No comments about Excluded Middle: Toward a Reflective Architecture and Urbanism.

No comments about An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy.

No comments about Old Buildings Looking for New Use: 64 Examples from Europe.

No comments about Rio Bec, Chenes, and Puuc Styles in Maya Architecture.

4 comments about Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner.

1. I checked this book out from our school's library and found it to be very exceptional. Anybody who is interested in set design, German Expressionism, film, or photography will enjoy this book.
   
   Great images, text, and references.



2. With a degree in architecture and a decade in the film industry I was delighted to wander across a book that brought both disciplines together in a language that students of both crafts might understand. The collection of essays provide access to the design decisions that faced the Production Designers of films from the dawn of "designed" cinema in the 1920's to the doorstep of filmmaking in the 1990's.

   If you find this book "too wordy" then chances are that this isn't the book for you as it is studied, researched and filled with images that most film fans have never before seen. It is a glimpse into the thought processes and schedule demands that shape the final look of a film.

   This book should be highly sought by fans of design and film alike.




3. If you are fascinated by film or archetecture, you ought to find this book of interest. Many great pictures, interesting anecdotes and perspectives beyond the "typical" film analysis.



4. Interesting, if a bit wordy, book explaining some of the thought processes that went into designing films of the near-future / alternate reality variety. This book would have much better had more illustrations/photographs been included.

1 comments about Brazil's Modern Architecture.

1. I WAS VERY PLEASED WITH THE DELIVERY SERVICE BECAUSE AMAZON RESPONDED FAST AND IN AN ADEQUATE WAY TO MY PROBLEMS.
   THE BOOK IS GREAT, IT HAS A VERY CLEAR OVERVIEW OF BRAZIL'S MODERN ARCHITECTURE WITH BEAUTIFUL PICTURES!

No comments about The Modern Functional Building (1926) (Texts and Documents Series).

1 comments about Perspecta 36 "Juxtapositions": The Yale School of Architecture Journal.

1. Writing in 3-D (2000)
   By Huang Xiang
   
   The oldest way to write poetry
   Is with a brush
   The newest way to write poetry
   Is with the body
   The most wonderful way to write poetry
   Is to stand right on your head
   With mind and body as one
   And dab ink
   On the ground!
   
   
   In a back alley in Pittsburgh sits a shingled house of little note except for the fact that the exterior walls are covered from foundation to roof with the cursive script and revolutionary verse of dissident Chinese poet Huang Xiang. Part of the City of Asylum project which gives international writers at risk a safe haven within which to write, this narrative home is the perfect materialization of many of the ideas in Perspecta 36: Juxtapositions, edited by Macky McCleary and Jennifer Silbert.
   
   Sweeping in its focus on the conditions of our time, the journal takes the reader on a multi-layered journey of discovery that turns the concept of architecture on its head in much the same vein as Huang Xiang's verse. Revolution, power and transition take center stage in this well-balanced journal that seams texts together to create sub- and hyper-texts that force the reader to mentally juggle the words and images before them. A sense of nostalgia in the form of roads traveled and studies undertaken arises throughout. Marjetica Potrc's "Caracas Case Study: The Culture of the Informal City" provides rich illustrations on the organic nature of the ever-changing homes on the hills high above Venezuela's capital city and, for this reader, brought back to life an evening spent sipping coffee with a young man eager to show his barrio home to a foreign guest. Leslie Lu's "The Asian Arcade Project: Progressive Porosity" allowed me to relive my own vertical traversal of Hong Kong via the intricate system of escalators and elevated walkways that intersect the city's close-packed skyscrapers while providing a new viewpoint on the ways the city's residents experience and navigate urban space. Many more recollections will be invoked in readers who have stood at the feet of the Berlin Wall, gazed out the window of a modernist home or walked down a meticulously planned boulevard in Brasilia.
   
   Broad in its attention to international contemporary culture, Perspecta 36 shows that the world's sovereign nations simultaneously rely upon and compete with one another to produce what might be called the stage of global juxtapositions. Architecture plays out upon this ever-shifting stage, providing a haven within which we may take shelter from the storm. In much the same vein as Huang Xiang's poem, the theoretical texts in the issue subvert architecture to the degree that we may begin to question its position in our tumultuous times. Evelyn Preuss's "The Wall You Will Never Know" deconstructs our notions of what the Berlin Wall stood for, both in physical and philosophical terms. In an equally revolutionary bent, Roger Connah's "Pulp Architecture" is a manifesto against "big name" architecture that calls for a new architectural strategy reliant on "film, street culture, art, play, terror, surveillance, the hacker ethic, shopping...war and new media." (Page 34) The editors surely used this list as a source of inspiration in their critique of the systems that fuel the architecture machine.
   
   The journal's visual program features the paintings of Joy Garnett that feature ghostly airplanes which hint at imminent disaster and attack from the sky and C.J. Kang's The Manhattan Project that melds imagery from the popular U.S. comic Popeye with superimposed bombers and a new tattoo for the hero's arm that reads "Enola Gay." Clearly addressing 9/11 fears and the Hiroshima nuclear attack, these paintings make us question the stability of the constructed form in an age when potential threats to the status quo loom large. To this end, Perspecta 36 urges us to rethink our built and social environment. Alexander Garvin's "Ground Zero: The Rebuilding of a City" is timely proof of the import of juxtapositions to our daily lives that extend well beyond the pages of Perspecta. On June 30th, 2005 the New York Times ran an article entitled "Redesign Puts Freedom Tower on a Fortified Base" that presented the new design for David M. Child's skyscraper for the World Trade Center site. A far cry from the plans outlined in Garvin's article, the new "impregnable" tower in many ways becomes Preuss's wall built directly in the midst of New York. Returning to Huang Xiang's poem, we may only question on what end architecture, and indeed contemporary society, will land in a world that seemingly depends on juxtapositions to survive.
   
   Eric C. Shiner (MA, History of Art, 2003) is an independent curator and writer based in New York City. He was the co-editor of Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine in 2004.
   
   (For more information on Huang Xiang's City of Asylum Pittsburgh project, please see www.mattress.org/news/events/asylum.html)

No comments about Josep Lluís Sert: Architect in New York (Spanish Edition).

2 comments about AIA Guide to Boston, 2nd.

1. This is a good guide book for walking around Boston and trying to understand some history behind the buildings. Too many buildings are covered, old and new buildings together. The general information about the construction date, architectural style is provided but not in detail. It is so grouped that it makes it easy to walk around the town and see good number of buildings in the neighbourhood. Information is not very detailed, State Haouse is described in two pages or so, other buildings in one short paragraph, just to give general idea about the architecture and history of the city. I found it more handy than other available books for it covers a lot and it has walker friendly sequencing.



2. As a handbook with information about Boston buildings, the AIA guide is useful. And its treatment of older buildings is reasonable. But this book is most interesting as a historical memoir, a reminder that architectural critics were once smitten by poured concrete and vast, empty plazas.

   Ever wonder how disasters like St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe managed to win AIA awards? Read Susan & Michael Southworth's guide to Boston, and you'll understand.

   The Southworths heap praise on the most unlikely monstrosities in the city. The execrable State HEW building is "a tour de force demonstrating the structural possibilities of concrete." The horrific Boston Architectural Center is "an admirable piece of contemporary architecture."

   The Southworths absolutely fawn over modernist heroes, irrespective of their work. They have nothing but kind words for I.M. Pei - making them perhaps the only persons in Boston capable of defending Harbor Towers or the MIT buildings. They are positively giddy about Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center, a monstrous bunker. In their eyes, 'the spatial drama is stunning, as are the bold concrete forms ... it is the work of a master."

   Now that architects have moved beyond blocky and dingy concrete boxes, the Southworths have very little favorable to say about them. They sniff at the varied facades, rooflines, and materials conceived for buildings like 75 State, 222 Berkeley, 500 Boylston and 99 Summer - if dingy concrete was good enough for Le Corbusier, why isn't it good for contemporary architects? Why can't we have more anonymous boxes like the "elegant" and "sleek" 28 State Street?

   The Southworths bemoan the fact that downtown buildings of the '80s frequently destroyed little alleyways. Of course, when I.M. Pei wiped out entire streets and blocks of lovely townhouses in the '60s, as at Government Center and the Christian Science complex, that was perfectly OK, producing "dramatic forms."

   Thankfully, the Southworths' era has long past. Their views would be more irritating if they weren't so absurd, and if anyone still had the audacity to build the concrete mausoleums they so passionately love.