New Books in Architecture

Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities (Island Press, 2019) is designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local levels to develop and implement plans to mitigate a community's greenhouse gas emissions and increase the resilience of communities against climate change impacts. This fully revised and expanded edition goes well beyond climate action plans to examine the mix of policy and planning instruments available to every community. Michael R. Boswell, Adrienne I. Greve, and Tammy L. Seale also look at process and communication: How does a community bring diverse voices to the table? What do recent examples and research tell us about successful communication strategies?

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We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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It may only be a slight exaggeration to say that one of David Dillon's career accomplishments was to put the words "Dallas" and "architecture" in the same sentence again. After a screed in 1980 entitled "Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?" launched his career as an architecture critic, Dillon took to the pages of the Dallas Morning News to praise, lament, explain, beg, scold, suggest, cajole, and influence how Dallas and its metropolitan region took shape throughout three revolutionary decades of development. To follow his career as a critic from the early 1980s, when downtown was dormant and street life an afterthought, to his retirement--when a new mindset for urban planning had largely set in, but still had far to go--is to listen to a larger story about how thinking about the built environment in North American cities has changed over the last generation, the new questions that have been raised, and the old ones that persist.

Some of Dillon's most memorable and enduring columns were recently published by University of Texas Press in a collection called The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture, part of a series furnished by the Roger Fullington Endowment in Architecture. The book is edited and introduced by Kathryn Holliday, associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she is also the founding director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture.

Holliday is the author of Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008) and Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century (Rizzoli, 2012).

David Dillon was the nationally acclaimed architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, where his work received awards from the Associated Press, the Dallas Press Club, and the Texas Society of Architects.

Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Taking an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together art, philosophy, history, and literature, this book investigates the landscapes and buildings of Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund. Through critical essays and beautiful illustrations focusing on four projects, the Woodland Cemetery, the Stockholm Public Library, the Stockholm Exhibition and Asplund’s own house at Stennäs, it addresses the topic of buildings accompanied by landscapes.

It proposes that themes related to landscape are central to Asplund’s distinctive work, with these particular sites forming a collection that documents an evolution in his design thinking from 1915 to 1940. The architect himself wrote comparatively little about his design intentions. However, through close reading and analysis of the selected projects as landscapes with architecture, Malcolm Woollen argues that reflections of the history of Swedish landscape architecture and the intellectual climate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are evident in his work and help to explain the architect’s intentions.

Erik Gunnar Asplund: Landscapes and Buildings (Routledge, 2018) is a must-have for academics, advanced students and researchers in landscape architecture and design who are interested in Nordic Classicism and the works of Erik Gunnar Asplund.

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From the pyramids of Giza, to quasicrystals, to the proportions of the human face, the golden ratio has an infinite capacity to generate shapes with exquisite properties. This book invites you to take a new look at this timeless topic, with a compilation of research and information worthy of a text book, accompanied by over 200 beautiful color illustrations that transform this into the ultimate coffee table book.

In The Golden Ratio: The Divine Beauty of Mathematics (Race Point Press, 2018), Gary Meisner shares the results of his twenty-year investigation and collaboration with thousands of people across the globe in dozens of professions and walks of life. The evidence will close the gaps of understanding related to many claims of the golden ratio’s appearances and applications, and present new findings to take our knowledge further yet.

Whoever you are, and whatever you may know about this topic, you’ll find something new, interesting, and informative in this book, and may find yourself challenged to see, apply, and share this unique number of mathematics and science in new ways.

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Dewey Thorbeck's new book Agricultural Landscapes: Seeing Rural Through Design (Routledge, 2019) follows on from the author’s previous books, Rural Design and Architecture and Agriculture, to encourage using design thinking to provide greater meaning and understanding of places where humans live and work with the rural landscape. Rural areas around the world are often viewed as special places with cultural, historical and natural significance for people. Dewey Thorbeck emphasizes the importance of these rural sites and their connections to urban areas through full-color case studies of these places with particular emphasis on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS), as identified by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, to document and explore personal experiences, lessons learned, and implications for the future.

Thorbeck's Bachelor of Architecture is from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. He then won a Rome Prize Fellowship and studied in Italy for two years. The recipient of a number of architectural design awards, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and past president of AIA Minnesota. Because of his rural design expertise, he was selected to serve as Vice Director of the organizing committee for the creation of the first World Rural Development Committee that will be managed by the World Green Design Organization established in 2010 by China and the European Union.

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Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places (Island Press, 2017) by Robert Cervero, Erick Guerra and Stefan Al is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies. Rethinking how projects are planned and designed in cities and suburbs needs to occur at multiple geographic scales, from micro-designs (such as parklets), corridors (such as road-diets), and city-regions (such as an urban growth boundary). It can involve both software (a shift in policy) and hardware (a physical transformation). Moving beyond mobility must also be socially inclusive, a significant challenge in light of the price increases that typically result from creating higher quality urban spaces.

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Today I talked to Eddie Chau about his new book Random Imaginations: A Collection of Illustrated Musings (ORO Editions, 2018). The book is a reproduction of thousands of graphic images from a single sketchbook, drawn over the course of 27 years. As a way to challenge the approach of drawing what is in front of the artist, these freehand drawings are a collection of images from imagination and memory. What started as an exercise to break out of a design block, these images began on a single sheet and then became a visual journey and exploration of landscapes, everyday items, architecture, abstracts, and compositions. Like the original sketchbook, Random Imaginations is a visual catalog of countless subjects and visions, to be used as discovery, inspiration, or just casual viewing.

Eddie Chau is the owner and Landscape Architect of ECLA Studio in San Francisco, CA. In addition to being a practicing landscape architect, he has taught at U.C. Davis and U.C. Berkeley Extension, where he is the Program Director of the Landscape Architecture Program. He also draws and paints and is a big fan of the University of California Golden Bears.

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Today I talked to Thaisa Way about her new books The Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag: From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design (University of Washington Press, 2019). Haag is best known for his rehabilitation of Gas Works Park in Seattle and for a series of remarkable gardens at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. He reshaped the field of landscape architecture as a designer, teacher, and activist. In 1964, Haag founded the landscape architecture department at the University of Washington, and his innovative work contributed to the increasingly significant design approach known as urban ecological design, which encourages thinking beyond the boundaries of gardens and parks to consider the broader roles that landscapes play within urban ecosystems, such as storm water drainage and wildlife habitat.

Thaisa Way is an urban landscape historian teaching and researching history, theory, and design in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle. She is currently the Chair of the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Planning and Budgets at the University of Washington. Currently she is the Program Director for Garden and Landscape Studies, Harvard University/ Dumbarton Oaks Research Center.

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As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected].

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