One year ago, in the first post of 2022, I shifted this blog from (almost) daily posts about architecture books to just once a week, changing the name of the blog to reflect that. In the fifth of five bullet points reasoning why that was happening, I wrote: "I'm planning on winding down this blog over the next two years, wrapping it up in January 2024... exactly 25 years after I started A Weekly Dose of Architecture," the first iteration of this occasionally shifting blog.
I'm still on track to do that, but with just one year of posts left — or 50 of them, if I don't skip too many weeks — I figured it's a good time to steer from the formulaic reviews and "Book Briefs" and instead write posts that are about architecture books but are not strictly reviews or encapsulations of them. So look for posts that are "On" certain typologies of architecture books or about issues around them: "On Guidebooks," next week for instance, as well "On Interviews," and others that come to mind as I dig through the books that find their way into my library.
While important new and recently published books will be featured with their own standalone reviews alongside the thematic writings, one of the biggest changes will be the incorporation of old books that I find while scouring used bookstores, putting them alongside the newer titles sent to me by publishers. One of the consequences of shifting this book blog from daily to weekly frequency was, sadly, the elimination of the "Wayback Weekend" posts. Those were some of my favorite posts to write, so I'll find a way to bring older books back into the mix, giving them nearly equal weight with the newer books.
What will I do after this blog ends in January 2024? To be honest, I don't know. The idea to shift this blog from strict reviews and briefs to more fluid and open-ended posts for 2023 came to me while thinking about things over the holidays. Structure is good but sometimes it is confining; I want this last year of posts to be less rigid but (hopefully) more interesting. We'll see how that goes. The idea of what I do after wrapping up these 25 years of "Archidose" will come to me ... about a year from now, most likely.