One of the perks of architecture as a contemplative art is that there has been a tremendous amount of great writing produced around it.  Here is a roundup some of the best books I read in 2015 (hint: a great source of gift ideas for the architect or architecture enthusiast in your life!).

Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry
Paul Goldberger

For those that are interested in reading about the people behind the buildings, this is a must-read.  A biography of late 20th-century art and architecture featuring Frank Gehry, this work is most powerful in its ability to unpack a man who, perhaps more than any other single individual, embodies the troubled word “starchitect”.  In contemporary media the conversation about architecture is often obscured, more rarely enhanced by conversation about the people creating it; this squarely falls in the latter category.  It is much easier to understand the enormous effect Gehry’s designs have had on architecture in particular, and the world in general, through understanding the process through which he creates those designs.  Goldberger leverages a four-decade friendship into this moving portrait and colorful history.  Great for architecture and biography lovers.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Ada Louise Huxtable

 

“In the end, art is truth, as sententious as that sounds, or as close to it as we get, and the truth of the man is in the work.”

As with Goldberger on Gehry, this is a powerhouse of architectural history.  Written by the 20th century’s preeminent architectural critic about the 20th century’s preeminent architect, this deceptively small book walks the reader through history, architectural evolution and revolution, and one of the most hotly contested figures in contemporary architecture with precision, rigor, and grace.  Huxtable’s wry humor lends itself well to a man so outrageous he became the self-caricature he created, slowly painting a subtly nuanced, varied yet accurate portrait.  A light, entertaining read excellent for history, biography, and FLW buffs.

Ambient Commons
Malcolm McCullough

 

“How can electronic artifice bring alive a sense of belonging to the world, and not just suggest conquest, distraction, or escape?”

This intensely dense book is a challenge to work through, and is quietly one of the most urgently-needed texts in the Information Age.  Beginning with definitions of attention and time and ending with a call for audio-visual ethics, McCullough carefully walks the reader through what it means to be a consumer of media, the unavoidable effects of digital media on physical environments, and the surprising opportunities that exist for each to augment the other.  Strongly recommended reading for anyone who uses the Internet.

Writing About Architecture
Alexandra Lange

“Buildings are everywhere.  We walk among them and live inside them but are largely passive dwellers in cities of towers, houses, open spaces, and shops we had no hand in creating.  But we are their best audience.”

The built environment rests in a funny place in most of our minds; although it affects all of us, all the time, we mostly don’t know how to think or talk about it in ways that everyone can understand, and therefore often feel handicapped in how we can participate in making it better.  Lange’s Writing About Architecture could have just as easily been titled Thinking About Architecture: from sensory-oriented walkthroughs to neighborly ruminations that change the world, Lange constructs a straightforward, highly accessible framework on how to evaluate buildings and built contexts using six pivotal examples from contemporary architectural writing.  An outstanding resource for architecture students, this would also be a helpful addition to any practicing architect’s bookshelf, and a useful primer for everyday citizens on how to think about, talk about, and feel ownership over their own communities.

Kicked A Building Lately?
Ada Louise Huxtable

 

“There is a far more sophisticated sense of architecture and a deeper response to the built world today than ever before in history.  In these years, a kind of wisdom has emerged.  People have learned to see and feel the city.”

For decades the authoritative voice in mainstream architectural criticism, first for the New York Times and later for the Wall Street Journal, Ada Louise Huxtable took a long hiatus from journalism to write a series of short, engaging books on architecture and urbanism.  In this volume, she wastes no time letting readers know through the title that architecture is a thing to be engaged with immediacy by anyone.  Like kicking tires on a car, she announces, one should be free at any time to kick a building: to evaluate for themselves its quality and effectiveness.  Through descriptions of cities, buildings, and architectural taxonomies, Huxtable shows through example how to think about the historical, political, financial, aesthetic contexts of our rich but often confusing built environments.  Published in 1989 with many essays originally penned in the 1970s, it’s also an interesting exercise to see how well each city or building has held up over time.  Each short, entertaining essay is a quick punctuation mark in a book that is dense with information, tart with commentary, and yet extremely easy to read.  A great book for architecture hounds and city planning enthusiasts.

Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography
John Comazzi

 

“The book presents a collection of Korab’s most distinctive images of Modern architecture, each carrying the imprint of his sensibilities and practices used to reveal what [Korab] refers to as ‘the dynamic tensions between architecture, nature, and the human condition.'”

While Julius Shulman is generally considered the starchitect photographer of Modern architecture, Balthazar Korab captured many of the era’s most iconic buildings.  The Hungarian architect made his way through Paris to Michigan, working closely with such pivotal designers as Eero Saarinen, Oscar Niemeyer, and Frank Lloyd Wright to produce images that were true to the architecture’s form and materiality, and whose true genius was maintaining a unique intimacy and vulnerable quality.  A quietly lovely book perfect for Michigan and Modern architecture lovers.

Hearts of the City
Herbert Muschamp 

“Architecture, no less than politics, is an art of the possible.”

A collection of one of the liveliest thinkers ever to write for the New York Times, this book is a collection of essays on architecture, design, and other observations by the former architecture critic Herbert Muschamp.  Including his seminal essay, “The Miracle in Bilbao” (arguably the most widely-read architectural essay in history) and spanning work from 1987 until his death twenty years later, these writings are like the man himself: unabashedly partial, packed tight with references, relentlessly energetic.  A must-read for aficionados of architecture, New York, and highly entertaining nonfiction.

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INTRODUCTIONLet's say you're throwing a big party.  You take a few weeks to sort out the menu, invite all your friends - you even make sure you clean the bathroom (for real this time).  By the time the last drink is drunk, the last dish piled up in the sink, and the last person tumbling... View full entry

Chicago is hosting North America’s inaugural Architecture Biennial this fall (3 October – 3 January).  Titled “The State of the Art of Architecture,” architectural firms and practices from all six continents have been invited to display their work.  Spanning all sizes and kinds of... View full entry

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is an unbelievably rich, dense, colorful survey of architectural thought all over the globe.  Everything from paper collages to massive urban revitalization projects are represented, and the ideas and conversations being had sparkle with excitement... View full entry

The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial is almost through its first month (it runs now through 3 January 2016).  Playing off of the internationally renowned Venice Architecture Biennale but with a distinctly different flavor and approach, each of the 100+ entries, installations, kiosks, and... View full entry

As a crucible for contemporary architectural practice and thinking, there is nothing quite like a biennial, which is why it’s so extraordinary that Chicago is currently hosting North America’s inaugural Architecture Biennial event. Practices from all over the world come together to showcase... View full entry

The "State of the Art of Architecture," North America's inaugural architecture biennial, is now firmly under way in Chicago.  Over a hundred practices from all over Chicago and the world are displaying projects covering the gamut of types, ideas at stake, and representational scales and modes.An... View full entry

Sound the alarm: the women are missing!Equity By Design (originally named The Missing 32%) is an advocacy group for women architects in the United States.  It started, perhaps inevitably, in San Francisco; architects like Dr. Ila Berman, Cathy Simon, Anne M. Torney, EB Min, and others had begun... View full entry

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is being held primarily at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington, Chicago), and the displays will be spread out throughout and around the entire building; a cogent spatial experience (one hopes!).  But if you'd like to know before you go where the... View full entry

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is almost here, and there are over 100 participants.  Want to check them out on Twitter before you go?  Or, not going to be able to make it and you're looking for a virtual experience?  Below is a list of all participants with official (not personal) Facebook... View full entry

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is almost here, and there are over 100 participants.  Want to check them out on Twitter before you go?  Or, not going to be able to make it and you're looking for a virtual experience?  Below is a list of all participants with Twitter accounts.  Most are at... View full entry

In the vein of trivia, networked knowledge, and of course the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Architectstasy presents: a trivia game for architecture geeks!  It is a mashup of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon plus the Wikipedia Game: linking one topic to the next by six degrees of separation.  For... View full entry

Iwan Baan...

DRAMA IN THE ARCHITECT WORLD! Did you know? The news: Zaha Hadid has just been awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.The drama: she walked out of a radio interview with the BBC News. There's going to be a lot written about this today. About how much it has to do with her being a woman (or not)... View full entry

Iwan Baan has been chosen to document Chicago for their first ever Biennial.If you think about it, this is kind of a funny thing to say.  Chicago is already articulate about its architectural identity:it has a well-established architectural foundationit has architecture tours (the river... View full entry

Our clients and education deserve the very best work that we are capable of producing, and this means doing some intellectual and philosophical heavy lifting about our projects and practices. This means understanding the formal and historical contexts in which our work finds itself and... View full entry

February 2015: Michael Sorkin, Florencia Rodriguez, Oliver Wainwright, Christopher Hawthorne, Michael Hays.

Of the 100+ artists and architects converging on Chicago for North America’s first architecture biennial, a few have given TED talks (some of them more than one).  Whether you’re looking for a TED distraction or wanting to dive into the biennial mood, here is a compilation of CAB... View full entry

TED: Iwan Baan, Ingenious Homes in Unexpected Places

TED: Bjarke Ingels, 3 Warp-Speed Architecture Tales

TED: Bjarke Ingels, Hedonistic Sustainability

TED: Liz Diller, Tech-Empowered Architecture

TED: Liz Diller, A Giant Bubble For Debate

TED: Frank Gehry, Now What?

TED: Frank Gehry, My Days as a Young Rebel

TED: Theaster Gates, Reviving a Neighborhood With Imagination, Beauty, and Art

There’s a new architecture biennial coming to Chicago.This, friends, is a PRETTY BIG DEAL.How big?104 artists and architects from the Magnificent Mile to Madrid, Tel Aviv to Tokyo, will soon be converging on just a few square miles in the heart of the United States for a three-ring, five-star... View full entry

There's a circus coming to town.And by “to town”, I mean the United States.  And by “circus”, I mean the horrifically overblown pomp and circumstance that’s going to get accorded the Obama Presidential Library.You guys, can we just agree in advance to CHILL OUT about it?The architects... View full entry

I sought this book out because (A) as an aspiring architecture critic I thought I should know what others are saying about it, and (B) Dr. Lange is kind of funny on Twitter.  I am enormously glad that I did.Who should read this book: practicing architects and architectural designers; urban... View full entry

In a bucolic rural setting one hot Sunday afternoon this July, a group of Michigan architects gathered to discuss the future of their local AIA chapter.  In some form or another, this conversation is happening all across the United States: a crisis in fate and faith of architects in "their"... View full entry

An alternate title to this article could have been, Let's All Think Like Architecture Critics.Okay, Ann Arbor. I don't want to freak you out or anything, but we have a real opportunity to make a profound impact on the face and function of our city for a long time to come.  The so-called "Library... View full entry

Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects had an opportunity to give a TED talk in 2005.  Before diving into the content, it's worth noting that at an event characterized by its animated, compelling, unforgettable speakers, Mr. Mayne's talk falls, well, flat.  He mentions once or twice that he's... View full entry

Here’s the thing about Herbert Muschamp.He’s kind of like this smooth nightclub you don’t know whether you want to be a part of. If you go, then everyone knows: you’re “in”. You’re “cool”. You look like you know the things everyone wishes they knew. You acquire a sort of... View full entry

Greg Lynn has occupied a prominent yet uneasy role in architecture for two decades now; crucial in developing new production processes and ways of thinking, yet always leaving the user experience as an uninteresting side effect of his designs. This talk is an illuminating long glance at his method... View full entry

In 1989, architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote an essay for the New York Times, “How Buildings Remember”, that was in part the first review of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.  In it, he discussed Modernism, transparency, the uneasy intimate relationship between art and... View full entry

She can feel like an all-chef/no-cook kitchen, but Ann Arbor wears her heart on her sleeve: you never have to guess what she’s thinking. She speaks her mind and she takes her passions seriously. As a town founded in the wilderness, named after its hallmark greenery, Ann Arbor has a long... View full entry

There’s something to be said for a bookstore whose theme of inclusivity extends to other species (I’m looking at you, scratch-hound Duke).  There’s a lot to be said for a bookstore that’s managed to survive the tribulations of Amazon and an economy that has led many... View full entry

AnnArbor.com reporter Ryan Stanton sums up my response to this proposal in his droll title: “19 new Old West Side-style homes coming to Ann Arbor’s north side”.  I couldn’t agree with Mr. Stanton more. Read the rest here... View full entry

In the rural South, where I'm from, the big running joke is that directions are often given in landmarks, and the even bigger joke is that those landmarks don't even have to be there any more for them to be used in wayfinding.  Perhaps the biggest joke of all?  I still do it, knowing... View full entry

For anyone who doubts its value, this is why urban planning is so very important.   Ask not for whom the bell tolls, friends: it tolls for the Old Fourth Ward.   The headline for this project’s go-ahead reads: “City Council Approves 14-story-highrise to Avoid Potentially... View full entry