Architecture - Criticism

The founder of Architizer.com and practicing architect draws on his unique position at the crossroads of architecture and social media to highlight 100 important buildings that embody the future of architecture. We're asking more of architecture than ever before; the response will define our...

Between 1898 and 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright's residential studio in the idyllic Chicago suburb of Oak Park served as a nontraditional work setting as he matured into a leader in his field and formulized his iconic design ideology. Here, architectural historian Lisa D. Schrenk...

When American architects, designers, and cultural institutions converted wartime strategies to new ends, the aggressive promotion of postwar domestic bliss became another kind of weapon.In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture--not as something imported from Europe, but as an...

The imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings and models, told through reminiscences, stories, conversations, letters, and monologues. Even when an architectural drawing does not show any human figures, we can imagine many different characters just off the page: architects, artists, onlookers, clients, builders, developers,...

Kind Of is a book presenting the work of Paul Preissner in a form of manifesto looking at the loose and varied origins of ideas that make room for intuition, blandness and confusion resulting in work which takes on a different type of politics:...

Key writings by a principal of the London-based architecture firm Caruso St. JohnA principal of the London-based architecture firm Caruso St. John, "Gritty Brit" Adam Caruso has been writing intensively since the mid-1990s. His essays, published in The Architect's Journal, OASE, Blueprint and Tate,...

In the mid-19th Century America was host to a curious architectural trend: the octagonal house. Such eight-sided homes-as well as schools, churches, barns, and businesses-were popping up across the country so quickly that by 1857 over 1,000 had been built. Though the craze has...

A GLOBAL HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE NOW FEATURING ADDITIONAL COVERAGE OF CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE AND MORE SUPERB DRAWINGS BY FRANCIS D.K. CHING! The book that forever changed the way architectural history is viewed, taught, and studied, A Global History of Architecture examines 5,000 years of...

Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.Architect L on Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments in images, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, these clever sketches do not try to please or...

Drawing on architecture, performance art, history and visual theory, In Search of African American Space explores the creative relationship between the African diaspora and social space in America Richly illustrated with vintage adverts, maps, posters and architectural plans, and organized thematically, this anthology, edited...

What should our buildings look like? Or is their usability more important than their appearance? Paul Guyer argues that the fundamental goals of architecture first identified by the Roman architect Marcus Pollio Vitruvius - good construction, functionality, and aesthetic appeal - have remained valid...

From Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank O. Gehry to Antoni Gaudí, Shigeru Ban and all the best in between, this essential guide celebrates 100 years of the finest architecture. Large-format photos, drawings, and floor plans, along with a chronological overview, reveal the ideas and...

A celebration of the uniquely vibrant architecture and interiors of classic and new Spanish-style houses in the southwestern and southern United States, Mexico, and Spain. Casa Bohemia showcases a collection of some of the most beautifully preserved Spanish style houses, from restored haciendas in...

From 1940 to 1970, mid‐Michigan had an extensive and varied legacy of modernist architecture by well‐known architects and regional firms. Through Susan Bandes's archival research and oral histories, the reader will see a picture emerge in the portrayal of buildings of various typologies, from...

A Financial Times Best Book of the YearA Guardian Best Architecture Book of the Year "Sharp, revealing, funny."--The Guardian "An original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again... [De Graaf] deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more...

Organized around a timeline that demonstrates the range of "presents" and "afters" we find ourselves contemplating, this volume of the Cornell Journal of Architecture considers our terrestrial occupations from a variety of real and imagined perspectives, from the prehistoric to the future-imperfect. It seems...

Every morning, the architect and writer Michael Sorkin walks downtown from his Greenwich Village apartment through Washington Square to his Tribeca office. Sorkin isn't in a hurry, and he never ignores his surroundings. Instead, he pays careful, close attention. And in Twenty Minutes in...

Winner, Publication Award, Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH), 2019Acclaimed for his designs of the Trinity University campus, the Little Chapel in the Woods, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Components Division Building, and numerous private houses, O'Neil Ford (1905-1982) was an important...

Architecture is often thought to be a diary of a society, filled with symbolic representations of specific cultural moments. However, as Craig L. Wilkins observes, that diary includes far too few narratives of the diverse cultures in U.S. society. Wilkins states that the discipline...

Updated and expanded to chart Chicago's evolving urban landscape, the third edition of this popular handbook is the perfect companion for self-guided walking tours, as well as an excellent source of information for those wishing to explore the internationally acclaimed architecture of Chicago. Over...

This study looks at the architectural transformation of Cleveland during its "golden age"--roughly the period between post-Civil War reconstruction and World War I. By the early twentieth century, Cleveland, which would evolve into the fifth largest city in America, hoped to shed the gritty...

Pulitzer Prize?winning critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography of America's greatest architect Renowned architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography Frank Lloyd Wright looks at the architect and the man, from his tumultuous personal life to his long career as a master builder. Along the way...

Contemporary thinkers from Hito Steyerl to Atelier Bow-Wow explore how architecture can adapt to--rather than replace--the existing built environmentThis volume considers existing urban contexts as an opportunity to use the potential of place, and the creativity of inhabitants and users, the power of the...

The expert contributors to this lavishly illustrated volume, devoted entirely to Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, address here for the first time the forgotten contexts of the Pavilion's genesis. Habitually thought of as an abstract, unpolluted, and splendidly isolated building--a precursor...

Not Interesting proposes another set of terms and structures to talk about architecture, without requiring that it be interesting. This book explores a set of alternatives to the interesting and imagines how architecture might be positioned more broadly in the world using other terms:...

Cincinnati earned its nickname of Queen City of the West with a wealth of fine theaters and hotels, a burgeoning brewery district and the birth of professional baseball. Though many of these treasures have vanished, they left an indelible mark on the city. Revisit...

For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining--or shadowy--counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some...

Portals: Pedagogy, Practice, and Architecture's Future Imaginary considers the COVID-19 pandemic and the remote pedagogy it occasioned globally in schools of architecture, as a critical threshold to future architectural pedagogy, practice, and spatial imaginaries. Given that the conceit of a "return to normal" is...

Imagining the future of cohabitation in Venice and beyondConceived as a record that delves deeper into a special section of the Biennale Architettura 2021, Co-habitats comprises essays and photo essays that pertain to specific geographic locations. While the main exhibition is primarily organized in...

20x14, Reflections on Studying Architecture Abroad: twenty suggestions (or paternal exhortations, if you will) for the fourteen weeks of a regular academic semester. Twenty reflections (written during the 2020 lockdown in Firenze) that I have drawn from twenty years of teaching architecture students abroad....

The Cannibal's Cookbook fiercely consumes the body of past cyclopean constructions. It assembles, re-packages, and offers this latent knowledge for your contemporary consumption. It is a manual for the hungry, for those who are not satiated by the careless building practices of the present....

After critiquing--and infuriating--the art world with The Painted Word, award-winning author Tom Wolfe shared his less than favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House. In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects...

It is in the wilderness of cities rather than in nature that the imagination of these landscape drawings comes to life. Without any heroic emphasis, these drawings result from the observation of traces, evident or discreet, in the urban landscape, and the process to...

Collected writings from an interdisciplinary architect and educator. Whether he was designing buildings and spaces for universities, museums, performing arts, or libraries, Arthur Erickson was preoccupied with intersections--of people, cultures, and ideas. Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems collects writings by an architect advocating for...

Small enough to fit in a pocket yet serious enough to provide real answers, this primer is a must-have for architecture and history buffs, tourists, and churchgoers interested in decoding the styles and symbols of religious buildings. Every building contains clues embedded in its...

Homelessness-the state of having no home-is a growing global problem that requires local discussions and solutions. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, it has noticeably become a collective concern. However, in recent years, the official political discourse in many countries around the world...

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) set out to build for the future. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, the Berlin-born architect had an inestimable influence on our aesthetic environment, championing a bold new hybrid of light, geometry, and industrial design, as dazzling today as it...

Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) is one of the greatest and most influential architects of Japan's postwar generation. He created sublimely beautiful, purist houses that have reconfigured and enriched our understanding of domesticity, tradition, structure, scale, nature and the city. The underlying formalism in Shinohara's architecture...

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently,...

"A protest against the wall and a forecast about its future."--Allison Arieff, The New York Times "Rael's courageous mixture of subversion and compromise is not going to hide the affront that the border represents to those who live south of it."--London Review of Books...

Issue 14 of LA+ Journal brings you the results of the LA+ CREATURE international design ideas competition, which explored how we can use design to achieve a more symbiotic existence with other creatures. The competition brief asked entrants to choose a nonhuman client and...

This book arose from two observations: that building design in these first decades of the 21st century has come to accept and pursue some increasingly odd and disturbing trends; and that there seems to be insufficient architectural criticism that calls these trends to account....

Royal Gold Medal 2022 recipient: Balkrishna Doshi This book presents a curated selection of Balkrishna Doshi's exceptional writings since the 1950s, with some published here for the first time. The collection of 15 lectures, articles and essays is richly illustrated with more than 50...

This is the dumbest smart book on contemporary architecture. What really is this "technology" that we speak of? How do we define "intelligence"? These are just two of the questions that this book attempts to answer through the unconventional (and seemingly ironic) lens of...

Janet A. Null is an award-winning architect and President of Argus Architecture & Preservation, P.C. She lives in upstate New York and has practiced throughout the Adirondack region for more than twenty-five years.Author: Janet A. NullISBN-10: 1438466668ISBN-13: 9781438466668Publisher: Excelsior Editions/State University of New YoLanguage:...

Designed to appeal to visual thinkers, 25 Concepts in Modern Architecture explores the fundamental ideas behind architectural design, through easy-to-follow sketches, drawings and succinct explanations. Twenty-five concepts - each of which are key to architectural design thinking - are accessibly explained by examining twenty-five...

This study of how the architecture of a building influences the people who work in it is of interest to architects, behavioralists, and management personnel as well as fans of architecture in general. Mildred Reed Hall and Edward T. Hall founded Edward T. Hall...

Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to...

This is the first study of Renaissance architecture as an immersive, multisensory experience that combines historical analysis with the evidence of first-hand accounts. Questioning the universalizing claims of contemporary architectural phenomenologists, David Karmon emphasizes the infinite variety of meanings produced through human interactions with...

A thought-provoking guide to the endearing and enigmatic ways in which the built environment takes shape, Best Practices proposes a new way of thinking about neighborhoods, housing developments, streetscapes, and storefronts, not so much as places defined by building codes, dimensions, or geographic features,...