New Books in Architecture

In his new book A History of New York in 27 Buildings: The 400-Year Untold Story of an American Metropolis (Bloomsbury, 2019), New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the story of the city through bricks, glass, wood, and mortar, revealing why and how it evolved into the nation's biggest and most influential. From the seven hundred thousand or so buildings in New York, Roberts selects twenty-seven that, in the past four centuries, have been the most emblematic of the city's economic, social, and political evolution. Roberts describes not only the buildings and how they came to be, but also their enduring impact on the city and its people and how the consequences of the construction often reverberated around the world.

A few structures, such as the Empire State Building, are architectural icons, but Roberts goes beyond the familiar with intriguing stories of the personalities and exploits behind the unrivaled skyscraper's construction. Some stretch the definition of buildings, to include the city's oldest bridge and the landmark Coney Island Boardwalk. Others offer surprises: where the United Nations General Assembly first met; a hidden hub of global internet traffic; a nondescript factory that produced billions of dollars of currency in the poorest neighborhood in the country; and the buildings that triggered the Depression and launched the New Deal.

With his deep knowledge of the city and penchant for fascinating facts, Roberts brings to light the brilliant architecture, remarkable history, and bright future of the greatest city in the world.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, best selling author Erica Bauermeister comes House Lessons: Renovating a Life (Sasquatch Books, 2020). This memoir is about the power of home, and the transformative act of restoring one house in particular. In this mesmerizing memoir-in-essays, Erica Bauermeister renovates a trash-filled house in eccentric Port Townsend, Washington, and in the process takes readers on a journey to discover the ways our spaces subliminally affect us. A personal, accessible, and literary exploration of the psychology of architecture, as well as a loving tribute to the connections we forge with the homes we care for and live in, this book is designed for anyone who's ever fallen head over heels for a house. It is also a story of a marriage, of family, and of the kind of roots that settle deep into your heart. Discover what happens when a house has its own lessons to teach in this moving and insightful memoir that ultimately shows us how to make our own homes (and lives) better.

Erica Bauermeister is the bestselling author of four novels, and the co-author of two works of non-fiction: 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader's Guide and Let's Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Washington and has taught there and at Antioch University. She is a founding member of the Seattle 7 Writers and currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington, in the house she renovated with her family.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Photographs play a hugely influential but largely unexamined role in the practice of landscape architecture and design. Through a diverse set of essays and case studies, this seminal text unpacks the complex relationship between landscape architecture and photography. It explores the influence of photographic seeing on the design process by presenting theoretical concepts from photography and cultural theory through the lens of landscape architecture practice to create a rigorous, open discussion.

Beautifully illustrated in full color throughout, with over 200 images, Anne Godfrey's Active Landscape Photography: Theoretical Groundwork for Landscape Architecture (Routledge, 2020) covers a variety of topics: the diversity of everyday photographic practices for design decision making, the perception of landscape architecture through photography, transcending the objective and subjective with photography, and deploying multiplicity in photographic representation as a means to better represent the complexity of the discipline. Rather than solving problems and providing tidy solutions to the ubiquitous relationship between photography and landscape architecture, this book aims to invigorate a wider dialogue about photography's influence on how landscapes are understood, valued and designed. Active photographic practices are presented throughout for professionals, academics, students and researchers.

Anne Godfrey is an award winning professor of landscape architecture in both teaching and research at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What makes a building’s design come alive as it helps shape our existence?

Listen in as I discuss this and other questions with Susie Hodge, author of The Short Story of Architecture: A Pocket Guide to Key Styles, Buildings, Elements & Materials (Laurence King Publishing, 2019)

Hodge is an art and design historian, author and artist with over 150 books published for adults and children alike. She’s also a frequent contributor to magazines, museum and gallery web resources, and radio and TV news programs and documentaries.

Topics covered in this episode include:

--The religious, civic, and cultural buildings that most stand out for Hodge, among the book’s stellar options, with the specific emotional responses each one elicits.

--Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Antoni Gaudi weren’t just great architects, they also had forceful, colorful personalities revealed here through select anecdotes.

--Which of the houses in this book influenced the top 10 must popular house styles in America? Learn as well which rooms in their houses Americans favor the most.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While the concept of "type" has been present in architectural discourse since its formal introduction at the end of the eighteenth century, its role in the development of architectural projects has not been comprehensively analyzed. This book proposes a reassessment of architectural type throughout history and its impact on the development of architectural theory and practice. Beginning with Laugier's 1753 Essay on Architecture, Pablo Meninato's Unexpected Affinities: The History of Type from Laugier to Duchamp (Routledge, 2018) traces type through nineteenth- and twentiethth-century architectural movements and thoeries, culminating in a discussion of the affinities between architectural type and Duchamp's concept of the readymade. Includes over sixty black and white images.

Pablo Meninato, PhD is an architect, architectural critic, and educator whose research focuses on the conception and development of the architectural project.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at [email protected] and @johnwphd.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials – fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood – from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.

Jane Hutton's new book Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2020) considers the social, political, and ecological entanglements of material practice, challenging readers to think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them, and to reimagine forms of construction in solidarity with people, other species, and landscapes elsewhere.

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo Ontario, Canada.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition of the significant contribution of buildings to climate change, the idea of building green has become increasingly popular. But is it enough? If an energy-efficient building is new construction, it may take 10 to 80 years to overcome the climate change impacts of the building process. New buildings are sexy, but few realize the value in existing buildings and how easy it is to get to “zero energy” or low-energy consumption through deep energy retrofits. Existing buildings can and should be retrofit to reduce environmental impacts that contribute to climate change, while improving human health and productivity for building occupants.

In The Power of Existing Buildings: Save Money, Improve Health, and Reduce Environmental Impacts (Island Press, 2019), academic sustainability expert Robert Sroufe, and construction and building experts Craig Stevenson and Beth Eckenrode, explain how to realize the potential of existing buildings and make them perform like new. This step-by-step guide will help readers to: understand where to start a project; develop financial models and realize costs savings; assemble an expert team; and align goals with numerous sustainability programs. The Power of Existing Buildings will challenge you to rethink spaces where people work and play, while determining how existing buildings can save the world.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How should we understand our cities? In Why Cities Look the Way They Do (Polity, 2019), Richard Williams, Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh explores the processes that shape the city foregrounding images over the idea that cities are designed or planned. The processes include the impact and influence of money, war, gender and sexuality, along with power and work. The book has a wealth of examples from cities across the world, from the megacities of Brazil, the financial hub of London, the sexual and computing spaces of San Francisco, to the aftermath of war in Belgrade. The range of examples, along with the focus on processes, make the book essential reading across the humanities and for anyone interested in contemporary urban life.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global temperature from increasing. Since approximately 80% of greenhouse gases come from cities, it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world.

As urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration; the collapse of global fertility rates; and the disappearance of the middle class. In Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities: Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class (Island Press, 2020) planning and design expert Patrick Condon explains how urban designers can assimilate these interconnected changes into their work.

Condon shows how the very things that constrain cities—climate change, migration, financial stress, population change—could actually enable the emergence of a more equitable and resource-efficient city. He provides five rules for urban designers: (1) See the City as a System; (2) Recognize Patterns in the Urban Environment; (3) Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure; (4) Strengthen Social and Economic Urban Resilience; and (5) Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages.

In Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities, Condon provides grounded and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow’s sustainable cities, and the design tools needed to achieve them.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.