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New and notable books on architecture, culture, and design.
April 2001
Parallax
By Steven Holl
Designed by Conny Purtill and Michael Rock of 2X4
Princeton Architectural Press, 384 pp., $40.00
Reading Holl's latest book--a series of scientific,
metaphoric, and architectural explorations into some of his favorite subjects--is
like taking a peek into his private notebooks. Nicely designed and illustrated
throughout, Parallax provides the "liner notes" for some of Holl's
recent projects, such as the Vassar Street dormitory at MIT, emphasizing
process rather than end result.
Impossible Worlds
Edited by Stephen Coates and Alex Stetler
Designed by Stephen Coates
August | Birkhäuser, 208 pp., $65.00
Using detailed studies of utopian plans as well as
built realities, this book argues that imagining the impossible can have
great practical benefits for architecture. It looks at everything from
Ebenezer Howard's Garden City movement to Zaha Hadid's imaginary world
for the film Executing God (published here for the first time).
Cities for a Small Country
By Richard Rogers and Anne Power
Designed by Pentagram
Faber & Faber, 310 pp., $21.50
Rogers, an architect, and Power, an urbanist, offer
their combined convictions in this perfectly square package. The thesis--a
condemnation of suburban sprawl and celebration of urban reinvestment--is
as rigorous as the format. Using Britain as their primary case study,
the authors insist that architectural integrity and sustainable growth
in the metropolis will cultivate social integration, innovation, and environmental
consciousness.
Modernism Rediscovered
By Pierluigi Serraino and Julius Shulman
Taschen, 575 pp., $40.00
The true masterpieces in this book are Shulman's witty,
insightful photographs. On the cover a shadowy area under a space-age
house's overhang is offset by a smiling woman in the foreground wearing
a bright sweater and holding a dachshund. Shulman reveals the colorful,
playful, and humane aspects of Modernism often neglected in histories
of the movement.
The Value of Things
By Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska
Designed by Stephen Coates
August | Birkhäuser, 222 pp., $42.00
The authors spent five years taking photographs inside
the British Museum and Selfridge's department store in London. The pictures
reveal an increasing commonality between retail space, where product displays
look like exhibitions, and museums, which have become branded spaces with
a focus on merchandise. Their completed project--a consumer-friendly
art book--is a manifestation of its premise.
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