No comments about State of the Worlds Cities 2006/7: The Millennium Development Goals and Urban Sustainability: 30 Years of Shaping the Habitat Agenda (Un Habitat).

No comments about Architecture on the Move: Cities and Mobilities.

1 comments about The Spaces between Buildings (Center Books on Space, Place, and Time).

1. This is really a nice book. It reads very well and gives a good introduction over major landscape elements in urban and suburban. It also includes background information about the historical development of these landscape elements. That makes it quite easy to understand the urban and suburban landscape in the U.S.. It is one of these books that you read and think "aah, that's why...". A good and cheap present for landscape architects and students (nice paper, layout and format, too).

No comments about Front to Back: A design agenda for urban housing.

No comments about Site Planning and Design for the Elderly: Issues, Guidelines, and Alternatives.

1 comments about Stud: Architectures of Masculinity.

1. This excellent book offers a variety of perspectives on not only the psychology of space but also the ways that these spaces are masculinized and created to promote the ideals of heterosexual masculinity. Of particular note in this anthology are "Rock Hudsons Bachelor Apartment in Pillow Talk", an analysis of the bachelor pad and its overt design with the intention of accentuating the heterosexual and "closeting" the homosexual in the partitioning of male desire; and the sometimes humorous "Electric Carving Knife", a device marketed toward men as a means of perpetuating the male tradition of the meat carver. I also very much enjoyed the essay on "Gay use of the streets", concerning the appropriation of public spaces as a means of forming a cultural network in the cities of the 1920's.

   This is a very interesting examination of masculinity, and anyone interested in this topic should enjoy this multi-dimensional analysis of masculinity and its architectures. It comes with my heartiest recommendation (and, for any men out there, you probably will never again look at the electric carving knife in quite the same way!)

2 comments about Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change: A 21st Century Survival Guide.

1. Every American planning professional or aspiring city planner should include this book in their personal library. Besides the fight against standard American-style sprawl, planners are going to have to take the long view (it's why they're hired!) when designing buildings, cities, energy supplies, and transport systems in a much warmer world. This book is a start. In my opinion, any school that fails to include plannning aspects of climate change in its curriculum is derelict.
   As you can see from my other book reviews I harp on the need to examine nuclear energy as an option for our quickly urbanizing world. Besides good coverage of alternative energy for buildings and cities, the authors mention the aging UK nuke plants, the problem of relying on French nuclear power during the last heat wave, and other issues, including Sweden's policy reversal on shutting down its nuclear program. But this assessment on p 278 stood out for me:
   "However with the approaching oil crisis the UK govt may well have to review this (nuclear) policy. It is difficult to see how we will cope without nuclear power."
   Whether the UK will modernize its nuclear infrastructure is another matter.



2. How will we live when the oil runs out? How will we live when the climate is even hotter, with more floods, high winds, droughts? What kinds of buildings will be livable? How can we change what we build now to better serve humankind? Sue Roaf and co-authors argue that we won't be able to do it in "thin-skinned", windowless twentieth century buildings of glass and steel that keep out neither cold nor heat and require tremendous energy resources just to be usable. This is a great book about the many ways in which we need to and can change our thinking--particularly in architecture, in which a slavish adulation of "maestro-built," difficult-to-use buildings must be abandoned for a commitment to buildings and communities that will protect, preserve and comfort us in the resource-scarce times ahead.

No comments about Creative City.

3 comments about The Pig and the Skyscraper: Chicago: A History of Our Future.

1. This book is a worthless exploration of the city through the dubious analytic framework utilized by Mike Davis in "City of Quartz." What separates that book is Davis' intimate familiarity with Los Angeles as a lifelong resident. Whereas D'Eramo is an Italian who's polemic is as cliched as any other European assessment of America which comfortably embraces false stereotypes and broad generalizations about american urban culture. What mystifies me about these modern marxist urban theorists is they vilify modern american cities, yet ultimately believe that cities provide the best social mechanism for engineering their normative philosophies.
   anyway, none of this is to imply that Chicago is immune from criticism. It is, as is any city. It's has a sordid history of racism, corruption, an dubious institutional choices. But any comprehensive analysis of Chicago that refuses to recognize Chicago's virtues or at least attempt to understand Chicago on Chicagoans terms is intellectually bankrupt and a worthless read. If you want great polemic pick up the works of the great chicago polemicists Algren and Royko, not the work of this Italian Huckster



2. Chicago as it is. The history of Capitalism and the history of American power have never been disected like this before. This is a good intro to those who are interested in cultural studies and their relevance to our every day lives. This is a superb work in the line of Braudel, Jared Diamond and Mike Davis.



3. Ably translated into English by Graeme Thomson, The Pig And The Skyscraper, Chicago: A History Of Our Future by Marco d'Eramo is a serious-minded and acutely insightful social analysis of Chicago as the penultimate example of the modern metropolis. From Chicago's humble origins to its towering rise in world prestige to the churning capitalism that keeps it running, The Pig and the Skyscraper looks closely at America's famous windy city and pulls no punches regarding the dark side of urban sprawl. A fascinating, in-depth account, The Pig And The Skyscraper is especially recommended reading for students of Urban Studies and the historical, contemporary, and future development of metropolitan Chicago.

2 comments about Structure Systems.

1. This is ASTRONOMICALLY THE BEST architectural structures book of all time!! This is the second book for a serious architecture student or architect to buy after Deplazes' foundation book. My structures education was so frustrating because it was not VISUAL. I longed for a book like this 20 years ago!! But better than I could have ever imagined, this book is intensely visual, almost no numbers, instead an encyclopedic catalogue of structural spanning options in a maniacally ordered logic, drawn with a sweet German version of Ching's style. Just skimming this book several times will aquaint you with the logic, the systems, the options, and the breathtaking possibilities this great book throws at your feet. "Take that", it says, "and go do something great!"



2. This is almost the only graphically illustrated book on structural principles for architect.
   
   Most of the structure book concentrate on calculation which are more important to structural engineer than to architect. However, this book put emphasis on structural principals and structural typology. The author uses very clear drawn illustration + table + text to illustrate different structural types.
   
   This is a helpful resources if readers are architects interesting in structural design. The book could be more complete if real building examples are illustrated together with the diagrams.