No comments about Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism.

1 comments about Mathland.

1. One of those books that make you think and go OUTSIDE the "box" - alas, beyond the flat surface of the box.
   Stimulating, insightful, and connecting the dots where few people have connected them like this. ANyone who wants to break out of his/her own "rut" of thinking, go read this - put it aside - and re-read it again. One of those books that just creates new dimensions with each time you read it. Is that what is meant by re-generating dimensions? Enjoy

No comments about Artificial Light: A Narrative Inquiry into the Nature of Abstraction, Immediacy, and Other Architectural Fictions.

2 comments about San Francisco Modern: Interiors, Architecture and Design.

1. What a great book packed with pictures. The design is very modern and unconventional (read expensive). This is a very fun book to review. If you can't afford the architecture costs there are many ideas you can incorporate into a more typical home design.



2. Coffee table book showing all the nicest spots in the Bay Area. The spread on the family compound in Sonoma is worth the price alone!

1 comments about An Architecture Notebook.

1. Mr. Unwin's Architectural notebook is a most distinguished and intelligent, yet modest and workmanlike excursus on his other book, Analyzing Architecture. He uses the wall as the fundamental architectural "idea" or "archetype", and expounds on this theme through a series of learned essays, all with a tone of scholarship tempered with a gritty sense of being in the practical world. The drawings are a beautiful witness to a dying art, the in-situ architectural sketch, and they follow much in Francis Ching's tradition of the pale pencil, single line weight school, but Unwin's are more poetic and less machined; they feel more personal.
   
   Anyway, the chapter on "the inhabited wall" is the crucial one in this book. I'm sure many architectural educators would make use of this chapter, and very important conceptual spatial idea, in their teaching.
   
   But it's the overall ethic implied in this work that's so exemplary; every page seems to say 'attend to the modest craft of freehand drawing, apply to rigorous observation and analysis, abstract formal principles from this work, and then reapply to the architectural project at hand.'
   Highly recommended.

3 comments about Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism.

1. aalto is the master, and this book prove it. Now days with the sustainble issue everywhere this architect raises from the grave, almost a century ahead of his time the finland master takes over with the holistic aproach to the discipline.



2. This is a fabulous book for real students of modernism. This monograph goes beyond the handful of buildings we're used to seeing by this great architect. Aalto appears to be getting his just rewards these days as more and more of us return to his work.



3. a nice review, with a lot of pictures. Good quqlity af color and paper.

1 comments about Sullivanesque: URBAN ARCHITECTURE AND ORNAMENTATION.

1. This is an excellent, scholarly work by University of Illinois professor Ronald Schmitt. This book is a study in which the author traces the development of ornamentation influenced in nature patterns. The book shows how Sullivan's ornamentation was passed down to his former employees (an excellent study in its own right). And finally how terra cotta ornament became massed produced and used by lesser-known architects for the development of a Chicago "Sullivanesque" Vernacular.

   This is a very thorough book that will appeal to students of The Arts & Crafts/Prairie School and "vernacular urban architecture" which has all but been ignored by architects and academics. The book contains numerous photographs. There is a great chapter on Sullivan's disciples, and, as mentioned before, the work of lesser-known "blue collar" architects whose background buildings are great contributions to the city of Chicago. There is also an appendix which contains an exhaustive, state by state inventory of Sullivanesque buildings.

No comments about Dutch Vernacular Architecture in North America, 1640-1830.

1 comments about Treasures of Taliesin: Seventy-Seventy Unbuilt Designs.

1. "Treasures of Taliesin presents 106 drawings of 77 Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that were never built--buildings that Wright believed were his most interesting works. This revised, updated, an[d] newly designed edition includes new text from Bruce Pfeiffer, Director of Archives at The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Pfeiffer draws on his long association with Wright to describe the circumstances surrounding the germination of each project, characterizes the personalities involved, and explains why the work was not completed. The stories include political intrigue and assassination, as well as providing glimpses of personalities such as Mike Todd, and Ayn Rand, and a poignant recollection of Marilyn Monroe, who wanted an entire floor of her planned home with Arthur Miller for their children. There is even a residence for a mysterious client whose identity was known only to Wright.
   
   "In his careful selection of projects, Pfeiffer has created a visual history of Wright's accomplishments over a career that stretched from 1895 to 1959. Treasures of Taliesin ranges in scope from the minutely detailed--Wright's admonition to Franklin Watkins to "use cadmium plated screws with a electrical screwdriver" to secure the cypress siding of his studio-residence--to the uniquely extravagant: a description of the 26-foot drawing for the Mile High Building, exhibited in 1956 to the astonished world. This collection of drawings is both a feast and a fascinating overview of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural genius.
   
   "164 pages, 106 color reproductions, 13 x 10". Casebound book with dust jacket. ISBN: 0-7649-1041-8."--© Pomegranate

No comments about Disappearing Architecture: From Real to Virtual to Quantum.