Bookshelf

Planetary Gardens: The Landscape Architecture of Gilles Clément
Edited by Alessandro Rocca
Designed by Giovanni C. Russo and Fabio Luis Soletti/No 11
Birkhäuser, 263 pp., $85

North American audiences may remember Clément from the innovative exhibition Environment: Approaches for Tomorrow, created in 2006 with Philippe Rahm at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In France, he is a major figure in the landscape-architecture world (although he prefers to be called a gardener), with more than four decades’ worth of projects under his belt. Planetary Gardens serves as a good introduction to this work—nine of his major gardens are extensively documented—and his philosophy of horticultural design. In a lengthy interview and a series of “guidelines for the planetary garden,” Clément comes across as both a fierce advocate of biodiversity and natural wildness and a canny manipulator of those qualities. As he tells Rocca, “you cannot comprehend and accept the apparently chaotic lushness of nature if this chaos is not staged, so to speak.”

Infill: New Houses for Urban Sites
By Adam Mornement and Annabel Biles
Designed by Adam Hooper
Laurence King, 240 pp., $40

One of the working titles of this book was Curious Footprints, an appropriate catchall for the 39 projects collected here, which were slipped into a remarkable variety of small, awkwardly shaped, and otherwise challenging parcels of land. As you would expect, the resulting structures—mostly residences—make serious compromises, some ingenious (a terrace that extends like a drawer at the touch of a button), others less so (a Tokyo house with bunkeresque subterranean living quarters). It’s worth studying both the hits and the misses—if the world’s population continues migrating to cities, as predicted, a lot more architecture will need to be wedged, crammed, and shimmied into and around existing urban sites.

I Miss My Pencil: A Design Exploration
By Martin Bone and Kara Johnson
Designed by IDEO
Chronicle Books, 240 pp., $50

I Miss My Pencil presents 12 design experiments. The authors, both employees of the renowned design consultancy IDEO, wrap a cheap plastic printer in foam to make it quieter and more attractive, design a thermostat that users adjust by blowing cool or warm air onto its face, and fabricate a cork wine bottle with a glass stopper. The idea is to provoke people to think about “human connections to objects,” and the experiments are intriguing—but reading about them, alas, is a chore. Most of the text takes the form of a running IM-style conversation between the authors, a wearying device that tends to bury their ideas in unfunny antics and asides.

Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives
of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
Edited by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli
Designed by Norm, Zurich
Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 192 pp., $49

In 1968, Venturi and Scott Brown took a group of Yale students to Las Vegas on an architectural-anthropological mission: to analyze contemporary urban sprawl by documenting its most extreme example in the streets, buildings, and signs of Sin City. Their photos and impressions formed the basis of the landmark 1972 treatise Learning from Las Vegas, but many of the original images didn’t make it into print—until now. Las Vegas Studio collects more than a hundred archival photos in a handsome new volume that depicts the city in its Technicolor heyday alongside glimpses of the newly married architects and their stylish young charges clowning around on the Strip. As Rem Koolhaas observes in an epilogue, “It actually looks like a honeymoon… . A honeymoon with students!”

The L.A. Earthquake Sourcebook
Produced by Richard Koshalek and Mariana Amatullo
Designed by Sagmeister Inc.
Art Center College of Design, 344 pp., $35

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the disastrously mismanaged recovery effort that followed, faculty and students at California’s Art Center College of Design started thinking about ways to prepare for the next big earthquake that will, inevitably, wreak havoc in the Los Angeles region. This guide is one outcome of their consortium—and it’s an impressively lively, creative, and multidisciplinary product, attractively designed by Stefan Sagmeister. The editors include some practical strategies for earthquake preparedness, but they devote the bulk of the pages to short essays, interviews, profiles, and book excerpts dealing with all manner of peripheral concerns, from seismography and earthquake folklore to the psychology of disaster behavior.

The Golden Age of Handbuilt Bicycles
By Jan Heine
Photographs by Jean-Pierre Pradéres
Designed by Christophe Courbou
Rizzoli, 168 pp., $50

Leave it to the French to elevate bicycle making to an art form. Beginning in the 1910s and accelerating in the 1930s, a line of expert craftsmen built elegant, precision-engineered machines for cyclists, designing and fabricating not just the frames but their own derailleurs, brakes, stems, hubs, and other components in small shops that, in some cases, turned out only a few dozen bikes a year. Here the editor of Vintage Bicycle Quarterly has collected 50 examples of classic hand-built bicycles, many of them extremely rare, with new color photographs that should induce pangs of Francophilic nostalgia even in the most ignorant Schwinn-pumping American.

Conversations with Frank Gehry
By Barbara Isenberg
Designed by Iris Weinstein
Knopf, 352 pp., $40

Throughout this oral history—culled from 20 years of interviews—the world’s most famous living architect comes across as a regular guy, a hockey-loving family man who is, if anything, a little on the insecure side (“I never thought I was going to be who I am now”). This makes him likable, but it doesn’t always make for riveting reading—you almost wish he were a bit more pompous at times, just to keep things lively. Still, this is a gold mine for Gehry admirers; for more casual followers of his work, there are plenty of intriguing insights into the creative process. He’s a tinkerer, driven largely by instinct: “I find something and I tend to poke at it, like a cat pokes at something.”

Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City
By Eric W. Sanderson
Illustrations by Markley Boyer
Designed by Abbott Miller and Christine Moog/Pentagram Design
Abrams, 352 pp., $40

Just in time for the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival on the shores of Manhattan, Sanderson, a landscape ecologist, has delivered a painstaking reconstruction of what the future Big Apple would have looked like in 1609. Mannahatta—“the island of many hills”—was once home to more than 55 eco­systems in only 20 square miles. If it existed in its original state today, Sanderson writes, “it would be the crowning glory of American national parks.” Informed by a decade’s worth of primary research, the book details everything from the quality of the soil to the culture of the native Lenape communities—and offers some ideas for how New Yorkers 400 years hence may be able to “bring a little Mannahatta back to Manhattan.”