window in terms of materials, dimensions, qualities of light, and qualities of space.
The documentation — made on research trips to the three countries between 2016 and 2018 and submitted to the YKK AP Window Research Institute in 2018 — is well done, especially in the choices of axonometric views, but the most valuable aspect of the book is the selection of windows, sometimes surprising but always interesting. Take, for instance, the windows of Gunnar Asplund, whose Stockholm Public Library is shown above. Although the windows in the library are high and therefore out of reach, most of the other designs by Asplund documented here are intimate — and exceptionally so — such as a round hole cut into a wall at the end of a staircase in Villa Snellman and a small window with integral mailbox at the Lister County Courthouse. Aalto’s windows and skylights are suitably diverse and many of them are famous, but seeing them together in one place is a valuable benefit of the book. Architects and students looking to do something different, something special with the design of windows should take a look inside The Nordic Window.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Architectures of the Technopolis: Archigram and the British High Tech by Annette Fierro, published by Lund Humphries (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Archigram's appeal seems never-ending, and a few years ago British High-Tech saw something of a resurgence online, so it makes sense for a history book to examine how the two arose in London at the same time around a half-century ago.
Off the Grid: Houses for Escape Across North America by Dominic Bradbury, published by Thames & Hudson (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The latest roundup of residential architecture by Dominic Bradbury focuses on houses in North America that are remote, off-the-grid, and “largely” self-sufficient. Following a few-dozen case studies is an “off-grid guide” with ten points for readers to consider if undertaking their own off-grid project.
Rootedness: Reflections for Young Architects by Juhani Pallasmaa, edited by Peter MacKieth, published by Wiley (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, best known for The Eyes of the Skin (which just had its fourth edition published), presents eight essays edited from educational lectures he has given over the years, “designed for students of architecture at any age.”
Three books released this week by ORO Editions:
Design for a Radically Changing World by Andy Cohen and Diane Hoskins (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Hoskins and Cohen, global co-chairs of Gensler, have written a book about how the world’s largest architecture firm navigates the numerous crises — social, environmental, economic, health, geopolitics, etc. — that our “radically changing world” constantly faces.
Imaginary Wilds: Architectural Interventions for the Thomas Cole National Historic Site by Adam Dayem (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Contemporary views of wild, untouched landscapes are explored in this collection of student-designed architectural projects for a new gallery building at Thomas Cole’s historic home and studio in the Catskills.
Poodling: On the Just Shaping of Shrubbery by Marc Treib (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — I can’t think of a cuter (or naughtier, depending on your dictionary) name for a title than this book, which looks at the vernacular technique of pruning shrubbery that “probably” originated in 18th-century Japan.
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:
Lots of award news this week:
The shortlist for Booklaunch’s second annual Architectural Book Awards — 32 books in five categories — has been announced: find them starting on page 10 in the magazine’s Spring 2024 issue available on Issuu.
The 33 Best Dutch Book Designs 2023 were announced on March 7 and included at least one architecture book, Reuse to Reduce: Architecture within a Carbon Budget. The Case of BioPartner 5 - Popma ter Steege Architects. The grand “Golden Letter” award went to Walking as Research Practice, “a small but significant work; a uniquely bound, hand-held opus,” per the jury.
Related, the winners of the best book design from all over the world competition will be celebrated at the Leipzig Book Fair taking place the end of this week. Two architecture books from Park Books — Innenputz and Die Rationalität des Baumeisterlichen — are awardees.
From the Archives:
The vellum wrapping the cover of The Architecture of Atelier Bow-Wow: Behaviorology (Rizzoli, 2010) supplies a definition for the term behaviorology culled from The International Behaviorology Institute (TIBI) website, but curiously it appends the word “architecture” where it is not found in the original. This says to me that few architects, if any, apply behavioral research to architecture the way that Atelier Bow-Wow does with its overt adoption of behaviorology as a methodology. I reviewed their monograph on my blog in 2010, liking Terunobu Fujimori’s essay on the studio very much, and, although I lamented the omission of any of Atelier Bow-Wow’s highly detailed drawings, I found the photographs appropriate, given how they showed the spaces they designed in use.
Best I can tell, WindowScape: Window Behaviourology (Page One Publishing, 2012) is the first presentation in English of the window research by the Tsukamoto Yoshiharu Lab at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Unlike this week’s “Book of the Week,” with its focus on a trio of Nordic countries, Windowscape reaches far and wide, both geographically and chronologically, with as many traditional and vernacular buildings found in their pages as familiar works of modern architecture. (Some examples can be seen in an old Instagram post of mine.) As such, instead of chapters with countries or architects, we find them structured in regards to forms, uses, and effects: “Pooling Windows,” “Workaholic Windows,” and “Aligning Windows,” to name just a few. Rounding out this great little book are relevant essays by Christopher Alexander, Geoffrey Bawa, Rudolph Olgiati, and Bernard Rudofsky.
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— John Hill