Architecture Books – Week 16/2024
Digging through some archives of architectural theory
This newsletter for the week of April 15 focuses on a trio of readers pulling essays, interviews, and other contributions from journals of architectural theory: one new and two from more than twenty years ago. In between are the usual new releases and headlines. Enjoy!
Book of the Week:
archithese reader: Critical Positions in Search of Postmodernity, 1971–1976 edited by Gabrielle Schaad and Torsten Lange, published by Triest (Buy from Amazon)
The Zurich-based journal archithese has been published four times a year since 1971, when it was founded by art historian Stanislaus von Moos and Hans Reinhard, head of the Association of Independent Swiss Architects (FSAI). This reader compiles a selection of theoretical essays and interviews from von Moos’s tenure at the helm of archithese: 24 issues from the beginning of 1971 until the end of 1976, after which the journal merged with werk. (That merger was short-lived, since archithese has been independently published since 1980.) For readers like myself, who are familiar with archithese but can’t read German (or the occasional French), archithese reader is valuable for presenting important essays and interviews from the journal’s early years in English for the first time.
The front flap of the 528-page paperback displays the covers of the issues spanning from 1971 to 1976. A quick scan reveals some structures and themes that are then elucidated in the reader’s contents. For instance, issues 1, 2, and double-issue 3/4 from 1971 are visually unique, with graphic design that splits archi and these at the top and bottom of the cover. After those issues, which were published in Lausanne, the numbering returns to number 1, indicating the “reboot” that happened with Arthur Niggli taking over publication of the journal. Among the twenty numbered issues from 1972 to 1976, one sees certain themes repeated and/or presented in series, especially “realism” in numbers 13 and 19 and three “Metropolis” issues in 17, 18, and 20. Not surprisingly, the themes explored by von Moos and his contributors, some of which are grasped in the covers, are used to structure the chapters in the reader.
archithese reader features 25 pieces from the journal in five thematic (i.e., non-chronological) chapters: “Historicity and Meaning,” “Realism and Autonomy,” “Urbanism and Consumption,” “Use and Agency,” and “Territory and Shelter.” Introductory essays elucidate the themes and the pieces that follow them, with two of them written by editors Gabrielle Schaad and Torsten Lange and the other three written by Marie Theres Stauffer, Irina Davidovici, and Samia Henni. Most valuable — at least in terms of learning about the journal itself, how its contents were determined, how it looked, and so forth — is an interview between the reader’s editors and von Moos at the back of the book. Coming to the fore is the transatlantic nature of the contributions, much of which stemmed from von Moos teaching in the United States and being exposed to the architecture and ideas of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas, and others.
The highlights in archithese reader are numerous, many of which reflect the transatlantic situation: von Moos’s look at Swiss architecture through the lens of American architecture (from issue 16, “USA-Switzerland”); his interview with Venturi and Scott Brown in the “Realism” issue (13) subtitled “Las Vegas etc.”; “Roxy, Noah, and Radio City Music Hall” by Rem Koolhaas, published in a 1976 “Metropolis” issue two years before it became a chapter in Delirious New York; and a presentation of 20 years of Atelier 5’s “experiments in communal living.” Given that much of archithese’s contents from its first six years were initially in English and then translated to German for publication, some of the essays and interviews were then translated back to English for the reader, while some are pulled from English sources, such as Koolhaas’s book. This odd situation does not detract from the book, which is exceptionally edited and beautifully presented — a must for fans of theory and architectural thinking in the first half of the 1970s.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
The Architecture of Studio MK27 by Gabriel Kogan et. al., published by Rizzoli (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The “first international publication” dedicated to studio MK27, the Brazilian studio founded by Marcio Kogan that excels in the design of modern single-family houses.
Borrowed Sceneries: The Influence of Japanese Garden Art on Swiss Landscape Architecture by Rahel Hartmann Schweizer, published by Birkhäuser (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — An unlikely study of the Swiss imitation of Japanese gardens in the 20th century, with many previously unpublished visuals pulled from a variety of archives.
Le Corbusier: Album Punjab, 1951 edited by Maristella Casciato, published by Lars Müller Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — A reprint of the notebook Le Corbusier kept during his two-week visit to Punjab, India, ahead of the planning and construction of Chandigarh, faithful down to the spiral binding.
Mien Ruys: The Mother of Modernist Gardens by Julia Crawford, published by Lund Humphries (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Crawford’s book is the “first comprehensive study in English” of Mien Ruys (1904-1999), the Dutch landscape architect whose influential model gardens in Dedemsvaart opened to the public in 1976. (I put those gardens, Tuinen Mien Ruys, in 100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs.)
Speculation: Discourse, A Series on Architecture edited by Monica Ponce de Leon, published by Princeton University Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The latest in Mónica Ponce de León's Discourse series, which began in 2020 with Authorship, “explores architecture as a form of cultural production that has traditionally been underestimated or undervalued.”
Tourist Modernist: Walking Along Modernist Architecture in Belgium by Gerlin Heestermans, published by Uitgeverij Luster (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — A collection of twelve walking tours that take visitors inside modernist houses in Ostend, Liège, Brussels, and other Belgian cities.
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:
Over at RIBA, Helen Thomas, author of Drawing Architecture (2018) and editor of Drawing Matter Extracts 2: Women Writing Architecture (2021), explains Women Writing Architecture, an open-source, annotated bibliography of writing by women about architecture that she founded and edits.
The Art of the Book, a collaboration between graduate students at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and Temple Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center, is on display at Temple University's Charles Library in Philadelphia until July 15. (This news reminds me of the The Book in the Age of … exhibition at Harvard last year.) Bonus: Watch all 20 episodes from last year’s “A Look at a Book” program that led to The Art of the Book.
Over at World-Architects, I rounded up four recently published architecture books on housing in North and Latin America.
From the Archives:
Apropos of this week’s “Book of the Week,” two other readers of architectural theory from journals spanning the 1970s come to mind. First is Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, 1973-1984, which was edited by K. Michael Hays and published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1999. Oppositions was the nearly square journal of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), the non-academic NYC institution founded by Peter Eisenman that also presented lectures, published books, printed a newsletter, hosted exhibitions, functioned as a school, and was directly responsible for at least one building (see “from the archives” in 13/2024). Massimo Vignelli’s design of the journal, from its orange cover and font selection to the mainly two-column layout of text and images, was integral to the journal and institution’s identity, so the reader replicates the originals in the few-dozen contributions from two-dozen issues that comprise it. It is a rewarding collection that includes some of the most important — and frustrating, admittedly — writings on architectural history and theory in its time.
Second is Re-Reading Perspecta: The First Fifty Years of the Yale Architectural Journal, a massive book from 2005 with excerpts from the first 30 issues of the journal edited by students at Yale School of Architecture. The book is massive because it adopts the same folio paper size as the journal itself, and because the importance of the contributions collected in the reader is unmatched by any other architectural publication with such longevity. Perspecta started in 1952 under chair George Howe, but it is most famous for the 9/10 double issue edited by Robert A. M. Stern in 1965, the last year that Paul Rudolph served as chair. I have that double issue that is coveted for the excerpt from Robert Venturi’s then-forthcoming Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Charles Moore’s “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” Unfortunately, Stern and the other editors of Re-Reading Perspecta (Caroline Picard and Alan Plattus) opted not to carry the page layout and design from the original issues to the reader; this provides a consistency across the hefty book’s 828 pages, but it pushes the images into a narrow 2-inch band across the bottom of the 12-inch tall pages, clearly an effort at maximizing the book’s contents while keeping it below a thousand pages. This means readers will not see, among other things, the red Disneyland gatefold map that was part of Moore’s essay — one example of how an original exceeds its copy.
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— John Hill