Architecture Books – Week 14/2024
No April Fools here!
This newsletter for the week of April 1 features a new monograph on Mecanoo and a couple of old books on — appropriately — libraries and Dutch architecture. Plus the usual new books and book news. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
Mecanoo: People Place Purpose Poetry by Francine Houben and Herbert Wright, published by nai010 Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
It doesn’t matter that Mecanoo was formed by a trio of Dutch students in the early 1980s after the unlikely feat of winning the “Anders Wonen” (Living Differently) competition. It doesn’t matter that the studio’s early days were focused on the realms of social housing and urban renewal, two commendable typologies the firm still concerns itself with. It doesn’t matter that the firm, now 120 architects under founder France Houben, is also responsible for museums, cultural centers, transportation hubs, offices, and other projects around the world. It doesn’t matter because, for me, Mecanoo will always be synonymous with libraries.
Suitably, Houben spoke last week at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library in Midtown Manhattan on the occasion of the release of Mecanoo’s latest monograph, People Place Purpose Poetry. Mecanoo, with Beyer Blinder Belle, recently renovated this library located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 40th Street, in a six-story building that the New York Public Library took over from the Arnold, Constable & Company department store about a half-century ago. The design team was appointed in 2015, exactly one hundred years after the store opened, and the building reopened, with seven floors, in 2021. As someone who often used its predecessor, the Mid-Manhattan Library, and has used SNFL regularly for the last few years, I can attest that the library is dramatically better — finally, New Yorkers have gotten the circulating library they deserve.
Mecanoo and BBB are also responsible for the renovation of NYPL’s iconic Stephan A. Schwarzman Building across the street. A building that hardly needs an introduction, the Beaux-Arts library designed by Carrère and Hastings opened in 1911 on the footprint of the old Croton Reservoir. Occupying the eastern half of Bryant Park, SASB is NYPL’s main research library, but anyone who has visited knows its hallways feel like they are more populated with tourists than patrons. Unlike SNFL, which closed for a few years during construction, SASB has stayed open during its renovation. The results (still ongoing, I think) consist of strategic, sometimes imperceptible changes that are well integrated with the existing building and now allow it to better handle the flow of its various users and also work better in its main function as a research library.
It still shocks me that the NYPL was pursuing a plan by Norman Foster to sell the store-turned-library across the street, move that busiest circulating branch into SASB, and destroy the architecturally important, if-off-limits-to-the-public stacks beneath the iconic Rose Reading Room to do so. Public outrage led to that idea being shelved and the eventual hiring of Mecanoo and BBB for a pared-down but necessary renovation of the 1911 building. Sensibly, as described by Houben in the new seventh-floor “witch’s hat” event space at SNFL last week, Mecanoo approached the two projects as one, in terms of both planning and a “timeless” approach to architectural design, materials, and furniture. So, for instance, a new entrance to SASB on 40th Street better facilitates movement between the two libraries at street level, while modern touches inside SASB (stair and elevators on the south, lobby desk, exhibition space, gift shop and café, etc.) are in synergy with the interior renovations of SNFL, regardless of the dramatic differences in the existing architecture of the old buildings.
One of the chapters in the hefty People Place Purpose Poetry monograph is devoted to libraries. Of course, chapter five, “Wisdom and Wizardry,” is the standout in the book for me. It has the two NYPL libraries as well as five other libraries that Mecanoo has been involved with since the mid-1990s. Oldest is the TU Delft Library, completed in 1997 in the city Mecanoo calls home. The grass- and sometimes snow-covered “landscraper” was long on my list of must-visit places. In 2018, when I was in The Netherlands for WAF and made a visit to the Mecanoo studio, I was able to do so, finding it even more captivating in person than I anticipated.
The chapter also has LocHal Library in Tilburg, The Netherlands, the Library of Birmingham in England, Tainan Public Library in Taiwan, and the renovation of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC. The last, like SNFL, opened unceremoniously in the midst of the pandemic but greatly improved the library for patrons, librarians, and the public using it in other ways, such as eating at the café or hanging out in the rooftop garden. The success is hinted at in the renovation winning the US Building of the Year in 2021, a feature I curated for World-Architects. (Later I interviewed Houben about the MLK Jr. Library and other other libraries she designed.)
“Wisdom and Wizardry” is structured, like the other typological/thematic chapters in a manner that is slightly unconventional from other architectural monographs. A text by London-based writer Herbert Wright begins the chapter: touching on libraries in general but then going into project-by-project descriptions. The projects themselves come after his text, illustrated with photographs and drawings accompanied by captions but disconnected from the project descriptions; it’s an odd format I don’t completely understand. With this structure and Wright’s preference for verbally describing architectural features, it’s hard not to flip ahead to look at relevant photographs for better understanding the text. On the other hand, one could skip the introductory texts entirely and just jump to the projects, since their illustrations and captions do a good enough job in helping understand the buildings and grasp the many qualities of Mecanoo buildings — libraries and otherwise.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, published by The MIT Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — An intriguing notion: re-examining Thorstein Veblen’s classic The Theory of the Leisure Class through the lens of Chicago in the 1890s, “bolstered by a strong visual narrative made possible by several of Chicago’s historic photographic collections.”
A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World by José Luis González Macías, published by Chronicle Books (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — An unexpected yet appealing collection of more than thirty lighthouses around the world, documented with special illustrations and maps.
The Life and Death of Buffalo's Great Northern Grain Elevator: 1897-2023 by Bruce Jackson, published by SUNY Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The author, a photographer and activist, documents the famous but ill-fated steel grain elevator in Buffalo through text, documents, and his own photographs taken over a period of several decades.
Sydney Brutalism by Heidi Dokulil, published by UNSW Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Brutalism’s current appeal extends to Sydney, where Sirius, the apartment building in the shadow of the Sydney Opera House, was saved and recently renovated. This book explores the city’s brutalist heritage that includes Sirius and many other buildings.
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 64th iteration of the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair (NYIABF) is taking place April 4 – 7 at the Park Avenue Armory. Need some enticement to get tickets and go? See my coverage of the 2020, 2022, and 2023 fairs on my blog.
“City of Stories”: Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has a feature by illustrator David Macaulay about his picture book on Rome and his contribution to Building Stories, the new long-term exhibition at the National Building Museum.
Swissinfo previews Le Corbusier: Album Punjab, 1951, the facsimile of Le Corbusier’s spiral-bound sketchbook for Chandigarh being released by Lars Müller Publishers in a couple of weeks.
From the Archives:
The large public and educational libraries designed by Mecanoo and presented in this week’s “Book of the Week” are the exception rather than the norm for the building type. Most of the libraries people use on a daily basis are considerably smaller, be they branch libraries of one or two floors (not seven) or even one-room libraries inside public schools. This last kind is the focus of The L!brary Book: Design Collaborations in the Public Schools (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqias, a book I reviewed on my blog back in May 2010. The book documents the first decade of the Robin Hood Foundation’s program, the L!brary Initiative, to improve the physical infrastructure of libraries in New York City public schools: twelve case studies in which architects worked (usually pro bono) with the graphic designers at Pentagram to design libraries that were welcoming, functional, and had strong identities within the schools. I wrote that, like the libraries themselves, the book was “carefully crafted, thoroughly documenting the case studies with numerous photos and drawings.”
During Houben’s talk at NYPL last week, the Dutch architect recounted forming Mecanoo with two classmates in the mid-1980s, when there were few competitions in the Netherlands but also “not that many interesting offices.” Fast forward a decade and a half and the situation was considerably different, as witnessed by SuperDutch: New Architecture in the Netherlands, Bart Lootsma’s 2000 book highlighting twelve Dutch architecture offices. Most of the dozen formed either in the 1980s, alongside Mecanoo, or in the 1990s, with only OMA’s founding going back to the seventies. It was an exciting time, when architects and the architectural media everywhere were paying attention to one country. Some of the firms alongside Mecanoo and OMA in SuperDutch grew considerably larger in the subsequent decades — especially Wiel Arets Architects, MVRDV, UNStudio, and West 8 — designing projects and opening branch offices around the world. Not quite a before-they-were-famous collection, since these and the other studios in the book were well known in 2000, SuperDutch is a decent snapshot of a thriving local scene on the cusp of going global.
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
Hi everyone! Has anyone read the renewal of dwelling: European housing 1945-1975? I found the book works very well selected and also the photography and design are beautiful!