The Book of Books: 500 Years of Graphic Innovation
Edited by Mathieu Lommen
Thames & Hudson, 464 pages, $65.00
Image courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Matthieu Lommen, curator at the Special Collections department of the Amsterdam University Library has compiled an excellent collection of books, illustrating more than 500 years of Western book design. Starting with Nicolas Jenson’s 1471 edition of Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae Linguae Latinae the collection ends with Irma Boom’s 2010 James, Jennifer, Georgina are the Butlers—-a 1,198-page sculptural book that traces the history of one family.

The Book of Books is a massive survey, weighing in at 6½ pounds, and is rich with examples. Short essays are devoted to such topics as the invention and spread of printing, nineteenth-century graphic techniques, the avant-garde and New Typography, and design in the Postmodern era. References to the great printers and engravers of the past—Aldus Manutius, Albert Durer, and Christoffel Plantin—are all included as well as to the designers of modern times (with shout outs to avant-guardians like El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, and Stefan Sagmeister).

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Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography
By John Comazzi
Princeton Architectural Press, 192 pages, $40.00
Image courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press

Balthazar Korab always wanted to be known as “an architect who makes pictures rather than a photographer who is knowledgeable about architecture,” John Comazzi tells his readers. Korab’s career can hardly be summoned up so easily.

The story of the celebrated architecture photographer begins in 1920s and 30s Hungary where he was raised in an upper-middle-class family, studying art, music, and poetry, even as his country was rocked with economic and social instability. With the aftermath of World War II he was forced to flee Hungary and landed in Paris where he studied architecture at École des Beaux-Arts. In between his formal studies he traveled through Europe, documenting the relationships between architecture, culture, and public life. It wasn’t, however, until he moved to Michigan and began working as a staff photographer for Eero Saarinen, that Korab established himself to be the man who documented midcentury modernism.

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Concrete, edited by William Hall with an essay by Leonard Karen, $49.95 US/CAN, Phaidon March 2013, www.phaidon.com

When I encounter a book dust jacket that’s textured to the touch I usually assume that it’s a willful distraction from the contents within; not so with Phaidon’s Concrete. Its striated cover perfectly evokes its complex subject.  Concrete, despite its historical roles from the Roman Pantheon to Fallingwater,  is a much-unloved material, rough to the touch and to the popular imagination.  Both the volume’s introduction and essay make immediate acknowledgement of its unpopularity. William Hall writes:

“Despite its range and ubiquity, many people associate concrete with rain-stained social housing, or banal industrial buildings,” writes William Hall. “Detractors of concrete cite such tired monoliths, and point out the failure of the material. Its economy and speed of production have inevitably led to its use on buildings of poor quality – frequently compounded by substandard design and inadequate maintenance. But concrete cannot be held responsible for all the failures of concrete buildings. For too long negative associations have dominated the public perception of concrete.”

A turn to the first photo in volume can do wonders to allay this perception, with a gently undulating concrete bridge complementing a rocky Austrian river view. Concrete need not be forbidding! And look, there’s the Guggenheim on the next page. Who doesn’t like that?

Concrete is something of a constructive wonder. This slurry of mineral and water is adaptable into almost any number of shapes and frames. The fact that most of these shapes haven’t been particularly imaginative is no fault of concrete itself; no more than wheat is to blame for Wonder Bread.

“Iron in combination with concrete, reinforced concrete, is the building material of the new will to form,” wrote Erich Mendelsohn in 1914. “Its structural strength capable of being loaded almost equally with stress and compression will give rise to a new, specific logic in the laws of statics, logic of form, of harmony, of implicitness.”

Subsequent failures are of imagination, not of material.

Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1996, Oscar Niemeyer, page 123, photo courtesy of Leonardo Finotti
This 50 m (164 ft) wide flying saucer, perched on the edge of a cliff, was designed when Niemeyer was 89 years old. A wide winding slope connects visitors to the entrance 10 m (33 ft) above the ground.

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I have two kids, ages almost 6 and 3, and while they love reading books, I enjoy reading their books as much, if not more, than they do. I love the nostalgia and silliness of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl and the clever stories and terms that Mo Willems churns.

The way my kids respond to books has shown me the power within their pages. One book can spark a new interest that lasts days, months – even years. One book can lead to the insistence that we read tens more on the same topic.

So naturally, I try to select books on topics that are also interesting to me (after all, I’m equally invested in reading these). This prompted an unofficial research project on children’s books about the built environment. With the exception of the immense stock of books about construction, trucks, trains, and planes, there are relatively few stories about the professions and interests of the designers and planners or about the shape and functions of cities, buildings, communities, neighborhoods, and parks themselves.

However disappointed I was by the brevity of my list, books like Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty and The Little House by Virginia Burton have been inducted into our nightly favorites. (You can find my assuredly incomplete list of children’s books on landscape, architecture, planning and otherwise urban-related topics at the end of this post.)

A story about a talented little boy who builds architecture out of everything from chalk to dirty diapers

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Reading Peter D. Smith’s latest volume, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, is akin to strolling through a contemporary city, wherein broad impressions are punctuated by specific and visceral encounters. The elements that make and shape cities and urban experiences, from the physical contours to the social interaction that takes place within their borders, are all explored in broad chapters such as “Where to Stay” and “Getting Around”. Short narratives highlight these well-researched surveys, topics that deserve their own explication on different elements of the city that we think we understand, but as Smith quickly reveals, we don’t. In the chapter on “Where to Stay”, we are given a brief history of the meaning of wharves then and now in cities such as London, San Francisco, and New York in “On the Waterfront.”  The chapter “Getting Around” is separated into subtopics like “Walking”, in which the author takes us on a short tour of “Mumbai’s Skywalks”. And what would an essay on “Traffic” be without looking at the history of the ever-present “Parking Meter”? Throughout the book Smith references London and New York as points to depart from and return to. It is a book with a large intellectual scope. And clearly, there is much more to say.

With this in mind, Guy Horton and I decided to ask Smith about his thoughts on issues in a time when developing nations are experiencing and experimenting with different development models, and our industrialized urban centers are seeking strategies for renewal and reinvention. We also asked his thoughts on the trajectory of contemporary cities in other parts of the world, including some of the BRIC economies, as well as nations in conflict. This is what he had to say.

Sherin Wing:  Let’s begin with contemporary urban spaces in industrialized nations, what elements do you think are at the forefront of our experiences of city-spaces?

Peter D. Smith: If I think of the cities of the industrialized world and how their spaces influence our experience of them, then I think first of how you get around those cities, of the transport infrastructure: the subways and underground systems especially. You can’t say you really know London until you’ve travelled beneath it. The Tube network is like a vast organism penetrating the substrata beneath the city.

The buying and selling of goods is one of the most ancient aspects of urban life. The Egyptian hieroglyph for a town was a circle with a cross in it – the circle representing defensive walls and the cross the meeting of routes at a marketplace. Today, shopping remains one of the big attractions of the city, even in the age of the Internet, like the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, the largest such market in the world. This is a remarkable, dynamic urban space with its own history and traditions. That’s a very different experience from the sterile streets and shops of Ginza. And a recent poll showed that Londoners placed the capital’s shops top of the list of what they liked most about their city.

Of course, the streets and squares are also important, the open spaces around the city’s structures. There may be broad avenues in some districts – probably choked with cars and trucks – and, in other areas, smaller streets, built on a more human scale where there are less people and where the experience of the city is more intimate.

And we shouldn’t forget urban parks and green spaces – some of them quite small, where the sound of the passing traffic remains a constant reminder of the big city beyond the trees. Others are so large that the city’s towers vanish into the hazy distance and you could be in the countryside. All these spaces contribute to our experience of the city.

Tokyo Sky Tree from Asakusa, courtesy P.D. Smith

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Talk about biophilia, biomimicry or biodiversity and another bio comes to mind –  that of late architect Richard Neutra. He himself coined the term biorealism as “the inherent and inseparable relationship between man and nature.”

Neutra, who was famous in life, passed away in 1970. His time has come again. We now face countervailing forces, both an atrophy of the senses and a passionate desire to reunite with the natural world. Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods speaks to a prevalent “nature deficit disorder,” as he calls it.

So what does Richard Neutra’s legacy hold for us now? He completed a ton of commissions across the country and overseas, was featured on the cover of Time Magazine and was considered a natural born salesman. His own firm actually carries on in the spirit of its founder as Neutra Associates under the stewardship of Dion and Richard Neutra, his sons. But Neutra’s classic, erudite, 1954 book Survival Through Design could have been minted this morning.  For those of us who believe it’s possible, that title says it all.

Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2012

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I’ll admit I was a little skeptical when I cracked open Taras Grescoe’s latest book Straphanger, which is both paean to public transportation and an evisceration of car culture. Living happily car-free in New York, I feared I might be the choir to the Montrealer’s preaching. But while the book—part history, part travelogue, and part manifesto—might not seem terribly radical to city-dwellers, Grescoe makes the argument for mass transit in a way you might not have heard before.

In the course of writing Straphanger, Grescoe visited a dozen cities across the world and spent considerable time getting to know their transit systems, figuring out how and why they work (or don’t). After a short prologue in Shanghai, Grescoe starts his global commute in New York, where the subway system maintains a tetchy coexistence with street-level planning that’s historically favored cars over pedestrians. Subsequent cities each provide a slightly different perspective on transportation: Phoenix gives us a primer on the difficulties of low-density sprawl; Copenhagen is a model of bike-friendly infrastructure; Bogotá’s rapid bus system proves how quickly a mass transit network can be rolled out from scratch.

Despite being one of the most crowded transit systems in the world, Moscow’s Metro is endowed with spacious, luxuriously appointed stations. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

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