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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On December 8, 2011, I sat in the Washington County Courthouse, in Hillsboro, Oregon, at the sentencing of one of my incarcerated students, a 15-year old boy, convicted of aggravated homicide.  The state of Oregon’s mandatory sentencing statute had this young kid, who committed his crime at age 13, facing life in prison with the possibility of parole, but only after 30 years of well-behaved life behind bars. The Supreme Court of the United States has declared that the law must not treat 13-year-olds as adults, and based its decision—the majority opinion written by justice Sonia Sotomayor—based on extensive neuro-anatomical research: The brain of a 13-year old has not fully developed, making it difficult for a juvenile to distinguish right from wrong.  Against common sense, scientific finding, and any humane impulse, the district attorney of Hillsboro argued to have this boy tried as an adult. He won. States’ Rights triumphed—at least for the moment. The defense has appealed on constitutional grounds.

I testified to my student’s amazing creative potential, to his keen mind, and his powerful yet brief being. I based my testimony on almost 50 years of teaching. The district attorney cross-examined me about the young boy’s unusual maturity, about the possibility that he possessed the brain of someone beyond his years—say, a 17-year old.  Might you not consider him an outlier, several deviations from the mean, demanded the DA. I responded that I could not talk about this young man as a statistic but only as a human being, alive and complicated and confused.

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What happens when a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic meets up with a MacArthur Fellow architect and the topic of their conversation is books? Shortly before it was announced that Jeanne Gang had been named by the MacArthur Foundation as a recipient of one of its 2011 awards, she and Paul Goldberger had a conversation about the book list that Gang submitted to Designers & Books this fall. They also spoke about Gang’s book Reveal, as well as how her idea of “turning off reality and letting yourself imagine” applies both to the design development process of a building and the interior monologue that goes on when you are reading a book.

Paul Goldberger:  Your work is wide-ranging; so, it would seem, is your taste in books, and what I particularly loved was the fact that this list moves back and forth between architecture and other subjects. It isn’t one of those “inside baseball” kind of lists that is of interest only to other architects and design professionals, but neither is it one of those lists that seems, as some of them do, almost ostentatiously to go in the other direction, as if bending over backward to prove that a designer is interested in other things. Were you conscious of moving in and out of architecture as you pulled this group of books together?

Jeanne Gang:  I just asked myself what were the most exciting, inspiring books. They had to be on my shelf still (my books are arranged using the Dewey Decimal System), things that I have gone back to.

PG:  There’s something quite wonderful about an architect who on the one hand uses the latest technologies, but on the other hand works in an office surrounded by books. It’s particularly wonderful to be able to put together a list like this by simply looking around your own office.

JG:  A lot of times I remember a book by its color.

PG:  I do, too. Or by its place on the shelf. I can close my eyes and picture it on that shelf somewhere on the left, or somewhere on the right.

JG:  The physical book is also something that works in the office because I share my library with everyone, so if it’s something that I saw, and I remember, I’ll just run back to the office, get the book, bring it into a meeting, and people will take it home. It’s very much in the spirit of the library that Benjamin Franklin imagined—the Lending Library.

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The phrase “bridging the gap” has been a hallmark of debates about architectural education and practice for as long as anyone can remember, with architecture’s unique “internship” period widely regarded and relied on as that bridge. It’s the catch-all and catch-up period between education and practice, which most educators and practitioners readily acknowledge needs bridging. For the estimated one-third of graduates that become registered architects, effectively all internships take place in a traditional design firm setting, under the tutelage of a registered architect.

In their vitally important new anthology, Bridging the Gap: Public-Interest Architectural Internships, co-editors editors Georgia Bizios and Katie Wakeford of North Carolina State University, shine a bright light on an exceedingly rare, but promising breed of architectural internships, focused on the public interest. These internships take place beyond the walls of firms, and are instead embedded in nonprofits and community organizations across the country. With 19 co-contributors, Bizios and Wakeford masterfully unite a veritable who’s who of public-interest design advocates—Victoria Beach, Bryan Bell, Thomas Fisher, David Perkes, and Michael Pyatok, among others—with some fresh new voices—Andrew Caruso, Sam Valentine, Katherine Williams, and Esther Yang, to name a few. Collectively, they hail from big firms (like Gensler), community design centers, nonprofits, and universities. Most essayists weave personal narratives with anecdotes about their internship experiences; the stories illustrate the array of settings that architecture graduates can and are working in, but also the struggles they face in the process.

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Prestigious hotels often feature formal common spaces with high ceilings, stylishly uncomfortable furniture, and a stuffy staff. So I was delighted to experience the unexpected recently, when I happened on the library at the Four Seasons in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

This is a place where you feel comfortable sitting with a small group of your friends.  A wall of windows brings the ski slopes inside. The view helps you restock the mental energy you’ve depleted while concentrating on such things as knowledge work. The views and daylight boost your mood and help you acclimate your circadian rhythms after a long flight.

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Eva Hagberg’s latest book is a collection of gorgeous rooms with views of “nature” as the architectural elite frame it for elite clients. But Nature Framed: At Home in the Landscape (Monacelli Press, 2011) is anything but a book about windows. “This is architecture at its most primal: as a shift in consciousness from open landscape to delineated space,” the critic writes in her introduction.

The collection of two dozen North American houses is infused with Hagberg’s enthusiasm and her clear and thoughtful perspective. There is such a powerful voyeuristic pleasure in house architecture. Many of the houses are luscious and delicious, powerful blends of site and fabric; they are all elegantly, sometimes hauntingly photographed (almost all lacking people in said photos, of course). The collection includes projects by Fernau & Hartman, Rick Joy, Kyu Sung Woo, Marlon Backwell, Tod William and Billie Tsien, and others.

There is something relentlessly compelling about constructed environments that set up and frame the human connection to nature, the physical connection between the interior and exterior. Read more…

For Iwan Baan, Modernism is not merely the old adage that “form follows function,” nor is it an idealistic, uniquely Western European architectural vision that can be easily transported globally. Instead in his book, Brasilia – Chandigarh: Living with Modernity, Bann shows how fluidity dictates all things, from buildings to definitions.

Baan’s goal was to document the changes that have occurred to both architecture and master urban plans over the past 50 years in both cities. We decided to interview him on his expedition in Brasilia. He began by “researching Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture, the elements of Lucio Costa’s urban plan, yet also the history of the construction of the city.”

As he sees it, “At the advent of Modernity, utopic [sic] aspirations were at play, as well as notions that today we find preposterous. For example, the vast networks of roads were designed so that every person could have a car, which today we find so misguided.” Which leads to questions regarding what elements would be instrumental in shaping our cities in the future. Says Baan, “Urbanism in Africa is increasing at unprecedented rates. Ultimately studying cities like Brasilia and seeing where they work and where they didn’t can inform our future city planning.”

In fact, what Baan discovered was that some of the most resilient elements of the city were not part of any grand vision: “One of the most vibrant neighborhoods is in fact the housing that was quickly built for the vast numbers of construction workers. The housing is still there, some fifty years later, and the neighborhood has a much more intimate scale for living.”

It is this ability to see beyond the standard architecture photographic trope of glorifying built structures as paeans to man’s genius, that makes Baan’s photographs so interesting: Read more…

Jason McLennan, CEO of the International Living Future Institute (home of the Living Building Challenge, a standard launched by the Cascadia chapter of the Green Building Council in 2006 and intended to push beyond LEED at the time) has published a memoir about his own effort to live green, Zugunruhe: The Inner Migration to Profound Environmental Change (published by the ILFI’s Ecotone Publishing, 2010, which is, full disclosure, the same publisher that brought out my book, Women in Green in 2007). After reading his new book and in the wake of his organization’s annual Living Future conference (billed as an “unconference” because of its unconventional learning and networking formats and quickly becoming known as an intimate event for so-called “deep” greens) held this past April in Vancouver, I got a chance to talk with Jason about the book, the Institute, and some of its programs.

Kira Gould: This is a very personal book about living “green,” mindfully, and purposefully. Why now?

Jason McLennan: I started to notice a lot of folks coming to me for career and life advice, from many walks of life, and they were asking good questions. It felt like it’s a good time to bring together some of the things that work for me. In effect, I was seeing a demand for advice on how to make things meaningful. Read more…

The back cover of the book Green Patriot Posters, published by Metropolis Books.

Seems like we have been predicting the end of the printed matter for a while now.  But whatever happens to newspapers and magazines, books are here to stay – for the simple reason that people love them.  Books, to some, are objects of worship.  

Now, I am willing to bet that there is significant overlap in the population of book lovers and the population of people that self-identify as “green” or are concerned about things like climate change. That makes sense, given that reading books is about acquiring knowledge and concern about our ecological crisis is founded on a trust of knowledge, as opposed to ideology or wishful thinking. Yet, how many book lovers, or more importantly how many book publishers, pay attention to how a given book is printed? I would say very, very few and that needs to change. Here is how it could work: Read more…

A conversation between an architect and his client, first in their youth and later in old age, sets up Carl Stein’s argument for Greening Modernism, a book just released by W. W. Norton.  While drinking wine and playing chess, the young client says to the architect, “We may not have a lot of money but we know how to live well.” Later, when both men have grown successful in wealth and circumstances, they sit and drink wine at the same table, again. This time the client says, “We may have a lot of money, but we [still] know how to live well.” Stein believes in a quality of life — and architecture — that’s dependent on a thoughtful, frugal consumption of natural resources.

He also believes that the quality of architecture was lost when Modernism got de-railed and forgot its original philosophy. Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier, he writes, would be “appalled at the notion that their work was connected by style rather than philosophy.” Modernism, after all, originally revolved around such ideas a Corbusier’s claim that a house should be a machine for living in — like an airplane, free of extraneous materials or parts. Stein believes that if Modernism had stayed with its philosophical tenets through the years, it would have landed firmly in sustainable, ecologically-aware design. Read more…