Architecture Books – Week 36/2023
Back to a weekly schedule (fingers crossed!)
Wishing everyone (stateside) a relaxing Labor Day. With today being the unofficial end of summer in these parts, I’m planning on resuming regular weekly posts to my blog and updates via this newsletter. Expect these to land in your inbox every Monday from here on out.
This week on A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books:
Like most human beings, I can be contradictory at times. One area where this manifests is architectural surveys: books that usually collect buildings of a certain typology, but also ones spanning a particular timeframe or through some other theme. I've written a few of them myself, so I don't inherently hate them. But I tend to pass on them when it comes to new books, which most likely boils down to the fact I'm not a practicing architect and therefore don't need to look at, say, a roundup of libraries when I'm designing one. Yet, when it comes to old surveys — as in my latest #archidosereads, below — I have a hard time saying no to them after spotting them in used bookstores. I think part of their appeal is the way they capture the character of a certain time, and often, with the occasional geographical focus of surveys, a particular place in time. Being seen decades after they were made, the best ones manage to transport me back to a certain place in time — something I find irresistible, even if subconsciously, before putting it down in words here. A book need not be old to do such a thing, so this week and next week I'm featuring books that manage to capture certain places at certain times. The six books aren't all surveys, but the majority of them do fall into that subcategory of architectural books. Following the three US-central books this week, next week's installment will head to Europe and Asia.
Detroit Modern: 1935–1985 by Peter Forguson, photography by Amy Claeys, published by Visual Profile Books, November 2022
Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple: A Good Time Place Reborn by Pat Cannon, photography by James Caulfield, published by Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, December 2022
A. A. Fischer's St. Louis Streetscapes by Nancy Moore Hamilton, published by Missouri Historical Society, June 2023
Architecture Book News:
On Tuesday, Notting Hill Editions is reissuing Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London (1964): a review at Inside Croydon
The Architect’s Newspaper excerpts Paul Preissner’s essay “How Framing Works” from American Framing: The Same Something for Everyone (Park Books), also released this week
Metropolis rounds up the best new books on architecture, urbanism, design, and sustainability: “10 Architecture and Design Books Worth Adding to Your Reading List”
#archidosereads
A recent dollar-bin find: Office Building Design from 1976, second edition of an @archrecordmag book (back when they did books). Especially hard to resist given the inclusion of Paul Rudolph's recently demolished Burroughs-Wellcome Co. Headquarters in North Carolina (click and swipe for more photos of it):
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