New Books in Architecture

Casting an eye toward the frantic vertical urbanization of Toronto, Condoland: The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto’s CityPlace (UBC, 2023) traces the forty-year history of the city’s largest residential megaproject. James T. White and John Punter summarize the tools used to shape Toronto’s built environment and critically explore the underlying political economy of planning and real e...

In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing the relationship between humans and forests through responsible, sustainable use of local and regional wood in home building.  American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or of concrete and...

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument? Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University...

They call it Spanish Harlem or sometimes just El Barrio. But for over a century, East Harlem has been a melting pot of many ethnic groups, including Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Italian, Jewish, and African American communities. Though gentrification is rapidly changing the face of this section of upper Manhattan, it is still full of sites that attest to its r...

From one of today's most inspired architects and urban advocates, a manifesto for architecture as a force for addressing our biggest social challenges. The world is facing unprecedented challenges, from climate change and population growth, to political division and technological dislocation, to declining mental health and fraying cultural fabric. With most of the planet's population now living in...

The vibrant red sandstone temples of India's Deccan Plateau, such as the Pattadakal temple cluster, have attracted visitors since the eighth century or earlier. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the coronation place of the Chalukya dynasty, Pattadakal and its neighboring sites are of major historical importance.  In Shiva's Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India (Yale...

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Lucy Benjamin. Dr Lucy Benjamin is a researcher in architectural theory and creative practice. Her work focuses on the intersection of environmental theory, architecture, and philosophy, especially the emergence of repair as a design principle and the conditions for human rights in the age of eco-crisis. They discuss time and space on the streets of Paris; repair...

In cities across the world, a new urban condition is spreading rapidly: an ever-increasing push toward efficiency, sanitization, surveillance and the active eradication of any aberration, friction or alternative. From Dubai, Hong Kong and London to Amsterdam and Cairo, the smooth city, with its gated communities and theme-park zones, insidiously transforms urban life into seamless "experience." Wh...

In the space of about two decades, five major parks were proposed, designed, and created in Paris. Some emerged from competitions between professional landscape architects, others were imagined by planners working for the city, all represented a shift in what Amanda Shoaf Vincent calls “post-modern” understandings of the role of parks and garden in the city.  In Constructing Gardens, Cultivating t...

Today I talked to Anat Geva about The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s (Texas A&M UP, 2023). There is no one mandate on how to build the exterior of a synagogue - something that I don't think I ever thought about, yet it was something that Professor Anat Geva focused on. Famous architects of different backgrounds built the synagogues across the USA and no two really look the...

What is it about Times Square that has inspired such attention for well over a century? And how is it that, despite its many changes of character, the place has maintained a unique hold on our collective imagination?  In Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change (MIT Press, 2023), which comes twenty years after her widely acclaimed Times Square Roulette, Dr. Lynne Sagalyn masterfully tells...

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.” Recruited by federal construction and res...

A vibrant urban settlement from mediaeval times and the royal seat of the Safavid dynasty, the city of Isfahan emerged as a great metropolis during the seventeenth century. Using key sources, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024) reconstructs the spaces and senses of this dynamic city. Focusing on nuances of urban experience, Dr. Farshi...

The Search for Shelter: Writings on Land and Housing (Oxford UP, 2022) sheds light on the global population living in slums, which has increased from 1 billion in 2014 to 1.6 billion in 2018. The book also looks at the impact of neoliberalism on urban planning, the manner of organization and the struggles of the communities affected by these processes, the cultural and political decision-making pr...

Swati Chattopadhyay's book Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. It takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people-the servants, women, children, subalter...

How do public markets, as ordinary as they seem, carry the weight of a city’s history? How do such everyday buildings reflect a city’s changing political, social, and economic needs, through their yearslong transformations in forms, functions, and management? Today’s book is: Everyday Architecture in Context: Public Markets in Hong Kong, 1842-1981 (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2023), by...

If ancient Kyoto stands for orderly elegance, then Tokyo, within the world’s most populated metropolitan area, calls to mind–– jam-packed chaos. But in Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City (Oro Editions, 2022), Professor Jorge Almazán of Keio University and his Studio Lab colleagues ask us to look again—at the shops, markets, restaurants and tiny bars in back alleys, side streets and und...

The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country. Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wea...

This instalment of the Object Lessons series focuses on the Swimming Pool (Bloomsbury, 2024). The book explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalisation and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking...

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time...

In Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023), Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political...

In her new book Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University Press, 2020), Despina Stratigakos investigates the Nazi occupation of Norway. Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Ci...

Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bern...

In Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991 (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) Kateryna Malaia examines the transformation of domestic spaces and architecture during the period of perestroika (1985-1991) and the first post-Soviet decades. In analysing how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers altered their homes amidst a period of profound socio-cultural cha...

The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Times (Reaktion, 2023) is a unique journey through stained-glass installations that spans both time and place. Diverse in technique and style, these windows speak for the communities that created them. From the twelfth to the twenty-first century, we find in the windows stories of conflict, commemoration, devotion and celebration. Dr. Virginia Chieffo Raguin...