Architecture Books – Week 33/2024
This week we're unboxing architecture books
This newsletter for the week of August 12 takes a look at a couple issues of an academic journal, one of which is packaged as a box set, with a book, bookmark, puzzle, and poster. This novelty got me looking at some other box sets from my archives. Note: It’s mid-August, when very few books are being released, so the new books are omitted this week but will be back next week. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
forA on the Urban Issue #1: Frictions edited by Andrea Börner, Cristina Díaz Moreno, Efrén García Grinda, Baerbel Mueller and the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
When is an issue #1 not the first issue? When it is preceded by an issue #0. I’m not sure how common such zero-number issues are in the wider realm of publications, but I’ve noticed a few when it comes to architectural journals. The ones that come to mind immediately are ANY Magazine, which launched with Number Zero in 1993; PRAXIS, the "journal of writing + building" founded by Ashley Schafer and Amanda Reeser had its Issue 0 in 1999; Harvard GSD’s New Geographies launched its 0 issue in 2009; and San Rocco followed one year later with “Innocence,” its zero-number issue. I see these zero-number issues a bit like TV pilots: productions that set the tone, agenda, and form for subsequent shows/issues, while also helping to determine if something is successful and if it will be funded and continue to be produced.
I’m thinking of zero issues this week because the first issue of forA on the Urban, the print and digital platform “conceptualized and produced” by the Institute of Architecture (I oA) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, was released in March of this year — three years after I oA made forA on the Urban Issue #0. Yet, unlike each of the journals mentioned above, in which the zero issues determined both the intellectual and physical formats of their respective publications (just look at all the San Rocco issues side by side to see what I mean), forA on the Urban took the form of something special for its Issue #0: a brick-sized box set with book, bookmark, poster, and puzzle. Issue #1, a slim, 160-page book published by Birkhäuser, is more traditional by comparison. Even though both issues were designed by Studio Lin and both issues are consistent with the title logo and other aspects of its design and contents, as will be touched on below, the physical change from zero to one is dramatic.
Most of the pieces of Issue #0 are nice (puzzle tiles with a Peter Cook drawing!) but superfluous. The meat of it is the thick book: 432 pages with nearly 30 contributions “[examining] the open, unfinished, multi-scaled, interconnected, complex and wild nature of urban manifestations, challenges, and situations through an expanded notion of architecture.” The contributions range from terse statements accompanied by illustrations and short interviews to lengthy essays on wide-ranging topics and dispersed places. Accordingly, they are arranged by number of pages and given a reading length, starting with Jimenez Lai’s six-page, four-minute read, “It Is Urban to Argue” and ending with Stan Allen’s 20-page, 20-minute read, “Microcities: The Culture of Cities Revisited.” So instead of thematic chapters (definitely a possibility with 28 contributions) or the editors putting the essays in deliberate proximity to others, the ordering is almost accidental, based on the length of the texts and amount of visuals the contributors delivered. Issue #1 continues this format, moving from short to long, from Keller Easterling’s three-minute read, “The Mix,” to Emilio Distretti and Alessandro Petti’s 15-minute “Visions for Architectural Demodernization.”
It is worth pointing out that the platform’s title, forA on the Urban, was precisely articulated to emphasize the role of architecture, the A, in the multiple urban forums, the fora. The zero issue was launched in concert with the forA on the Urban website and an event, Forum #1 on the Urban, at the Venice Architecture Biennale in September 2021; Forum #2 followed at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in April 2022. These three pieces — publications, website, events — comprised the forA on the Urban platform.
Normally I would try to parse some of the contents of the Book of the Week, in this case the more readily available Issue #1 (Issue #0 was only available previously via Berlin’s Books People Places), but not long after receiving the two issues from the people involved, forA on the Urban shut down. This happened on July 15, but I’m just now seeing the closure statement on the website, meaning I can only speculate on the brief four-year run of the project. Are academic explorations of architecture and the urban a thing of the past? Hardly. Were the ambitions expressed in the Issue #0 box set too difficult to sustain? More likely, though hard to say for sure. One thing I do know is that Issue #1 is a bit of letdown from Issue #0: I find the contributions in the zero issue more rewarding than the first, and I also appreciate the novelty of its packaging — a brick at home on my bookshelf. (See the From the Archives section below for other “architectural box sets.”)
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:
HarperCollins imprint William Collins has acquired the rights to the biography of architect Zaha Hadid: Queen Zaha is being written by biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (they won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for their bio of Willem de Kooning) with a research grant from, and the full cooperation of Hadid’s estate, and will be published — be patient! — in 2029.
Over at BD, Nicholas de Klerk writes that the forthcoming (in the US) Modern Buildings in Blackheath and Greenwich: London 1950-2000 by Ana Francisco Sutherland “demonstrates compellingly how the architecture that now characterizes the area is deeply rooted in the place and its history.”
“How to Map New York City”: a long article at Urban Omnibus documenting how they created a highly detailed illustrative map of NYC to celebrate their 15th anniversary and mark some of the places their contributors have written about. (The map is available via a donation to Urban Omnibus.)
From the Archives:
When I rack my brain to think of other multifaceted box sets akin to forA on the Urban Issue #0, there is one academic production that comes to mind: the first issue of Thawed, the journal made by the School of Architecture and Graphic Design Departments at the University of Illinois that I featured on my blog back in 2010. Befitting it being made by students in architecture and graphic design, respectively under professors Stewart Hicks (of more recent YouTube fame) and Jimmy Luu, the journal rooted itself in architecture zines, journals, and pamphlets that came before it, and it was extremely diverse in its design and construction. The various pieces — a poster, stickers, pamphlets, booklets, newsprint, even laser-cut chip board and balsa — came clamped together but required disassembly in order to be looked at and read:
The first issue of Thawed was published in fall 2009 and a call for contributions to the second issue was put out by the school the following spring, around the time of my review, but I don’t think it lasted beyond one or two issues. I wrote that, because it was “centered on exploiting the potential of print” and the balanced contributions of the two departments, “there is readily apparent a desire to situate Thawed in relation to other journals of its ilk, to set it apart from its peers.” It did that, but apparently in a way, like forA on the Urban, that was unsustainable.
Another box set that comes to mind is more elaborate: The Sleepwalkers Box, a documentation of Doug Aitken’s video installation that was displayed on the facades of MoMA in 2007. When I saw Sleepwalkers in person, I didn’t speculate on the need for a more permanent documentation of the piece, but when such a thing arrived in spring 2012, I basically said that a multimedia “remix” was the only way to capture the original. Instead of just a 96-page, 12-inch-square book with text and images, the box set also comes with a DVD, compact disc, record, flip books, and a double-sided poster, all in a perforated yet sturdy box:
At $300, the initial asking price for The Sleepwalkers Box was high but basically in line with the production of the various pieces accumulated within — it can be seen as six $50 items packed together. Still, it is an extravagant presentation for an artwork that I’d argue was special for its fleetingness, its ephemerality. The book, DVD, and album foreground the cast of famous actors and soundtrack but dilute the art/architecture experience of standing in the cold (in my case) to watch Aitken’s moving images dance across Yoshio Taniguchi’s facades.
Later that year, in October 2012, Pantheon released Building Stories, the $50 (now $100) graphic novel-in-a-box that was described by many people at the time as Chris Ware’s magnum opus. In the context of this newsletter, it can be seen as the pinnacle of “architectural” box sets. The graphic novel, set in a three-flat apartment building in Chicago, consists of 14 “distinctively discrete” books, booklets, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets — all totaling 260 pages and all fitting within a large tabloid-sized box:
How is it architectural? Not only is the apartment building an integral element in the various stories depicted by Ware in his dense and distinctive comic format, “the organizing principle of Building Stories is architecture,” as reviewer Douglas Wolk wrote in the New York Times upon its release, “Ware renders places and events alike as architectural diagrams.” There is even a cutaway isometric of one floor of the building on the back of the box, accompanied by depictions of the 14 pieces. Many of the comics were originally published in places such as the Times, making the box set a means of controlling the format of the publication — page size, paper type, binding, etc. — at a level beyond the highly controlled layouts of Ware’s logically structured yet emotionally wistful comics.
Of the various boxed-set books touched upon in this week’s newsletter, Building Stories is the most impressive, the most justifiable in terms of its extravagance, and the strongest argument for box sets to be one-of-a-kind creations rather than templates for series or journals. But considering the dearth of such creations, you probably didn’t need me to tell you that, dear readers.
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— John Hill