Architecture books to inspire shelf love

MAD rhapsody 

Rizzoli

MAD founder Ma Yansong’s work draws on Antoni Gaudí and Eero Saarinen, and ’tempered them with a sensitivity to both Chinese and Western urbanism and the Chinese vernacular, added a dollop of pure fantasy and perhaps a bit of science fiction, and come up with a series of architectural statements that, if nothing else, seem entirely of the twenty-first century: technologically adventuresome, flamboyant, bold and monumental in scale, yet with surprising and endearing elements of intimacy,’ writes critic Paul Goldberger. This tome celebrates the Chinese practice through a visual feast across some 23 projects from 2004 till today. Pictured here, MAD’s Cloudscape of Haikou. Photography: Ma Yansong

Postmodern London Map

Blue Crow Media

The latest in Blue Crow Media’s architecture guides, this map captures London’s postmodernist architecture. Written by Owen Hopkins with photography by Nigel Green, the publication features over fifty selected buildings. ‘The map shines new light on some of east London’s former industrial areas such as the Docklands and Canary Wharf where Postmodern architecture brought new character and identity,’ say the publishers. Photography: Nigel Green

Jaragua Won’t Crumble

This new book explores a forgotten modernist icon in the Caribbean - the Jaragua Hotel, built in 1942 in the Dominican Republic. The publication was composed by architect Alex Martínez Suárez and design editor Rab Messina. ‘The Dominican Republic’s role in the spread of modernism in the Antilles has been widely ignored by both practicing architects and academic researchers,’ says Martinez Suárez. ‘At the time, the Jaragua Hotel was one of the most photographed and globally disseminated buildings hailing from this region… and yet the fact that we live in a country that only values its colonial-era architectural heritage basically erased it from our collective history.’ Messina adds: ‘In fact, many Millennials have no idea that the Jaragua Hotel by the Caribbean Sea is not the original one. We’re talking about two generations born after 1985 that ignore the diverse wealth of our architectural heritage, since Santo Domingo’s accelerated and indiscriminate vertical growth has turned the city into a mass grave for modernist works.’

Immersed: The California Houses of Feldman Architecture

Oscar Riera Ojeda 

This book is a feast of residential architecture, digging deep into the portfolio of Californian practice Feldman Architecture to bring to the fore a rich selection of the practice’s bespoke homes. Including an introduction by Aaron Betsky, the publication is divided into sections around context, such as suburban and rural. The homes span scales and materials, offering an immersive exploration of the residential typology in California. 

Peter Marino: The Architecture of Chanel

Phaidon

‘Chanel invented the modern woman—vibrant, forward-looking, stylish. It’s that spirit that [the] store captures, while articulating what it is that makes Chanel uniquely Chanel,’ has said architect Peter Marino, as explored in this extensive tome by Phaidon on the fashion brand’s architecture. The visually rich book includes an introduction by Pilar Viladas and contributions by Felix Burrichter and Sam Lubell, while celebrating Peter Marino’s 25-year-long collaboration with Chanel. 

Isabelle Stanislas: Designing Spaces, Drawing Emotions

Rizzoli

Paris-based architect and interior designer Isabelle Stanislas has launched a monograph of her work - a beautifully crafted tome, including elegant photography and a wealth of projects from the creative’s long portfolio. The works span from private homes to commissions for luxury fashion brands such as Cartier and Hermès, all of which Stanislas has completed in her refined style which bridges the subtle grandeur of historical architecture with an unmistakably contemporary aesthetic. 

OMA: Search Term

Rizzoli

‘This book is an index of twenty-three works by OMA New York - built, lost, and in progress,’ say OMA NY partners Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long. ‘Over the last thirteen years, our identity has materialized through our growth as a satellite office within the unique circumstance of OMA’s lineage. We went from working on one institutional project in New York to thirty projects ongoing simultaneously across diverse scales and typologies—masterplans, parks, towers, museums, exhibitions, and more.... We started as a small office of five and grew to a full-fledged operation of eighty. We reached a point where it made sense to ask: What is OMA New York?’ Exploring the DNA of OMA’s NY outpost, its body of work, past, present and future, the publication is now out by Rizzoli, edited by Sophia Choi and designed by Studio Lin.

Now You Know

Sound Advice

Sound Advice, the architecture platform that instigates and fosters dialogues in the industry around issues of racial inequality, diversity and inclusion has published Now You Know, a special tome that explores the above topics in the written form. The publication includes a range of essays and interviews by sixty architects and urbanists of colour, edited by Sound Advice co-founders Joseph Henry and Pooja Agrawal. Thought provoking and powerful, the book aims to increase awareness about the existing diversity issues in the architecture field - and beyond. 

Mid Century Britain, Modern Architecture 1938–1963

Pavilion Books

For all the attention that the mid-century period gets in art, design, and architecture, the British architectural landscape of the forties, fifties, and early sixties is only just getting its due. This isn’t for lack of material; the post-war period saw huge investment in the built environment, particularly in social housing and infrastructure. So why the belated recognition? Elain Harwood’s new book ‘Mid Century Britain’, published in collaboration with the Twentieth Century Society, looks at the period 1938 to 1963, during which the modernist zeal for renewal and change was suddenly pushed to the forefront by the ravages of war and the birth of the welfare state. Harwood is an engaging and hugely knowledgeable guide, who along with other Society members has done huge amount to change the perception and preservation of this architectural era. The book includes churches, department stores, housing estates and more, showcasing the quiet innovation, generous spaces, and commitment to equality that is so desperately needed once again. Writer: Jonathan Bell

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office: Thresholds: Space, Time and Practice

Thames & Hudson

The Chinese practice’s second monograph, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office: Thresholds: Space, Time and Practice, is a suitably extensive survey of Neri & Hu’s work. The publication runs through a selection of over 30 of the practice’s most recent projects, spanning works in the cultural, leisure, public and private domains. Works are divided in six main chapters: Reflective Nostalgia, Nomadic Voyeurism, Dwelling, Inhabitable Strata, Recasting Vernacular, and Future Artefact, spanning both pragmatic and conceptual concerns and illustrating each scheme with a range of media. Pictured here, the studio’s Suzhou Chapel in Suzhou Shi. Photography: Pedro Pegenaute

The Empty Room: Fragmented Thoughts on Space

RZLBD

Tehran-born, Toronto-based architect Reza Aliabadi leads a dynamic practice with engaging work in a variety of fields - from private houses to conceptual work, but also art and words. All this and more are explored in the studio’s latest publication, an in-depth dive into Aliabadi’s thought process and output. The book is available through the practice’s own store, RZLBD Shop, ‘an archive and web store hosting self published print work produced in the atelier over the past decade.’ 

Atlas: Tadao Ando

Prestel

When former journalist, filmmaker and photographer Philippe Séclier visited the studio of Tadao Ando in 2012, he was captivated by the journey through the renowned Japanese architect’s buildings and the way the light travels through them. His fascination resulted in a nine year project and a series of photographs of some 130 buildings. This book presents the fruits of his labour, showing the works in a loosely chronological order, inviting the reader to explore Ando’s oeuvre through Séclier’s unique perspective and skillful lens. 

Voices (Towards Other Institutions)

les presses du réel

A publication linked to the project Open, by the 2021 Russian Federation Pavilion, this book - Voices (Towards Other Institutions) - has been masterminded by architect Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Erica Petrillo. ‘This book gathers twenty-eight texts released weekly between May 2020 and May 2021 on pavilionrus.com by an interdisciplinary cohort of practitioners and thinkers, from Russia and beyond, putting forward new ways of thinking and acting within institutions,’ the team explains. If you’ve missed the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, this book will help you get a taster. 

Bjarne Mastenbroek. Dig it! Building Bound to the Ground

Taschen

‘Mankind destroys the skin of the earth at an unprecedented scale. The time has come for a fundamental reset,’ says this book’s author, Dutch architect Bjarne Mastenbroek. With this publication, the founder of dynamic architecture pratice SeARCH acknowledges the field’s need, and efforts, to reconnect with nature and the earth. Using examples such as African churches chiseled from rock, Chinese villages dug into terrains, outgrown Parisian housing and a villa built into the cliffs of Capri, Mastenbroek helps us delve into past practices in effort to imagine a better future of sustainable architecture. 

Works: Mim Design

Untitled Press

One of Australia’s leading interiors architecture firms, Mim Design has just announced its first monograph, showcasing projects from 2000 — 2021. With it, the Melbourne based studio, which was founded by Miriam Fanning, celebrates 21 years of practice and invites the reader on a journey across a carefully selected handful of key works. 13 project unfold, spanning private and multi residential, retail, hospitality, and commercial typologies, while the publication also includes a foreword by design author Karen McCartney. 

The Complete Kengo Kuma

Taschen

Kengo Kuma’s mastery of architecture unfolds in its full glory in this new monography by Taschen. The book explores the Japanese architect’s works from the 20th and 21st century, through some 500 illustrations (photographs, sketches, and plans). Including both completed and ongoing projects, the ‘XXL’ tome also comes as a limited edition ‘Art Edition’, featuring a custom-built wooden slipcase and accompanied by a lithographic print of a sketch by Kengo Kuma, signed by the architect himself. Pictured above, the Daiwa Ubiquitous Computing Research Building, University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus, Tokyo, (2014). Photography: Takumi Ota

Nicolas Schuybroek: Selected Works

Hatje Cantz

A hefty new tome by publisher Hatje Cantz explores the work of Belgian architect Nicolas Schuybroek. Out in October 2021, the book is the very first monograph of the dynamic architect who already has a wealth of elegant built projects under his belt. Including schemes like the boutique private JJM House outside Brussels, and flooded with striking imagery, this publication is a feast for the eyes. Pictured here, O House. Photography: Koen van Damm

Master of the Midcentury: The Architecture of William F. Cody

Monacelli

William F. Cody (1916–1978) is one of the most iconic Palm Springs architects. Cody came to Palm Springs in 1945 in search of fame and architectural fortune. He had been lured by the formidable Nellie Coffman – ‘The Mother of Palm Springs’ – to extend the Desert Inn, the sanatorium she founded in 1909 and which evolved throughout the century. Cody was just 29, a recent graduate from the College of Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California (alumni of the era included Paul Revere Williams, Pierre Koenig and William Krisel). He became one of the most recognisable architects in the region. This new book is the first comprehensive retrospective about the key modernist architect’s life and work, published by Monacelli. Pictured here, the proposed Mountain Terminal of Tramway, drawing by William Cody. Image: William F. Cody Papers and William F. Cody Papers 2, Special Collections and Archives, Robert E. Kennedy Library, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Erik Dhont’s Gardens – the Beauty of the Unpredictable

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Landscape architect Erik Dhont has released a collection of projects from his lush portfolio together with publisher Hatje Cantz Verlag. Exploring a variety of projects, from gardens in private homes, to commercial and public spaces, the book transports readers all around the world, from an avenue of camellias in Walloon Brabant to evergreen oaks in California. Seven thematic chapters by art historian Suzanne Krizenecky help organise Dhont’s work in ‘creating frames’ through which nature can take over and play the protagonistic role. Photography: Jean-Pierre_Gabriel

Antarctic Resolution

Lars Müller Publishers

‘Antarctic Resolution is the first publication on the Antarctic that attempts to offer a multidisciplinary high-resolution image of our southernmost continent,’ say this book’s creators. Edited by Giulia Foscari / UNLESS, and co-authored by 150 polar leading experts, the publication is an immersive exploration of the frozen continent - which accounts for approximately 10% of the land mass of Planet Earth. Divided into three main sections - on geopolitics, science, and architecture - the tome contains texts, photographic essays, and data-based visual portfolios, as well as the very first census of Antarctic architecture. 

Amos Rex Art Museum

Arvinius + Orfeus

Celebrating the Amos Rex Art Museum project, this book by Arvinius + Orfeus is a deep dive into the design of JKMM Architects for the renowned Finnish Museum that opened its doors in 2018. Celebrating the popular Helsinki cultural destination and its recent win with the Leading Culture Destination Award for New Cultural Destination of the Year – Europe, the publication showcases how an unexpected, subterranean, two-storey building can push the boundaries of what an art space can be. 

Manuel Cervantes Estudio

TC Cuadernos

A new book celebrates the work to-date of architect Manuel Cervantes and his Mexico City based studio. The brains behind elegantly contemporary work such as his own base in the Mexican capital, Casa Estudio, Cervantes is a staple in the country’s architecture scene and beyond. This new publication seeks to create a dialogue between local and modern, highlighting the architect’s approach through 300 pages and works completed between 2011 and 2021. Texts, photographs and plans make for an immersive experience that will transport you with the architecture’s sophisticated, subtle complexity. 

Contemporary Japanese Architecture

Taschen

This lush, XL-sized tome by Philip Jodidio explores some 39 architects and 55 projects in Japan. Big names sit next to emerging practices, all thinking and rethinking architecture and buildings in the Asian country. Examples includefrom Tadao Ando’s Shanghai Poly Theater, Shigeru Ban’s concert hall La Seine Musical, SANAA’S Grace Farms, to Fumihiko Maki’s 4 World Trade Center. Works touch on several typologies and ongoing architectural concerns, such as sustainability, community and use of materials, seen through luxurious photography and texts. Pictured here, Yusuhara Wooden Bridge Museum by Kengo Kuma in Yusuhara, Kochi, Japan, (2010). Photography: Takumi Ota

New Architects 4

Architecture Foundation

A rich collection of emerging UK talent, New Architects 4 is the Architecture Foundation’s newest exploration of young talent. The book series has just launched its latest iteration, featuring 109 British architectural practices to look out for. Edited by Pamela Buxton and designed by Studio Mathias Clothu, the tome (at a lavish 550 pages) is a valuable resource and source of inspiration for anybody interested in the UK architecture scene and its future. It includes words by Architecture Foundation Director, Ellis Woodman, Eleanor Beaumont, Luke Jones, Jon Astbury, Meneesha Kellay, Lucy Watson and Neal Shasore. Photography: Thomas Adank

Sandfuture

MIT Press

Justin Beal is an artist and writer. His new book on the life and work of Minoru Yamasaki is part memoir, part history, part cultural reflection. Yamasaki is best known as the architect of the original World Trade Center, inescapable symbols of a city that were grudgingly admired for their brutish elegance and vast scale. Until suddenly they were no longer there, and their existence became freighted with more meaning than any architect would ever desire to be associated with. Yamasaki died long before the twin towers fell, but he did live through the demolition of another one of his most significant works, the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St Louis. For decades, this deliberate demolition of a high-profile public housing project, barely 20 years into its life, was seen as a colossal example of modernist hubris – ‘the day Modern architecture died,’ according to Charles Jencks. Beal takes all this on board, weaving in his own story and that of other artists and architects who have seen their work become part of a much broader conversation about place, culture, and identity.

Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles

MCD Books

Los Angeles is a city of ruminating writers, the vast majority of whom are unpublished and bitter, looked ever deeper inward for the source of their lack of success while simultaneously living amongst the inescapable physical evidence of those who have actually made it. Rosecrans Baldwin is a talented writer who is intrigued, rather than infuriated, by the city’s eccentricities. Like many of his creative peers, he’s not a native Angeleno, but as an accomplished essayist and writer of fiction, Baldwin’s outsider status gives him a perfect vantage point to challenge, embrace or confront what it means to live in LA in the 21^st century. Citing everyone from Reyner Banham to Joan Didion to Raymond Chandler, LA is presented as a place that challenge preconceptions, an endless horizon of possibilities where you’re meant to make your own narrative and find your own self, in amongst a crowd of others seeking to do exactly the same thing. This episodic piece of narrative non-fiction sub-divides the urban experience into personal vignettes, filtered through the city’s copious literature and the many voices Baldwin meets on his quest to understand LA. It’s a book about planning as much as people, and why LA is so utterly resistant to the latter whilst also being such a neophiliac’s paradise.

Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency

Pelican Books

Barnabas Calder’s new book addresses the inconvenient truth that architecture has a colossal and very pressing role to play in the climate crisis. As Calder points out, the built environment accounts for a substantial slice of the energy-use pie chart, as much as 40% once construction, materials, transportation, and energy consumption is taken into account. Calder knows a thing or two about energy intensive processes – he wrote Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism. This history-focused successor explores how architecture was traditionally shaped by the available energy, maximising or minimising its requirements in as natural way as possible. The age of mechanical services changed everything; if we’re to dial down our consumption, then the old ways need to be explored once more.

Hip-Hop Architecture 

Bloomsbury

Hip-Hop Architecture takes a radical new approach to contextualising architectural practice, eschewing the tropes of academia and the power structures of modernism, gentrification and exclusion that have driven the design narrative to date. Written by Sekou Cooke, a practicing architect as well as an Assistant Professor at New York’s Syracuse University School of Architecture, Hip-Hop Architecture is a call for building design to be instated as the fifth pillar of this cultural movement, joining dance, drama, fine arts and music. Central to Cooke’s thesis is the idea of design driven by engagement with community and process, not just the imposition of pre-existing forms and hierarchies. As idiosyncratic, challenging and genre-redefining as Hip-hop’s other cultural manifestations, Cooke’s book argues for a new approach to urban design that better expresses the Black and African American experience. Image: Dorchester Projects. Photography: Sarah Pooley

Architectural Guide London: Twentieth-Century Housing Project

DOM Publishers

A welcome diversion from the usual icon-focused approach to the architectural city guide, this book looks at London through the frame of social housing. Author Tjerk Ruimschotel is your well-informed leader, taking you on a tour of the capital’s best and least-known housing developments, ranging from the Arts and Crafts-inspired blocks by the pre-war housing associations and the large, modernist housing schemes that replaced bombsites, damaged terraces and abandoned factories in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Throughout its history, Londoners have vilified the various stages and styles of the city’s housing stock, and perceptions usually reach their lowest ebb before a style is swept up in popularity by the cycle of fashion. The good news is that local authorities are finally gearing up to provide good quality homes once more. Ruimschotel’s guide will lead you through the history of this desperately needed resource. Photography: Tjerk Ruimschotel

Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism

Verso

Owen Hatherley is one of the best contemporary architectural writers. Unlike many of his peers and predecessors, Hatherley’s writing has always come from a place of experience, whether it was the long walks that shaped his early books on Post-War British, Soviet and European architecture, or the lived reality of growing up in a well-planned, humanist modern estate at a time when these structures – and their inhabitants – were increasingly marginalised. Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism comes out this experience, assembling a collection of writings on everything from serious pop to frivolous architecture, written from 2005 onwards. Like all Hatherley’s work, this writing fuses the personal and the political, charting our transition from a world of multi-layered intellectual challenges underpinned by a utopian internet to our current era of deep digital cynicism and deliberate obfuscation. The clear-sighted vision, analysis and, optimism of a writer like Hatherley shines through when we need it most.

Kengo Kuma: Topography

Images Publishing

Kengo Kuma, one of Japan’s most pre-eminent architects, is given the monograph treatment in Topography. The architect, born in 1954, has accelerated his output over the last decade, with projects such as the new Tokyo Stadium for the ill-fated 2021 Olympics, the city’s newest train station, the forthcoming House of Fairytales at the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark, and the acclaimed V&A Dundee. If there’s a common thread running through these often very different structures, it’s the integration of the surrounding environment and the transformation of architecture into a topographical landscape all of its own, from the V&A’s step-sided caverns to the tree-festooned façade of the Japanese National Stadium. As Kuma himself says in the introduction, ‘I became aware that while I thought I had made the
architecture invisible, something else was inevitably created in its place.’ That something else is traced in the three dozen projects detailed on these pages. Image: V&A Dundee. Photography: Hufton + Crow

Inagawa Cemetery Chapel and Visitor Centre

Lixil Publishing, Tokyo, and Buchhandlung Walther König

A meticulous publication to accompany a meticulous project, this beautiful book complements David Chipperfield Architects’ recently completed cemetery chapel and visitor centre in Ingawa, set amongst the steep slopes of the Hokusetsu mountain range in Hyogo prefecture. The building itself is united by a single sloping roof and finished in uniform red coloured concrete and is set at the base of a grand axis that rises up through the burial plots, with Chipperfield and his team creating both the architecture and the furnishings. The book was designed by long-time collaborator John Morgan Studio in London and uses a specialist modern paper, Takeo Satogami, designed to evoke the feel of traditional hand-made Japanese washi paper. It features a year’s worth of photographs by Risaku Suzuki, charting the impact of the seasons on the gardens and the light.

Gio Ponti

Taschen

In keeping with the company’s long-standing love of scale, Taschen’s new monograph on Gio Ponti is billed as the most comprehensive book ever published on the Italian modernist’s life and work. At nearly 600 pages, this hefty hardcover covers a hugely varied career, with many unseen photographs, drawings and ephemera taken from the official Ponti Archive. Ponti, who died in 1979 at the age of 87, worked on everything from polychromatic interiors to the timeless drama of the Pirelli Tower in Milan, as well as furniture, fabrics, industrial design, accessories and more, The book is a fittingly grand encapsulation of a long career characterised by invention as well as innovation.

Building for Hope: Towards an Architecture of Belonging

Thames & Hudson

Author Marwa al-Sabouni is based in Homs and witnessed the destruction and deprivation of Syria’s civil war at first hand. Her previous book, The Battle for Home, described her experience of living as a female architect amidst the ongoing conflict. Building for Hope is a counterpart text, exploring the ways in which traditional, evolutionary patterns of human settlement can return and flourish in the face of abandonment and waste. Syria is perhaps the most obvious example, but al-Sabouni explores the impact of architecture on other forms of crisis and how a more inclusive and sensitive approach to town planning might alleviate suffering in other parts of the world. The author’s own drawings bring the cities of the Middle East and their vivid histories to life. Image: Damascus’s fabric around the Great Umayyad Mosque, 1993, drawn by Marwa al-Sabouni

The Essential Louis Kahn

Prestel

Louis Kahn’s work has always been at home with the ageing process. Moving away from the clinical perfection espoused by many of his more purist-minded peers, the modernist architect’s insistence on brick, wood and concrete has given his buildings a chance to grow old gracefully, becoming increasingly at one with their surroundings and gradually taking on a timeless quality. The Turkish architect and photographer Cemal Emden has travelled around the US and Bangladesh to capture 23 of Kahn’s best-known buildings, from private houses and educational buildings to the Sher-E-Bangla Nagar government buildings in Dhaka. The resulting photographs highlight the enduring power of architecture rooted in solidity, simplicity, and geometry. Image: Salk Institute, Photography: Cemal Emden

Vertical Living: Compact Architecture for Urban Spaces

Gestalten

Vertical Living provides a snapshot of the uneasy reality of modern urban life, a place where space is at a premium, and apartment dwellers walk a fine line between spatial innovation and exploitation. Collecting over 40 examples of recent designs for small space living, this is the architecture monograph as wish book, showing example after example of visionary treatments of slender plots and tiny sites. There’s plenty of variety on display, whether it’s London, Tokyo or elsewhere; the trick is to stack space without compromising function or liveability.

The Kyklàda Press series

Kyklàda Press

A series of four little books touching upon big ideas, this publishing project from Athens looks into architectural topographies and themes stemming from experiences in the Greek islands and in particular the Aegean Archipelago. Looking at past and present, through topics such as the Cycladic holiday house and the history of the iconic island of Mykonos, these books are an exploration of time and place. The first in the series, titled ‘The Architecture is Absent’, delves into the retreat of 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis and his own holiday house on the island of Amorgos. Four books have been released and another four are currently in the pipeline. 

Anime Architecture: Imagined Worlds and Endless Megacities

Thames & Hudson

A true labour of love, just like the artworks within, Anime Architecture is devoted to the realms conjured up in the modern wave of Japanese science-fiction anime films over the past twenty years. Focusing on eight films, including the iconic Akira and Ghost in the Shell, Riekeles’ monograph includes nearly 400 images taken from all stages of the production process, from concept designs through to finished, film-ready backdrops. The artistry on display is staggering, especially in the fine lined concept designs by the likes of Shuichi Kusamori and Shinji Kimura, and the book covers an era when traditional hand processes were increasingly being spliced with computer graphics. Image: Metropolis, scene 12, cut no. 7 et al. Final production background Shuichi Kusamori Poster colour on paper 50 × 70.7 cm (193⁄4 × 27⁷⁄₈ in.) © 2001 TEZUKA PRODUCTIONS / METROPOLIS COMMITTEE. Licensed from BANDAI NAMCO Arts Inc. All Rights Reserved

Richard Seifert: British Brutalist Architect

Lund Humphries

Richard Seifert was a commercial architect of exceptional acumen, renowned for Brutalist works that transcend the banality of many big developments. Seifert’s talent was for pattern, extracting ornament out of the repetition of modular façade elements. It gave his buildings a strong character, from Croydon to Centre Point, which doubtless helped sway planners to adopt his monumental schemes. The other key factor in his career was the war, from which Seifert emerged as a Colonel, returning to a city in desperate need of architectural renewal. His firm grew to become one of Britain’s largest, with George Marsh as a principal designer and key clients like the developer Harry Hyams. Dominic Bradbury’s new architecture book is the first major treatment of the life and work of an architect who still leaves a major legacy. Image: Centre Point, London

David Adjaye - Works 1995-2007

Thames & Hudson

One of the many delights of The Modern House website is seeing the occasional early work by Sir David Adjaye resurface for sale. It’s hard to imagine, but the winner of the 2021 RIBA Royal Gold Medal was once best known for his intimate, experimental and richly detailed private houses and interiors. Many of those projects were for artists and creatives and went deliberately and boldly against the grain. Adjaye shaped luminous caverns out of unprepossessing spaces, treating architecture as if it had been hewn from a solid block. Colour, light, and form also play a key role in these projects, with the theatrical juxtaposition of bold hues, mirrored surfaces and an almost Brutalist reverence for building materials. This suitably monumental new monograph, Works 1995-2007, covers those early, formative years and is among the year’s must read architecture books.

20/20: Twenty Great Houses of the Twentieth Century

Lund Humphries

Architect John Pardey is no stranger to our pages. An author as well as an award-winning architect, his new book looks at twenty of the most significant houses of the last century. There aren’t any major surprises here, but instead of dry by-the-numbers description, Pardey’s take on each project is personal, weaving the trials and tribulations of their design, construction and subsequent history. From Aalto to Wright, Eames to Utzon, there isn’t a house here that doesn’t have many tales to tell, and Pardey proves a compelling and knowledgeable narrator. Image: Exterior view of Stahl House showing the pool and terrace

Out of the Woods – Architecture and Interiors Built from Wood 

Gestalten

The Gestalten image factory does what it does best, taking a concept and then sifting through the image streams to illustrate it inside and out. Out of the Woods is not especially high concept, featuring as it does page after page of warm and charming contemporary structures that deploy every aspect facet of timber construction. But the projects on display are also underpinned by a much more significant truth; wood has never been more important. Not only are new structural approaches giving fresh impetus to timber’s practicality, but its innate sustainability and flexibility make wood an excellent option for almost every application. One of the year’s must read architecture books. 

Triangle Modern Architecture 

ORO Editions

This new book from ORO captures the architectural experimentation that has come characterise ‘The Triangle’, the area of North Carolina contained within the three college towns of Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill. Over seven decades, this legacy came to include a multitude of mid-century Modern houses, as well as campuses, country clubs, malls and commercial buildings. It wasn’t just sleek, low structures – there were also plenty of bold structural innovation and neo-Brutalist forms. Architect and writer Victoria Ballard Bell traces the web of influences, allegiances and partnerships that put the Triangle at the sharp end of American architecture. Photography: Tom Arban

Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings Volume One, 1954–1978

Cahiers d’Art

It’s easy to think of Frank Gehry as a global phenomenon, an architect whose signature style became shorthand for cultured engagement. The first volume in the prolific Canadian architect reveals the Californian origins of his career. Early projects were influenced by the spindly windows and willowy canopies of the Case Study Program, with drawings that evoked the meticulous line work of Paul Rudolph (an acquaintance). Gradually the influences become broader, and restraint gives way to expressionism, as Gehry rattles through Pop and Po-Mo until – at some point in the mid-70s – he hits upon something unique, a deconstructed style that launches a hundred imitators and a thousand theses. The period covered by this lavish volume gets us nowhere near the familiar ‘icons’ of the 20th century, but culminates instead with a hefty tranche of drawings for the building that effectively launched the architect’s career, the Frank and Berta Gehry Residence in Santa Monica, ‘completed’ in 1978. Encapsulating his ethos of ‘careless complexity,’ the house was a stage set for experimentation and has never lost its allure. Photography: Gaetane Girard

In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism

Lars Müller Publishers

As the title of this new study from New York’s Pratt Institute makes abundantly clear, a clearly defined ‘African American Space’ is still in flux, constantly redrawn and redrafted by shifts in the body politic. Overlooked and discarded, demonised or gentrified, and then casually redrawn and redrafted to suit the political expediency of the community’s oppressors, African American Space is still hugely contested. Contemporary America still sits on a racial fault line of uneasy juxtapositions and this book is the first major academic study of how space and community continues to be one of the cracks.  With details of artistic and architectural responses to the perennial search for a meaningful space, as well as a huge number of historical illustrations, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of modern America. Image: ISAAS House 2, Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas, 2001, Yolande Daniels

Life Meets Art: Inside the Homes of the World’s Most Creative People

Phaidon

Going through the keyhole with creative figures spanning the past few centuries, Life Meets Art is as much a statement about modern museology as it is about creativity. In addition to the beautifully curated living spaces of contemporary practitioners, a substantial chunk of the book shows the meticulously maintained studios of the departed. These are spaces that have been kept as they were the day their occupant died, with totems of inspiration carefully art directed for prosperity. These range from the ragged authenticity of artist’s studios belonging to the likes Joan Miró, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, through to the shrine-like reverence accorded to the workspaces of Lloyd Wright, the Eameses, and Le Corbusier. Many of these more famous rooms are (usually) open to the public, so this architecture photography book serves as an atlas of the eccentric art of the creative space.

Abbatt Toys: Modern Toys for Modern Children

Design for Today

Paul and Marjorie Abbatt were a power couple of British modernism, albeit in a low-key way. Their company was set up in 1932 and soon occupied a magnificent toyshop on Wimpole Street, designed by none other than Ernö Goldfinger with a style and ethos that still looks utterly contemporary. The Abbatts believed in dovetailing play with learning, studying the emerging field of educational psychology and choosing their stock from the best and brightest European designers. Their catalogue was full of puzzles and construction toys, sturdily built to last. Powers’ book chronicles their hugely collectible oeuvre and the modernist circles they moved in. 

Flughafen Tegel

Verlag POOL Publishing

Featuring immersive, striking colour photography by Berlin based artists Robert Rieger and Felix Brüggemann and an essay by Wallpaper’s own Germany editor Sophie Lovell, this book is an ode to Tegel airport. Now reduced to skeleton service, after being in operation for almost 70 years, Berlin Tegel is captured in this new 88-page photo book, which celebrates not only the particular project as a landmark piece of infrastructure, but also the architecture of the 1960s and ‘the unmistakable design logic of this singular airport,’ explain its creators. The beautiful tome includes an interview with architect Volkwin Marg, who, together with von Gerkan designed the project. Photography: Flughafen Tegel © Felix Brüggemann & Robert Rieger

Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary

Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers

The Belgian architect Glenn Sestig’s new monograph is a testament to refinement, not just of physical form, but of materials and the interaction of light and shadow. On the surface, Sestig’s work feels like an endless quest in search of reduction and simplicity, but it’s the interplay of volumes, whether structural, material or physical, that gives these spaces their sense of enduring solidity. The monograph has an introduction by our very own Nick Vinson, along with an essay from wallpaper*’s Architecture Editor Ellie Stathaki and interviews with a number of key Sestig clients. 

James-Simon-Galerie Berlin

Walther König

On the occasion of the completion of the James-Simon-Galerie in Berlin, David Chipperfield Architects has commissioned an elegant tome to celebrate. The building of subject, a visitor centre and gateway to Berlin’s Museum Island located between the Kupfergraben canal and the Neues Museum, is the last architectural puzzle piece to be slotted into the island masterplan. And who better to capture the sober lines, slim concrete columns and classically sculpted space of the James-Simon-Galerie but photographer Thomas Struth. The photographs in the book, which are complemented by essays and archive images, capture the crispness of the architecture with Struth’s typical clarity and sensitivity across multiple scales and angles. Read more about the James-Simon-Galerie here. Photography: Marion Schoenenberger for David Chipperfield Architects

Slacklands 2: A Guide To Rural Contemporary Architecture Of The Twentieth Century

ARCA, Archive for Rural Contemporary Architecture

In this second edition of the beautiful Slacklands guide written by Corinna Dean, ARCA (the Archive for Rural Contemporary Architecture) explores the architectural gems found, often in ruins, outside the big urban hubs of the world. Ranging from Cold War relics to more everyday typologies (such as water towers and churches) the book explores 32 illustrated examples of buildings that fit the category. Artwork by Peter Nencini perfectly complement’s Dean’s words in each chapter section, creating a fascinating visual Grand Tour of lesser known architectural marvels. The tome includes a foreword by Charles Holland. 

AB Concept: A Cultural Journey through Light, Form, and Space

Assouline

AB Concept co-founders Ed Ng and Terence Ngan set up their joint Hong Kong operation two decades ago and have since seemingly taken over the world of luxury interiors in the residential and hospitality fields; and with good reason, as their striking designs are sensual, meticulous and multi-layered, bringing their own unique brand of east-west fusion in an exciting journey of storytelling. Now, a range of their projects can be perused in a new tome by specialist publisher Assouline. The hefty publication includes a variety of hospitality flagships around the world, such as their Mei Ume restaurant in London’s Trinity Square. Not only will the reader be able to follow the practice’s work through iconic and experimental works, getting a unique insight into the brand’s mind and processes, but they will also be taken through an enticing journey around the world, as well as a true visual feast. The book features words by Paola Singer. Photography: Owen Raggett

Eric Mendelsohn Synagogues

Lund Humphries

Four synagogues designed by Eric Mendelsohn are documented in colour by photographer Michael Palmer in this new book published by Lund Humphries. These four synagogues, are the built designs out of the seven that the German-Jewish architect created in America between 1946 and 1953. Writer Ita Heinze-Greenberg’s accompanying essay describes Mendelsohn’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism – including his interest in finding new architectural solutions for the post-war and post-Holocaust climate, when the duality of Jewish and American identity became more crucial than ever.