Archinect - News

Win the "Architectural Guide China", a handy travel book of the country's architectural history

2016-02-23T12:25:00-05:00

Architectural Guide China is a unique travel guidebook that presents up-to-date insight into the rich architectural histories in Eastern China's megacities, which continue to create widespread impact through rapid urbanization, population growth, and the consequential effects on the natural environment.

In this volume of Architectural Guide, authors Evan Chakroff, Addison Godel, and Jacqueline Gargus give an architectural overview of nine major urban sites in mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Macau. If you're planning a trip to any of those places, this book can definitely come in handy.

Thanks to DOM-publishers, Archinect is giving away Architectural Guide China to three of our readers!

Read on for more about the book, and find out how to enter the giveaway.

"The 'Reform and Opening' era affected these metropolises in different ways and has influenced the existing structures of dynastic capitals, trade centers, former European colonies and discovery areas.

The volume contains 620...

Editor's Picks #437

2015-12-16T11:51:00-05:00

Nicholas Korody penned a double review; of 'The Geological Imagination' and 'The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform'. He finds "The two books also help illuminate some of the difficulties in perceiving climate change, while offering some potentials for movement" and goes on to reference "enmeshment", systems thinking and dark ecology.

Plus, Robert Urquhart took stock of how The Bartlett and the Architectural Association are "bringing emerging technologies into the UK's architecture education".

News
Denise Scott Brown, along with her husband Robert Venturi, have won the 2016 AIA Gold Medal. Snubbed of the 1991 Pritzker Prize when Venturi was named as the only laureate, Scott Brown is the second female recipient of the Gold Medal.

In honor of the happy and historic occasion, Denise Scott Brown appeared on Archinect Sessions #45.

To DWLindeman it "is splendid good news, and a long overdue award...Robert Venturi was right to say to the AIA ‘not without Denise.’ This is also a very significan...

Touring China's past, present, and future: an examination of "Architectural Guide China"

2015-12-09T18:02:00-05:00

If architecture is the ultimate fourth dimensional experience, then “Architectural Guide China” by Evan Chakroff, Addison Godel and Jacqueline Gargus is a remarkable fourth dimensional tour guide. It encapsulates not only the physical attributes and detailed locations of architecture in China, but its complex journey through time in a way that's compact enough to be useful, yet thorough enough to be thought-provoking.

The guide begins with three introductory essays, each of which attempts to make sense of the thousands of years of history, philosophy, and socio-economic realities that have informed both classical and contemporary Chinese architecture (all in less than fifty pages). This is of course a daunting if not impossible task, but each essay wisely chooses a specific aspect of this overwhelming scope to make a particular point. For his part, Evan Chakroff chooses to tackle what he describes as the centuries-old notion of ‘scalelessness’ in conjunction with rigidly defined diag...