Architecture Books – Week 49/2023
This week on A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books:
This week on my blog is the third and most likely last installment in the inadvertent "Places in Time" series, which looks closely at three books: the first about Chicago from the Great Depression to the mid-1980s; the second one about the broader American built landscape over roughly the same period of time; and the third jumping to Switzerland and tracing the urban development of Schlieren, near Zurich, over a 15-year period this century. All three of the books were in my roundup of holiday gift books a couple of weeks ago. The first two Places in Time posts looked at Detroit/Chicago/St. Louis and Paris/Indonesia/Flanders. The three books in “Places in Time III”:
Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986: How Technology, Politics, Finance, and Race Reshaped the City by Thomas Leslie, published by University of Illinois Press
Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of our Architectural Treasures by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, published by CityFiles Press
Urban Change Over Time: The Photographic Observation of Schlieren 2005–2020 Reveals How Switzerland Is Changing edited by Meret Wandeler, Ulrich Görlich and Caspar Schärer, published by Scheidegger and Spiess
Architecture Book News:
It’s the time of the year for book roundups.
First, the editors of Architectural Record present thirteen notable books of 2023, including a monograph on Aino + Alvar Aalto, a few books on single-family houses, and a hefty Norman Foster monograph.
Next, Planetizen made a roundup of the top planning books of 2023, a crop of books that “addresses land use, equity, road ecology, and climate change, and provides models for how planners can ensure their practice stays relevant to the urgency of today’s issues.”
The Architecture Foundation’s Book Week — presentations of “fourteen of the best newly published architecture books” — took place near the end of November. Over at World-Architects, I highlighted a few of the fourteen book talks, all of which are available on YouTube.
Looking forward to spring 2024, Publishers Weekly has a Top 10 of forthcoming books on art, architecture and photography, including Atlas of Never Built Architecture, the latest installment in the “Never Built” books by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin.
#archidosereads
Speaking of urban change in Switzerland, Atelier 5's Siedlung Halen (1961) in Bern, in an aerial photograph in Edmund Burger's Geomorphic Architecture (1986) and matching view in Google Earth (2023):
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