Architecture Books – Week 8/2024
Housing is a right, even in NYC.
This week’s newsletter is bookended by new and old books by Richard Plunz, the Columbia University professor who has devoted himself to housing in New York City. In between are the usual new releases and book news.
Book of the Week:
New York_Global: Critical Writings and Proposals, 1970-2020. Housing, Infrastructure, Pedagogy by Richard Plunz, published by Actar Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
Most likely, Richard Plunz’s legacy will forever be defined by A History of Housing in New York City, the seminal text from 1990 that was updated seven years ago. (See the bottom of this newsletter for more information about that book.) Although “housing” is suitably the first term in the triumvirate of “sedimentary layers” at the end of the lengthy title of his latest book, New York_Global (released this week), Plunz admits in the book's introduction that the collection of essays is more aligned with pedagogy than housing or infrastructure, since the essays were spurred by his teaching at Columbia University and are interspersed with projects by students in the housing studios he led at GSAPP. As such, one could read the essays to see, he writes, “changes in the focus and substance of pedagogy” over the essays’ fifty years (the first is dated 1970 and the last 2020). Even so, the things that haven't changed dramatically over this half-century jump to the fore, especially in the context of housing in NYC: Affordable housing and economic inequality are still big concerns, and tactics proposed decades ago (e.g., adding low- and mid-rise buildings to the open spaces between towers-in-the-park public housing) are just now seeing fruition.
The 25 essays — most, but not all of them are focused on NYC, as “global” in the title indicates — were culled from academic and trade journals, books, talks given by Plunz, and unpublished pieces found in the Richard Plunz Papers at GSAPP’s Avery Library. Therefore, readers familiar with A History of Housing in New York City, like myself, will find something new, be it an essay on Barcelona’s Diagonal, a text on a redevelopment proposal for Algiers, or even an interview about analyses of Twitter hotspots and other social media engagements in Manhattan. The same can be said about the project plates (lettered A–S), which are thoughtfully inserted in the middle of relevant essays. Plate A, shown here, is a case in point: Studio projects focused on Naples, done while he was teaching at Penn State in the early 1970s (he started at GSAPP in 1973), sit within an essay, “Developments,” dating from the same time. The essays and projects are organized strictly chronologically, meaning overlaps like this occur but recurring themes, including NYC housing, are scattered throughout the book's roughly 200 pages.
Even with the surprises and occasional geographic forays beyond the five boroughs, I found the essays and projects focused on NYC the most valuable parts of the book. For example, the pieces on adding density on public-housing superblocks are as relevant now as then. Even essays that miss the mark to some degree, such as one from 1983 (with Martha Guzman) that strives to locate substandard housing and population loss within a so-called “New York Ring” — this phrase doesn't seem to have caught on, which might be explained by an accompanying map that gives the impression of wedges extending from Midtown Manhattan, not concentric rings radiating from the same — are valuable as archival texts now widely available to interested readers.
Toward the end of the book, in a 2003 interview with the late Kristen Richards, Plunz mildly laments not designing more housing in his lengthy career (of of his few designs, his “Ring” contribution to the Vacant Lots design study from 1987 is near the middle of the book), but he is more upset that young architects interested in housing beyond apartment buildings and houses for the rich have not been given enough opportunities. These words ring true today, twenty years later, and are echoed in earlier texts by Plunz and projects by his students: expressions that fighting for decent, affordable housing is a slow but necessary task for architects.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
The City as a System: Metabolic Design for New Urban Forms and Functions edited by David Dooghe, Eric Frijters, Catja Edens, Matthijs Ponte, Thijs van Spaandonk, Christopher de Vries and Jet van Zwieten, published by Valiz (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower may have been demolished, but metabolic metaphors are alive and well, as in this edited collection exploring solutions for urban problems.
City Science: Performance Follows Form by Jeremy Burke and Ramon Gras, published by Actar Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Burke and Gras are co-founders of Aretian | Urban Analytics and Design and this, their first book, illustrates their “city science methodology used to evaluate the relationship between city form and urban performance.”
Housing Atlas: Europe 20th Century by Orsina Simona Pierini, Mark Swenarton, Dick van Gemeren and Carmen Espegel, published by Lund Humphries (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — This hefty book presents more than 80 seminal housing projects from across Europe in plans, sections, and elevations, in the vein of the great Floor Plan Manual (née Atlas).
Looking for the Voids: Learning from Asia’s Liminal Urban Spaces as a Foundation to Expand an Architectural Practice by Géraldine Borio, published by Park Books (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Swiss architect Géraldine Borio’s research projects in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Seoul are beautifully presented in a spiral-bound volume with color-coded pages of differing sizes.
The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto by Sofia Singler, published by Lund Humphries (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Alvar Aalto continues to be popular with architects, though recent books acknowledge the contributions of his wives Aino and Elissa, apparently including this critical account of their religious buildings.
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:
Architizer is hosting a free, one-hour webinar on Tuesday, February 20 (11am EST) titled “How Architects Get Published: Harnessing the Power of Print in the Digital Age.” It will feature two speakers from Cantina, the design studio behind Architizer’s annual "The World’s Best Architecture" compendium.
Metropolis previews the forthcoming Shelter Cookbook (Spector Books), edited by Leopold Banchini and Lukas Feireiss, which “provides an intimate look into the home of 85-year-old publisher, builder, and storyteller” Lloyd Kahn, author of Shelter, Domebook, and other well-known books. (Shelter, I should note, is one of the 100 books I put in Buildings in Print.)
Sumita Singha, author of Thrive: A field guide for women in architecture, reviews 100 Women: Architects in Practice (RIBA Publishing) at Building Design, saying it “offers welcome inspiration for today’s practitioners, as well as for the next generation of women architects.”
Yet another review of Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities (I collected a bunch of them in week 44/2023), this time from Michael Nicholas, an editor at Failed Architecture, writing at The Architect’s Newspaper. (Spoiler alert: he’s not a fan.)
From the Archives:
On this week in 2017 I reviewed Columbia in Manhattanville, which was released in 2016, not long before the first phase of Columbia University’s controversial, contested campus in Manhattanville — about a half-mile north of its Morningside Heights campus — opened. The timing could hardly have been coincidental, given the long gestation of the campus and the need of architects, professors, and students at Columbia to come to terms with the project, which displaced people and businesses but also made concessions to the those in adjacent neighborhoods. Back then I wrote that the book “fills a void by presenting what the campus is as well as what transpired to make it happen.”
Although “housing” is the first of the trio of terms listed in the sub-subtitle of Richard Plunz’s “Book of the Week,” there is no mention of his seminal text, A History of Housing in New York City, in the new book — not that I could find in its pages, and it’s nowhere to be found in the index. Interested readers, therefore, need to go to the source. First published in 1990 and expanded in a new edition released in 2016, the book is, as the latter’s description indicates, “a standard in the field”; it is effectively the only book needed to understand the totality of housing (i.e., not exclusively luxury housing) in New York City over the modern era, from the mid-19th-century until the near-present. I haven’t read the book cover to cover, but I use it whenever I need to research old housing, such as Sunnyside Gardens, which I included in 100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs, or Twin Parks Northwest, the site of a tragic fire in 2022. The revised edition, which I haven’t seen, adds about thirty pages in a new last chapter, “Entropies and Atrophies”; its name implies that the issues the city has been dealing with since the 1970s — the decade of the financial crisis but also the Housing and Community Development Act, which shifted social housing from production to subsidies — are far from being properly addressed.
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— John Hill