New Books in Architecture

What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its de...

Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of a...

In this episode, Steven Fine, Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, Israel, discusses his new book Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem to Rome—and Back, published in Brill’s Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy E-Books Online collection. He explores how the Arch has been a symbol of subjugation as well as empowerment for both Jewish and Christian cultures as they evolved acros...

Between the Stock Market Crash and the Vietnam War, American corporations were responsible for the construction of thousands of headquarters across the United States. Over this time, the design of corporate headquarters evolved from Beaux-Arts facades to bold modernist expressions. \ Grace Ong Yan's book Building Brands: The Architecture of Corporate Modernism (Lund Humphries, 2021) examines how c...

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of t...

Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures (Routledge, 2021) examines the philosophical context of our current situation and its implications for design. It explores how modernity and our constricted notions of progress have contributed to today’s crisis of values, and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of modera...

Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbia UP, 2020), Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that...

Featuring exclusive interviews with the internationally renowned architects: Kengo Kuma; Alberto Campo Baeza; Špela Videcnik (OFIS); Fernanda Canales; Jonathan Sergison (Sergison Bates); and Jane Hall (Assemble) Entering Architectural Practice (Routledge, 2020) is a practical and honest guide for architecture students, entering the world of architectural practice. There is often a disconnection be...

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models...

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate wi...

The Gaza Strip is one of the most beleaguered environments on earth. Crammed into a space of 139 square miles (360 square kilometers), 1.8 million people live under an Israeli siege, enforcing conditions that continue to plummet to ever more unimaginable depths of degradation and despair. Gaza, however, is more than an endless encyclopedia of depressing statistics. It is also a place of fortitude,...

How can we develop solutions to the housing crisis? In Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives (Liverpool UP, 2020), Matthew Thompson, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool, offers a history of collective alternatives to state and market driven housing in Liverpool, drawing...

The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph. D. takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Pred...

Now in its fifth edition, Analyzing Architecture has become internationally established as the best introduction to architecture. Aimed primarily at those wishing to become professional architects, it also offers those in disciplines related to architecture (from archaeology to stage design, garden design to installation art), a clear and accessible insight into the workings of this rich and fasci...

The Business of Architecture: Your Guide to a Financially Successful Firm (Routledge, 2017) is the essential guide to understanding the critical fundamentals to succeed as an architect. Written by successful architects for architects everywhere, this book shows the architecture industry from a corporate business perspective, refining the approach to architecture as a personal statement to one that...

The Korean War is now America's seminal war. It was the first war conducted with the new United Nations, the first war fought against the Chinese Communists, and the first modern war the US didn't win. Louis Nelson designed the mural wall at the Korean Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington DC. His just published memoir, Mosaic: War Monument Mystery, An Historical Memoir (239 Productions, 202...

Everything you use, from your home to your smartphone, from highways to supermarkets, was designed by someone. What did they get right? Where did they go wrong? And what can we learn from how these experts think that can help us improve our own lives? In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have su...

Parks and recreation systems have evolved in remarkable ways over the past two decades. No longer just playgrounds and ballfields, parks and open spaces have become recognized as essential green infrastructure with the potential to contribute to community resiliency and sustainability. To capitalize on this potential, the parks and recreation system planning process must evolve as well. In Parks a...

Teaching Landscape: The Studio Experience (Routledge, 2019) gathers a range of expert contributions from across the world to collect best-practice examples of teaching landscape architecture studios. This is the companion volume to The Routledge Handbook of Teaching Landscape in the two-part set initiated by the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS). Design and planning studio...

The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2020) is a handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times. In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. Hughes and Armstrong search beyond human...

Gardens at the Frontier: New Methodological Perspectives on Garden History and Designed Landscapes (Routledge, 2019) addresses broad issues of interest to architectural historians, environmental historians, garden writers, geographers, and other scholars. It uses different disciplinary perspectives to explore garden history’s thematic, geographical, and methodological frontiers through a focus on...

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this...

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for over twenty-five years. His primary teaching and research interests are in environmental planning and policy, with a special emphasis on coastal and natural hazards planning, environmental values and ethics, and biodiversity conservation. He...

Today I talked to Enoch Sears about his short ebook Social Media for Architects. The book details how architects can use social media for lead generation through didactic examples, commentary and case studies. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored...

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the average American family still lived by kerosene light, ate in the kitchen, and used an outhouse. By 1940, electric lights, dining rooms, and bathrooms were the norm as the traditional working-class home was fast becoming modern—a fact largely missing from the story of domestic innovation and improvement in twentieth-century America, where such benefits se...