Architecture Books – Week 34/2023
Anyone like monographs?
This week on A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books:
Of the numerous books publishers send me for review — be they requested by me, pitched by them, or arriving at my doorstep unsolicited — the highest percentage of them are monographs. This fact goes against the occasional sirens over the irrelevance and anachronistic nature of monographs in our digital age, with free access (for now) to voluminous amounts of information on buildings and architects readily available online. But books, in my opinion, are better archives than websites, offering architects a further level of control over the finished product compared to websites. It's not uncommon today to find architecture firms, no doubt driven by savvy marketing departments and PR firms, merging their brands across platforms, such that their monographs resemble their websites. But in five or ten years time, only the books will retain that expression, thereby making them important archives of architects' work and the means of presenting it. The four recently published monographs on my blog provide four diverse expressions for architectural monographs today.
Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual by Bryan Cantley, edited by Peter J. Baldwin, published by Routledge, April 2023
Merging City and Nature: 30 Commitments to Combat Climate Change by Batlleiroig, published by Actar Publishers (March 2023)
Allied Works Architecture 2003- 2022 (TC 156) by Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works, published by TC Cuadernos (July 2022)
Skylab: The Nature of Buildings by Skylab, published by Thames & Hudson (June 2023)
Architecture Book News:
Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic visits Phyllis Lambert to talk about her new photo book, Observation Is A Constant That Underlies All Approaches.
Graham McKay at Misfits' Architecture muses on AI in the context of Neil Leach's new book, Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects.
Read Sara Hendren's excellent review of David Gissen's The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access at LAM.
#archidosereads
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A few recently received books:
See these and more recently published and forthcoming architecture books on my blog and on my Bookshop.org page.
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— John Hill
Good point about the books becoming archive of the architecture branding, while the websites and other output changes (and disappears permanently). There's nothing like early noughties monographs with edgy typography and terrible early CGI renders..