Book Briefs #44
Here is the next installment of "Book Briefs," the series of occasional posts featuring short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that publishers send to me for consideration on this blog. Obviously, these briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than those that end up as long reviews.Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change edited by Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Daniel A. Barber, Anton Vidokle | e-flux Architecture | February 2022 | 7 x 10 inches | 272 pages | $30 | Amazon / BookshopThe old saying goes that if you want to know the weather just stick your head out the window. But what about climate? If you want to understand climate and how it has changed over time, "media is necessary," the editors of this volume of 22 essays contend. Usually such media takes the form of charts, graphs, maps, and other visualizations of data, showing how climatic zones have shifted northward in the Northern Hemisphere, for instance, or how much global carbon emissions come from the construction and operation of buildings. This being a publication of e-flux Architecture, architecture — "a material and symbolic intervention in the lifeworld" — is the subject of choice, one that "works towards new understandings of effective [...] means of engaging ecosystems and behaviors." Although the editors write that the essays in Accumulation "outline some of the opportunities and ambitions of visual scholarship" in addressing today's challenges, the book has fewer than a dozen illustrations. The contributions by academics and practitioners in diverse fields therefore require mental visualization on the part of the reader, who is ideally someone ready and willing to effect change toward what the editors call "other possible futures."Architecture and Anarchism: Building without Authority by Paul Dobraszczyk | Antepavilion / Paul Holberton Publishing | November 2021 | 9 x 10-1/2 inches | 248 pages | £25 | Amazon / BookshopSurveys are a popular format for architecture books, with most of them focusing on typologies of buildings (skyscrapers, housing, museums), buildings in a particular region (Japanese houses, Santa Fe Modern), or some particular aspect of architectural culture (books, magazines, women architects). Surveys are most valuable when they draw attention to buildings, projects, places, and people that are unexpected, not covered widely in other architecture books or media but nevertheless of importance. I lump Paul Dobraszczyk's Architecture and Anarchism in here, alongside Design Like You Give a Damn, Radical Architecture of the Future, Social Design, and other titles focused on the impact of architecture on society. This one features sixty "projects from the Global North that illustrate anarchist values in action" (I'm guessing the Global South is omitted because it would have pushed the book from art, self-building, and collective action toward slums and other communities of necessity) with the goal of presenting anarchism as "a powerful way of reconceptualizing architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological and egalitarian practice." Well-known places — past, present, and imaginary — abound (Christiana, Burning Man, Drop City, Kowloon Walled City, Occupy Wall Street, Theaster Gates's Dorchester Projects, Constant's New Babylon, etc.), but many are little-known by comparison. Instigated by Antepavilion, an arts and architecture charity in the UK, Architecture and Anarchism is a much-needed survey of alternative practices and approaches that arrives at a time when contemporary crises make alternatives necessary.The Architecture of Yemen and Its Reconstruction by Salma Samar Damluji | Laurence King Publishing | May 2021 (Second edition) | 10-1/4 x 13-1/2 inches | 368 pages | $95 | Amazon / BookshopSalma Samar Damluji, who worked with Hassan Fathy in the 1970s and 80s, co-wrote a historical monograph on the famous Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy: Earth & Utopia, an impressive — and large — book put out by Laurence King in 2018. A decade earlier, in 2007, Damluji wrote The Architecture of Yemen, billed as "the first book to offer an in-depth investigation into the characteristic architecture of [the] country," resulting from "nearly two decades of research." The second edition released last year has a large format similar to the Fathy book, allowing them to fit well side-by-side on one's bookshelf; both are worth having, especially for architects interested in traditional mud construction and the preservation of such buildings. The three chapters from the first edition — on Lahij ("Stone and Skyscrapers"), Shabwah ("Mud Brick and Desert Palaces"), and Hadramūt ("Stone, Shale and Mud Brick Skyscrapers") — are accompanied by a new chapter devoted to the reconstruction of Hadramūt between 2006 and 2014 (hence the and Its Reconstruction in the book's title) and an emergency project in Shibām, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Initi
The German architecture magazine ARCH+ makes just one of its four issues each year available in an English translation. This most recent issue, last year's, is Contested Modernities, the printed companion to a multifaceted program of the same name that consisted of symposia and an exhibition focused on postcolonial architecture in Southeast Asia as part of Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism. The four "initiators and artistic directors" of the program also edited the publication that features more than thirty essays, conversations, and photo essays organized into four country chapters: Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Singapore. It is an impressive publication, with deep scholarship on architects, buildings, and places that are most likely unknown to the majority of architects in Europe and North America. Although the program was put together with a German perspective (the "encounters" are those between Germany and Southeast Asia), Contested Modernities offers plenty for people who want to know more about architectural production in Southeast Asia last century, wherever they're from. The highlights are numerous, though the conversations stand out above the rest. One of them is an insert on glossy pages, an "ARCH+ feature," in which two of the editors talk with Farid Rakun from Indonesia, one of the members of the ruangrupa collective that curated the 15th Documenta, which just opened in Kassel, Germany.
The latest book by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, author of Architecture of the 20th Century in Drawings, Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture, and numerous other books, compiles 27 texts by the architect and theorist that were originally published in other languages between the 1980s and 2020, the majority from the previous decade. Falling into three chapters (Serene Modernity, Memory and Sustainability, and Contemporary Urban Design), the texts aim to provide "an appropriate framework of arguments" for an urban design "oppose[d] to the wanton and reckless destruction of European cities." The essays are short, with an average length of around seven pages, so they can be read fairly briskly and in any order. Each essay has just one image, though the selection of photographs — of modern European mainly — is diverse, with more people than the typical architecture book, and with photos of modern European architecture depicted, less as completed buildings, and more in various states of design, construction, demolition, and decay. Radical Normal is the 138th title in DOM's "Basics" series, which is billed as "a platform for established authors and committed young researchers who publish texts in their native language" and therefore consists of books in English, French, German, and other languages.