5 comments about Design by Competition: Making Design Competition Work (Environment and Behavior).

1. Worth to read for all architects, developer as well as environmental psychologists



2. The best book I've read on design competitions. In fact, the best book I've read about architecture. A must read for anyone interested in the field



3. I've wondered about the trophy architecture I've seen in my city and elsewhere. As did Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to our house, Design by Competition goes beyond the publicity to tell the true story: The emperor's wearing no clothes. Nasar packs the book with facts and anecdotes about flaws in competition designs through history, and the disastrous results of a Peter Eisenman competition winning design. If you liked Wolfe's book, you'll love this one.



4. A compelling and comprehensive book about the problems with design competition architecture and signature architecture. It analyzes competition successes and failures through history; and provides a detailed analysis of Peter Eisenman's competition winning design for the Wexner Center, a full blown disaster that the critics loved. He shows that the emperor is wearing no clothers. It is a must read for any citizen concerned about their built environment and for anyone involved in a design competition--sponsors, jurors, competitors, and concerned citizens.



5. Have you ever seen a building that won a design competition and wondered what planet the people who designed it and chose it came from? Jack Nasar's latest book, Design by Competition, brings the same clarity of thought and sound aesthetic sense shown in his earlier work, The Evaluative Image of the City, to another fundamental aspect of urban design: design competitions. Here he again relies on solid social and behavioral surveys, and a deep commitment to community, to dispell the elitist values of architects who place the pursuit of the grand architectural "statement" above sound function, responsible economics, social relevance, and even beauty. He strips bare the hollow ideology of avant-garde architecture pawned off in competitions on a public it disdains, showing it to be out-of-step with the values of those it claims to lead. It also calls into question the underlying educational and professional atmospheres that reward such work. Written in a tone reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, William H. Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, and Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Nasar holds up a mirror to the conduct of design competitions and finds a distorted image in reflection. In response, he offers many common sense suggestions for improvement. While the book reads in places like a journal article written for the professional social scientist, it's a must read for all with professional or lay interests in architecture, city planning, urban design, and landscape architecture.

No comments about Tracing Architecture: The Aesthetics of Antiquarianism (Art History Special Issues).

1 comments about In Search of a Living Architecture.

1. this book is fantastic! i am currently a 5th year architecture student...i wish i had come across this book by first year. it is plainly written, precise, easily comprehensible. in a school where the archi(babble) is almost as important as the design, this book gives a person like myself hope for the future of architecture, design, and construction. albert frey (whose mentor was le corbusier) is one of the lesser known great architects of the 20th century. his work has so much to offer. simplicity at its best! a must own!!!!!!!!

No comments about Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism.

1 comments about Mexico: Architecture - Interiors - Design.

1. Outstanding in its ability to capture the range of Mexican architecture and design from the historic haciendas to the stunning modernist houses of Mexico City.
   The best part, however, are the amazing sensual houses of Careyes and Cuixmala, you can practically feel the sea breezes.

1 comments about An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition.

1. An Early Encounter with Tomorrow won the 1998 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. From the Society's press release, this book meets "the highest standards of imaginative scholarship", "makes available much new information", and "interpretations cross disciplinary lines and point the way to new approaches." "Arnold Lewis demonstrates and analyzes the cultural importance of the Columbian Exposition and of the skyscrapers in Chicago's Loop....The major theme is Chicago's international importance in the transformation of Western culture at the end of the 19th century. Europeans who endtered the Loop walked int a real future, not a vision of one. Exhilarated or disquieted, they acknowledged Chicago's central district as the 'Museum of the present.' The minor theme is the usefulness for historians to study the encounter between the established and the new, the collision between old world assumptions and new world realities, not only in the Loop but also in the Columbian Exposition." From Meredith Clausen's April 1998 review in the American Historical Review, "Carefully researched, well-documented, clearly organized, and beautifully written, Lewis's book should be required reading for anyone in the field of American history, cultural studies, and women's studies as well as architectural history. It is cultural history at its best."

No comments about Architecture and Interior Design: A Basic History Through the Seventeenth Century.

No comments about Architecture and the 'Special Relationship': The American Influence on British Architecture Since 1945.

2 comments about The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream.

1. Amazingly researched biography of a (bad) icon of New York's skyline. The only drawback is the overly academic, detached tone which lessens the thesis that the Pan Am assisted in the fall of the modernist regime. In any case, this is a must read simply for the story of how a big building gets built in a complicated urban environment.



2. In 1987, _New York_ magazine ran a poll to determine the buildings that New Yorkers hate the most. The results were plain on a cover of the magazine, which showed a gigantic wrecking ball taking its first swipe at the Pan Am Building. The building is not only on New Yorkers' most hated list; though it has had a few defenders, it has since its inception drawn criticism from a worldwide public, from architects, and from professional architecture critics. How could such an unloved mass ever have been plonked on Park Avenue? There are plenty of reasons for the failure, and plenty of repercussions from it, and all is told in _The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream_ (MIT Press) by Meredith L. Clausen. Professor Clausen teaches architectural history, and she has produced a big, well-illustrated, and weighty volume that covers the history of the building and the history of much of twentieth century urban architecture. There are plenty of books devoted to particular building that are considered architectural successes; Clausen shows that one devoted to a failure can be just as interesting, though perhaps not as inspiring.
   
   The Pan Am Building was conceived in 1958. It was to be part of the complex of the Beaux Arts masterpiece, the Grand Central Station, which had been completed in 1913. The economic force behind the construction was Erwin Wolfson, a highly respected and successful real estate developer who had a quiet manner, broad interests, and remarkable erudition. Wolfson was unable to accept the proposal of Richard Roth, whose firm was prolifically designing efficient and economic buildings for businesses, and wanted a well known architect with a name, one that would provide the building with prestige and enable it more readily to be rented to moneyed clients. He didn't get one architect with a name, but two. Walter Gropius had an established worldwide reputation as an architect and an academic spokesman for the Modern Movement, the glass and steel functionalism produced by the famous Bauhaus school. He was joined by Pietro Belluschi, who had previously worked with him, an architect who had experience as a design consultant and architect for corporations, and who had previously designed tall office buildings, as Gropius had not. The resulting design was released to the public in February 1959. It was the largest office tower in the world, 59 stories tall, of faceted glass and concrete exterior, in a shape of a broad octagonal prism. It spanned the full width of Park Avenue, looming over the Grand Central Terminal. Where the terminal had above it the less soaring but more delicate New York General Building and then simply sky, the new building would block any vista and would dwarf adjacent buildings due to its immensity. Observers found the building a betrayal of the civic principles that Gropius and Belluschi had espoused. Just as the public could not stop the construction, it could not stop Pan Am's installation of a heliport on the roof, for express trips to and from the surrounding airports. It was too noisy and too dangerous, people said, and they were eventually proved right; the heliport was closed after a fatal crash in 1977, and one of the five fatalities was a pedestrian on the street below.
   
   The accident sullied the reputation of Pan American Airways, which was under financial difficulties and went bankrupt in 1979. The building now bears a MetLife sign, but has had no change in the professional and amateur dislike directed toward it. Paris's Eiffel Tower was disliked when it was built, and is now beloved; nothing like that is going to happen to the Pan Am Building. The debacle has had its upside. The next development of the area was to have been a huge rectangular block constructed over the station, but the preposterous addition was so vilified that the Landmarks Preservation Commission's refusal to allow it was upheld by the Supreme Court. The Pan Am Building had disillusioned architectural professionals and the public, and served best in the capacity of a bad example, something the city should never allow again. Clausen's wonderful, detailed look at the failure is also a cautionary tale on hubris and the risks of letting money do just what it wants to make more of itself.

1 comments about Le Corbusier's Hands.

1. For LC enthusiasts. This book revealed "broken details" of a GIANT by one of his closest collaborators and friends. Treat this book as a semi-biography with a different perspective.