No comments about Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism.

1 comments about Buildings of Iowa (Buildings of the United States).

1. This book is a handy dandy little guide for the daring soul who enjoys taking lazy Sunday afternoon drives in the great state of Iowa. The book doesn't have a lot of information per se, but it is really nice as a quick reference to many well-designed/constructed buildings that may be lurking just around the corner, or cornfield.

No comments about The Paradox of Contemporary Architecture.

No comments about Pevsner Architectural Guides: Stirling & Central Scotland.

No comments about Greece: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books - Modern Architectures in History).

No comments about Renaissance Architecture in Venice.

1 comments about The Inflatable Moment: Pnuematics and Protest in '68.

1. So you thought that inflatable chairs were just goofy, disposable conversation pieces - the lava lamp of furniture, doomed to evoke hazy images of some late 60s lysergic idyll no matter how many times they come back in fashion. This book is here to blow that perception out of the water - to tell for the first time the fascinating story of inflatables: how the idea emerged from the US military, was baptized by the ludic "instant city" manifestoes of Archigram, and became bound up in the politics of the Situationist-inspired street protests of May '68. There aren't quite as many high-quality images as I'd have liked, and from time to time the book descends into unwonted theoryspeak, but I know of literally no other reference on this particular moment - one where optimism, liberation, and technology fused to suggest possibilities where none had existed before. Highly recommended.

No comments about World Architecture 1900-2000 - A Critical Mosaic Volume 4: Mediterranean Basin.

No comments about Open 13: The Rise of the Informal Media.

1 comments about Design City Melbourne (Interior Angles).

1. Design City Melbourne
   
   Leon Van Schaik
   Photography by John Gollings
   
   Wiley Academy, 2006
   ISBN-13 978 470 01640 4 (HB)
   
   
   With a light touch `Design City Melbourne' tells the wonderful story of Melbourne's late 20th century architectural renaissance as an incubator of local design culture. And who better to tell that story than Leon van Schaik AO, Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) at RMIT where for 20 years he has been a passionate teacher, curator, administrator and advocate of innovation across the arts. And who better to photograph that story than John Gollings.
   
   The development of Melbourne as a Design City - a city Van Schaik defines as one which is temporarily "hot" with a catalytic mix of curators and creators - has been held in orbit by RMIT during his tenure and dominated by its vociferous architecture programs. Most of the book is taken up with brief biographies of the established and incipient Melbourne architectural glitterati, nearly all of whom are tethered to RMIT in some capacity. Most have been part of its graduate design school, a forum where the theory-practice nexus that Van Schaik insists upon, has been crystallized as nowhere else in this country and for that matter in only a few places around the world.
   
   Descriptions of these people and their practices are framed by a main essay regarding the curatorial methods and agendas Van Schaik developed since his arrival in Melbourne in 1986. Other shorter essays map the links between architecture and the academy, between architecture and other disciplines, and most importantly, between architecture and the city itself.
   
   In short, the story of Melbourne becoming a Design City in the course of the last 20 years is one of how, through this network of interconnections that Van Schaik in no small part engineered, a generation of designers has converted the crippling cringe that generally affects settler societies, in to the source of their liberation. As opposed to recoiling from the global so as to romanticize and essentialise the local, Van Schiak the immigrant, saw the cringe from all sides and exposed Melbourne to a consistent stream of international influences, trusting the locals to make their own, local sense of it.
   
   They were steeled for this by Peter Corrigian and his partner Maggie Edmond who had already pioneered a gritty Melbournian brand of critical regionalism in several small suburban riots. But it was their high risk gymnastics across the front of RMIT's Building 8, a building Van Schaik championed, that came to headline Swanston Street as a new axis of innovation cutting across establishment lines. With this project the conversations inside both RMIT and the local journal `Transition' (RIP), literally started spilling out onto the streets and muscled their way in to the otherwise dull Melbourne grid.
   
   Of course, many bright Melbourne architects, not least of all Howard Raggatt who nailed his own thesis on the cringe to RMIT's door in 1990 would have found their voices in the wilderness, and Van Schaik is not claiming credit for all, rather, as this book attests, the Design City is one of multiple synergies.
   
   From Edmond and Corrigan the baton was handed to Ashton Raggatt McDougall whose Storey Hall next door to Building 8 was thought so radical that they kept a bag over its head until opening day. Completely misunderstanding its brilliance, many wanted the bag put back on - Ralph Neale, the former editor of this journal included. ARM have since reinforced their importance in Melbourne's inner city renaissance by digging in to the Shrine at one end of Swanston and opening Pandora's box with the Melbourne Central Shopping Centre at the other. Federation Square by LAB architects replete with Paul Carter's footnotes to an-other history of colonization and the new QV complex by Lyons, Kerstin Thompson, John Wardle and Rob McBride all consolidate Van Schaik's thesis of a Design City. The temporal and spatial linkages between these works and Van Schaik's role in the cultural life of Melbourne are no coincidence, although a finer grained history of these breakthroughs would reveal more.
   
   As a somewhat overt homage to Libeskind, Federation Square is however more difficult to package as radically and originally local. Nonetheless, Van Schaik recoups it as a part of geometric arguments being waged in Melbourne, arguments between the platonic and the fractal to which he errs on the side of the latter. Whilst at this level he takes sides, this book makes clear that he never set out to form one school of thought and certainly not a style: quite the opposite. Just as it is the crucial factor in the biological world, diversity is the key to the cultural. But this is not to say that anything goes; the curator has to tie it all together and find commonalities without compromising the differences.
   
   Although it provides a poetic, political and geographic structure, there is much more in this book than an appreciation of Swantson Street's well known trophies. The whole kaleidoscope of designers who have inspired or helped Van Schaik in his quest to create a Design City are all showcased. Risking the perils of writing his own story through theirs, Van Schaik's tone is humble and indeed humbled by the creative work of his colleagues. He played his role and they played theirs, both fulfilling the Design City contract.
   
   Although he connects the dots from the efflorescence of his time back into Melbourne's deeper architectural history, this book is not about dispassionate historical analysis; rather it is about recognizing that there is a latent ecology of creative intelligence in any city and that if you nourish it, things happen. Neither does Van Schaik tell us what to think about this outpouring of work and nor, as he so easily could have done, does he admonish other Australian cities for doing so little in the time that Melbourne has done so much. And although this book seems designed for a broad audience and is to an extent promotional for all included, Van Schaik doesn't tell us why the Design City is good nor amass data about its benefits - those arguments have been won and now the work speaks for itself. Those who define themselves by their distance from RMIT would be hard pressed to deny the remarkable achievement of this group of people.
   
   By announcing what has been, however, books like this tend to also announce that which is about to pass and whilst Van Schaik worries for a future that could so easily acquiesce back into stylistic echoes, this is an uplifting book for anyone involved in the daily struggle to create serious cultural production.
   
   Given the theme of innovation, the design of this book is surprisingly conventional and some essays are too short and too cool for such a hot topic. The conclusion, a proposal to erect a copper sheath over the Arts Centre seems unnecessarily heroic. As opposed to vertical triumphs over the inner city symbolic order, perhaps the future of this Design City, like most in the 21st century has to be about horizontality, about landscape.
   
   In this book, Landscape architecture as a discipline and a profession, despite being there throughout it all, gets very short shrift. Van Schaik doffs his hat to VicRoads and RMIT landscape graduates, Cath Stutterheim, Patrick Franklyn and Leanne O'Shea are noted. Their works suggest that some of the rich conversations held in RMIT's landscape program are starting to find form but perhaps landscape is yet to be curated in the manner that Van Schaik has done for architecture. If that is so, then, the creators need to rise to the occasion and give the curator something inspirational to work with.
   
   RW