New Books in Architecture

Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles.

In The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island Press, 2019), distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns.

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Bradley Cantrell and Adam Mekies' new book Codify: Parametric and Computational Design in Landscape Architecture(Routledge, 2018) Bradley Cantrell and Adam Mekies, "Codify: Parametric and Computational Design in Landscape Architecture" (Routledge, 2018) Landscape architecture has a long history of innovation in the areas of computation and media, particularly in how the discipline represents, analyses, and constructs complex systems. This curated volume spans academic and professional projects to form a snapshot of digital practices that aim to show how computation is a tool that goes beyond methods of representation and media. The book is organized into four sections; syntax, perception, employ, and prospective. The essays are written by leading academics and professionals and the sections examine the role of computational tools in landscape architecture through case studies, historical accounts, theoretical arguments, and nascent propositions.

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This is a magically journey about the mystery of the design process. Chip Sullivan's Cartooning the Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is about using your drawing skills to exercise and stretch your imagination. He takes you step by step through a process of creativity to enhance your own design and challenge your limitations. Why not? Where does creativity come? This book will help guide you on your own path to go there...somewhere. You are your only limitation.

Chip Sullivan is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

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During a career spanning six decades, Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) became one of the most prolific and outspoken landscape architects of his generation. He took on challenging new project types, developing a multidisciplinary practice while experimenting with adaptive reuse and ecological designs for new shopping malls, freeways, and urban parks. In his lifelong effort to improve the American landscape, Halprin celebrated the creative process as a form of social activism.

Kenneth Helphand is a Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects and professor emeritus of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon. His fascinating insights and research reveal a design process that lead Landscape Architecture’s most iconic places. In this interview about his new book Lawrence Halprin (Library of American Landscape History, 2017), Kenny discusses the love that Halprin had for landscape and his role in shaping the way the public uses and enjoys its public spaces.

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Christof Spieler, PE, LEED AP, is a Vice President and Director of Planning at Huitt-Zollars and a lecturer in Architecture and Engineering at Rice University. He was a member of the board of directors of Houston METRO from 2010-2018, where he oversaw a complete redesign of the bus network that has resulted in Houston being one of the few US cities that are increasing transit ridership.

His Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit (Island Press, 2018) is a fascinating book about “How To” develop better transportation modes for US cities and urban areas. Christof has put assembled a dense amount of research with maps, diagrams, and images to demonstrate the successes and lessons learned from US transit. This is a must read book for anyone interested in urban planning, landscape architecture, and the design of our cities.

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Harold Holzer has written a biography of one of America’s greatest public artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Daniel Chester French.  In Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), Holzer chronicles the career of French, who became best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.  French was born in 1850 and became one of the most sought after sculptors of portraits and thematic sculptures in America.  Holzer reveals French’s methods of creation and execution of his sculptural commissions, which included many notable works before the famous Lincoln Memorial.  Yet, the Lincoln Memorial and its place in the American imagination are a central feature of this book.  Holzer reveals how the statue had different political meanings to different audiences from the moment of it dedication.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics of Cole Porter--to name a few--Cheng draws on the oft-studied but little considered Josephine Baker as a figure of articulation for the nuanced contradictions of primitivism, modernism, and theory. Through Baker, Cheng invites us to reconsider the mutual imbrication of object/subject, surface/depth, and exploitation/fascination. Cheng’s careful eye and beautiful command of texture illustrates that dissolving Baker into pure particularity--into pure surface--is the best way to capture her unique agency.

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Environmental crises are making headlines in the news everyday. As public awareness increases about brownfields, pollutants, and water quality, Phyto: Principals and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design (Routledge, 2015) is the tool to mediate those pressing issues. The authors are both landscape architects who address “how to” contain and mediate through phytotechnologies the pollutants humans have used in the environment. The book demonstrates what we can, and the limitations of what we can do, to create healthy beautifully designed ecological sensitive environments for humans, plants, and animals.

Kate Kennen is a landscape architect from Boston MA and founder of Offshoot, Inc. Her undergraduate is from Cornell University and master’s degree from Harvard Graduate School with distinction. She began this study about plant remediation as an undergraduate and it bloomed (pun intended) into an amazing book of tools and recommendations for students and practitioners to incorporate plants to create healthy and beautiful environments.

Niall Kirkwood has been teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1992. His research topics relate to sustainable reuse of land and urban regeneration. His publications include Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape (Routledge), Principals of Brownfield Regeneration (Island Press), and Weathering and Durability in Landscape Architecture (Wiley). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and is a visiting professor to University of Ulster, Korea University, and Tsinghua University.

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In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedented in form and extent, and new socioeconomic structures, including slavery, coinage, and market-exchange. These physical and historical developments were closely linked: building the Republican city was expensive, and meeting such costs had significant implications for urban society. Building Mid-Republican Rome brings both architectural and socioeconomic developments into a single account of urban change. Seth Bernard, an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, assembles a wide array of evidence, from literary sources to coins, epigraphy, and especially archaeological remains, revealing the period's importance for the decline of the Roman state's reliance on obligation and dependency and the rise of slavery and an urban labor market. This narrative is told through an investigation of the evolving institutional frameworks shaping the organization of public construction. A quantitative model of the costs of the Republican city walls reconstructs their economic impact. A new account of building technology in the period allows for a better understanding of the social and demographic profile of the city's builders. Building Mid-Republican Rome thus provides an innovative synthesis of a major Western city's spatial and historical aspects, shedding much-needed light on a seminal period in Rome's development.

Ryan Tripp teaches history in California.

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