Helpful Book For Young Architects

Here are the books that must be read by students of architecture:

• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture by Mathew Frederick

This is a book that needs to be collected by the students of architecture in the closet of their studios and duffel bag. At the same time, this book should also be hidden from their lecturers because this book explains about architecture in the form of a simple language and easy to digest is not like courses that they often heard in class. This book explores 101 short lessons in design, drawing, creative process, and presentation,-from the basics of "How do I draw the line" up to complex color theory.

• Draw 50 Buildings and Other Structures

Draw 50 Buildings and Other Structures teach you how to draw easily by following the simple instructions step by step. Author Lee J.Ames book will show you how to draw the structures of famous buildings from around the world, including the igloo, barns, windmills and traditional houses. 

• Fantastic Cities: A Coloring Book of Amazing Places Real and Imagined

This unique coloring book featuring cities from various parts of the world from the air. The artist Steve McDonald illustrate with a very beautiful and detailed picture of the air big cities in the world such as New York, London, Paris up to Istanbul and much more.

• Translation by Aaron Betsky

Fernando Romero graduated from the school of architects in Mexico in 1955, and after that, he worked with Enric Miralles, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas before starting his own company in 1999 called Laboratorio de la Ciudad de Mexico. LCM has quickly become one of the leading companies in Mexico who dared to take on experimental projects in Mexico City are quite fragile economically. 

• The LEGO Architect

Let the adventure in the history of architecture in The LEGO Architect. You will learn about style-style such as Art Deco, Modernism, and High-Tech and get inspiration in the gallery LEGO models. Assemble bricks and studied architecture in a way that is fun! 

• 10 x 10 (Architecture) by Editors of Phaidon Press

This book gives a comprehensive view of contemporary architecture, presenting 100 masterpieces of international architects. Give you the opportunity to see various types of modern inspirational collection of works selected by 10 professional architectural critics. The works featured in this book are more than 250 buildings and projects, including the building of newly completed and is in the process of development.

That was 6 helpful book for young architecture or wannabe. is there we miss? comments below!

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Books:Different Roads to Urbanization

Beyond the City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America, by Felipe Correa, University of Texas Press, June 2016, 192 pages, $40.

Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China, by David Bandurski, Melville House, October 2016, $27.99.

Two excellent new books, Beyond the City, by Felipe Correa, director of the Urban Design Degree Program at Harvard University, and Dragons In Diamond Village, by David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, offer contrasting but fascinatingly connected analyses of resource-extraction urbanism.

In Correa’s case, the extraction is literal: his work describes a series of ex novo urban and regional projects in South America sited and designed to facilitate the mining or harvesting of natural resources. This arresting group of incarnated dreams offers a vivid alternative—or critically supplementary—history of the modern city, embodying an aspirational possibility in which both creating an urban design and realizing it can be imaginative and literal all at once.

Beyond the City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America

The story begins with Belo Horizonte in Brazil, a new capital for a region rich in coffee and iron, built from scratch in the 1890s: its elegant “progressivist” baroque/city-beautiful plan by Aarao Reis was an obvious precursor to Brasilia. Clearly under the influence of Haussman, Ildefons Cerda, and—especially—Pierre L’Enfant, the design exemplifies the way the circulation of utopian planning ideas saturated the creative atmosphere, penetrating even to the South American hinterland. Correa cites, among others, Vincenzo Scamozzi, Robert Owen, Arturo Soria y Mata, Patrick Geddes, Clarence Perry, and Le Corbusier as part of a richly mixed parentage, mating paradigm, purpose, and place.

If Belo Horizonte is a “classic” set piece, the city of Maria Elena, built in 1916 in the Atacama Desert of Chile, is a node within a vast network of nitrate mines, oases, rail links, and coastal ports, an immense territorial urbanism consecrated to a single purpose.

A similar mono-economy characterizes the towns of Judibana and El Tablazo, products of the explosive petroleum-driven growth around Lake Maricaibo in Venezuela, which moved from squalid camps to highly planned settlements seen as “messengers of modernity.” Judibana, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1948, merges a company town—characterized by a dominating employer, stratified housing types, and “rational” zoning—with something more elegantly prospective, the U.S. suburban dream.

At the eastern edge of Venezuela, Ciudad Guyana—with the help of planners largely based at Harvard and MIT—developed at a nexus of iron and bauxite mining and hydroelectric potential. The city has a linear layout, stringing neighborhood “units” designated (like Chandigarh’s) with maniacally segregated socio­economic formal typologies.

Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China

Correa judges the city a considerable success for the accommodating logic of its spinal organization, the transformation and mixing of use in its constituent zones, and its growth from an original population of 50 thousand to its current 1 million. The book concludes with a discussion of the 1962 Vila Piloto (“pilot city”) in Brazil’s Parana River basin, part of a TVA-scale program for a chain of dams. The circular town is remarkable for its pie-graph organization and for the intention that it be dismantled when the nearby dam was done.

The most arresting elements of Correa’s book deal with a variety of infrastructures–some at continental scale—that have conduced to extraction urbanism in its “pure” form: not conventionally planned cities but the spontaneous proliferation of settlements drawn to highways, electrification axes, ports, waterways, mines, oil fields, and plantations. The author’s evocation of the urban and the territorial is acute and revelatory, a nuanced analysis of the interaction of formal ideals and the aggressive extraction of the earth’s resources.

Dragons In Diamond Village is a mesmerizing description of another form of extraction city, the runaway development of so-called urban villages in China. These are the result of the exponential expansion of Chinese cities to surround—and physically absorb—agricultural villages on their peripheries. The key wrinkle is the easily exploited ambiguity of ownership that has resulted from the post–Deng Xiaoping devolution of power to a condominium of municipalities, state institutions, and private developers relying on rent as the primary basis of their economic self-interest. However, in a system that still retains collective ownership for rural settlements, these “villages-in-city” have found themselves with fields that yield far higher returns from real estate than from sorghum, cucumbers, or fruit trees.

In what has become a typical pattern, communal plots are developed hyper-densely with small apartment buildings, the primary residential option for the millions of “floating” migrants from the countryside. These people labor at the bottom rungs of the new economy, fixed in status by the houkou system that makes many basic services unavailable.

Bandurski’s richly ethnographic tale is a gripping account of both the nominally informal system that has generated this urbanism and of its effects on local communities and individuals. Focusing on a village in Guangzhou, his sympathetic engagement with its struggles to resist the corruptions and social dislocations of the development steamroller are remarkably detailed and researched. We’re shown suicides, houses rigged with defensive explosives, and Kafkaesque legal maneuvering. Framing the narrative are descriptions of the covert building and launch of village dragon boats in the face of official attempts to thwart the villagers, and the beautiful, if pyrrhic, victory they won.

Bandurski offers a riveting account of a civil society struggling to be born, with deep insights into a culture we too often read as an impossibly monolithic juggernaut. Like Correa, he portrays a crudely extractive urbanism but in its most rarefied form: in the urban village, the cash crop is space itself 

Credit :  www.architecturalrecord.com

Reading Structures: 39 Projects and Built Works - BOOKS

Reading Structures: 39 Projects and Built Works, by Guy Nordenson, Lars Müller Publishers, January 2016, 375 pages, $60.

Reading Structures: 39 Projects and Built Works

As a practicing structural engineer, Guy Nordenson has been involved in the design of some of the most notable buildings of recent decades, including Steven Holl’s carved-block Simmons Hall Residence at MIT (2002), Richard Meier’s curve-walled Jubilee Church in Rome (2003), and SANAA’s precariously stacked New Museum in New York (2007). He writes about those projects alongside bigger, smaller, and lesser-known ones­ in Reading Structures: 39 Projects and Built Works.

The tome is not merely a textbook on how these buildings are put together—even if it does include plenty of information about that. It also incorporates in-depth discussions about slip-formed concrete, friction pendulums, torsional buckling, tensegrity structures, and similar topics of interest to engineers. In one example, for Yoshio Taniguchi’s MoMA expansion in New York (2004), Nordenson explains how, upon a museum trustee’s expressing concern, the design team was able to eliminate the only two columns in the addition’s largest space, the 21-foot-tall contemporary-art gallery, by hanging the floors above it from a belt truss. In another, he discusses the evolution of the “grillage” system of steel girders and beams for the roof—intended to be as thin as possible—of the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion (2006), also by SANAA.

Smaller projects are a chance to test age-old techniques on new materials. For a series of staircases, first in a private loft in New York and later in Ferragamo shops in Bologna and Venice, Italy, Nordenson adapted the principles behind the “cantilever” stair to glass, metal, and wood. It was originally developed during the Italian Renaissance, for stone.

Some of the more fascinating details, however, make up the backstories to these works, not least of which is a series of projects at the World Trade Center following the September 11 tragedy. In other cases, intriguing elements stem from the personal stories. Nordenson’s first encounter with Meier, for instance, had to do with the 1989 competition to design the French National Library. Meier had wanted to work with famed engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup & Partners, who, it turned out, was already teamed up with another architect competing for the library. Meier, Nordenson writes, “was not at first pleased to be handed off to what he saw as the New York ‘branch office’ of Arup.” (In 1987, Nordenson helped establish the New York office, before founding his own firm, Guy Nordenson and Associates, in 1997.)

Eventu­ally, Meier came around and went on to work with Nordenson again on the Jubilee Church. Nordenson calls his relationship with the much-admired Rice “pleasurable, if distant.” The pair worked side by side only briefly but never completed a project together. Yet, in many ways, Nordenson’s style, or more appropriately his lack of one, is similar to that of Rice, who emphasized collaboration and, like Nordenson, formed a “crafts-based practice.”

Nordenson’s recounting of these 39 projects, selected from nearly 200 since the start of his career in 1979, is, in fact, a story of collaboration. None is more notable than that with Holl, which dates back to the early 1980s. Holl’s buildings—which, aside from Simmons Hall, include the 2 million-square-foot Linked Hybrid complex in Bei­­jing (2009) and several museums in the U.S., Europe, and China—compose a fifth of the book.

Divided into three sections­—Engineering Ephemera, Simply Supported, and Building History—the book delves into details without being dry or difficult to understand for the reader who doesn’t happen to be an engineer, or an architect, for that matter. Even for the lay person, Reading Structures offers incredible insight—from inspiration to design to politics—into how buildings, pavilions, parking garages, bridges, and follies get built, or don’t. And, maybe more important, how they stand up.

Credits ; www.architecturalrecord.com

BOOKS: Ward Round

Three recent books on the ideas of the late architect and anarchist Colin Ward suggest that his influence continues to grow, says Ken Worpole.

Autonomy: the Cover Designs of Anarchy, 1961-1970

ed. Daniel Poyner

Hyphen Press, 304pp, £25

Talking Green

Colin Ward

Five Leaves Publications, 160pp, £8

Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader

eds. Chris Wilbert and Damian White

AK Press, 368pp, £14

Though Colin Ward died in 2010, his writings and ideas seem more prominent and pertinent than ever. Over the past twelve months no less than three books directly concerning Ward’s work have appeared: ‘Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility – The Colin Ward Reader’; ‘Talking Green’; and ‘Autonomy – the cover designs of Anarchy 1961-1970’. It was that magazine, of which Ward was the long-standing editor, which contained many of his most provocative writings on housing policy, town planning, adventure playgrounds, environmental education, and the profession of the architect.

Today, in an era of the Occupy movement, environmental activism, localism and a deep distrust of mainstream political parties and programmes, it is not surprising that a new generation is interested in ideas which promote more independently-minded, do-it-yourself solutions to social and environmental concerns. The anarchism which Ward professed was based on the inherent tendencies towards cooperation and self-help which already existed in the social world – the ‘seeds beneath the snow’.

How do people make a home for themselves in the world, Ward asked again and again, and what forms of support might help or hinder this process? His wonderful essay on The Anarchist House supports the ‘long-life, loose-fit’ approach. He was fond of relating a study by psychologist Erik Erikson who found that if you gave a group of young children a box of bricks, the boys would build towers and the girls would create enclosed spaces which they then furnished. It was ever thus. For Ward, self-build was not about individualistic follies in the manner of Grand Designs – though he would have loved that television programme, fascinated as he was with materials, detailing and the construction process – but about experiments in living in which the built form was the expression of more communitarian ideas. Maintenance schedules and cleaning rotas were as important as design. To hear him expound on the history and place of the kitchen in the greater scheme of things was always a joy.

In a now famous essay on the influence of Ward’s editorship of Anarchy, historian Raphael Samuel claimed that the journal and its radical typography and design represented the true epicentre of 1960s counter-culture in Britain. Samuel observed that Ward ‘has taken Anarchy’s concerns with the built environment into the heart of architecture and planning’. Few people created more interest in the quality of the built environment in post-war Britain than Ward, whether through the pages of Anarchy or as a result of his job at the Town & Country Planning Association, where he established the Bulletin for Environmental Education. This galvanised a whole generation of primary and secondary school teachers to work with pupils on understanding the streets, buildings and towns where they lived. The fantasy that anarchism encouraged children to run wild was gainsaid by Ward’s profound commitment to an exploratory, educated appreciation of the built world, its management and social relationships, and its effect on local customs and ways of life. In a wonderful phrase he used to say that even very young children should not be confined to the playground, but should ‘climb out of the sandbox into the city.’

Ken Worpole is a writer on architecture, landscape and planning policy issues. His book Contemporary Library Architecture will be published by Routledge in April.

Images Anarchy, published in London in the 1960s, was designed mostly by Rufus Segar and edited by Colin Ward, who used it to propose the idea that anarchist principles of mutual aid and autonomous organisation outside a centralised state could be achieved here and now.

BOOKS: Sergison Bates architects buildings

Emmett Scanlon on a monograph exploring the life of buildings before and after the moment of completion.

Care home at Huise-Zingum, Belgium (ph: David Grandorge).

Sergison Bates architects: Buildings

Edited by Heinz Wirz

Quart Verlag, 288pp, £64

A book by an architect is very different to a book about one. With Papers (2000) and Papers 2 (2007), Sergison Bates demonstrated its interest in the book as a valid form of artistic and creative expression on the one hand, and on the other, a critical part of its strategy to engage an audience with its architectural and tectonic intentions.

Those books were literally layered with leaves of changeable covers or with pages carefully composed and replete with saturated images and visually compelling texts, allowing readers to discover their own book within the book, to find new stories in the pages, making an engaging, sustainable read.

In his introduction to Sergison Bates’ new book, Buildings, editor Heinz Wirz quotes Paul Valéry in order to draw parallels between the art of making books and that of buildings and commends the author-architects for their commitment to the reality of this book, which is to be equally enjoyed by the eye and the hand. Intended to evoke the sensation of a brick, Buildings represents a logical step in the development of Sergison Bates’ book-arts-building practice.

There is an elegant logic too in its organisation. Eschewing the narrative structures typically found in architects’ monographs, this book instead echoes the structure of online information, and more specifically recalls the thematically ordered portfolio website. Information on eight individual projects is classified under three distinct headings or themes: Intentions, Impressions and Catalogue. This strategy allows the reader to understand each project one-byone with regard to these themes, or instead to understand the eight projects collectively as variations on the architectural themes presented. This makes reading feel lively and dynamic as one moves across the work and through the book.

Before these themes emerge properly, however, ‘Texts’ gathers three commissioned essays, by Dirk Somers, Irina Davidovici and Martin Steinmann, which together locate the work of Sergison Bates in architectural history, culture and theory in a sophisticated manner.

Spread from Buildings.

‘Intentions’ directly describes the ideas and manoeuvres of each of the eight projects, many of which have not been published before. This section is richly illustrated with imagery rarely found in depictions of the architctural object – of context, work methods and on-site processes – making the finished buildings feel very present-tense and real.

The reality of the built projects, most of which are photographed by David Grandorge, are gathered under ‘Impressions’. Though still, Grandorge’s intense images are very moving in their depiction of the lives of these buildings and their occupants, most notably those of a care home in Belgium. Here it seems the word ‘impressions’ has been carefully chosen in that it refers to the physical and social impact the occupants now have on the buildings. It is also perhaps a further nod to the virtual world, where a visitor to a website is said to leave an impression. By the time one reaches the chronological ‘Catalogue’, a record of all Sergison Bates’ projects, an very good impression has certainly been made on the reader – of a sincere generosity recorded in this book and imbued in these buildings.

Emmett Scanlon is co-founder of Dublin based CAST Architecture and architectural advisor to the Irish Arts Council.

Books: Circular argument

A review about Richard Weston’s new book Tietgen Dormitory: an Imaginary Journey around a Real Building

Tietgen Dormitory: an Imaginary Journey around a Real Building

Richard Weston, ed by Torsten Bløndal

Edition Bløndal, 280pp, £40

Conceived perhaps on the premise that a picture is worth a thousand words, Edition Bløndal’s unorthodox monograph tells the tale of the well-regarded 2006 Tietgen Dormitory in Copenhagen. Designed by Lundgaard & Tranberg, this distinctive circular building with, somehow unsurprisingly, 360 student rooms, is concerned with the age-old dilemma of simultaneously expressing both the individual and the collective.

With a provocative essay by Richard Weston and plenty of drawings and photos of the project, the book could easily conform to the standard model, but added to these – and stamping its character on the handsome volume – is a copious assortment of images depicting the circular theme in both architecture and nature. Some, such as Asplund’s Stockholm town hall, the Samara ziggurat, and the Pantheon (left) are familiar, but others are obscure, if not quaint. Some too are relevant to the concept of the dormitory building, while others seem tenuous at best. Compiled by architect (and long-time Edition Bløndal collaborator) John Pardey, the range of imagery makes a fascinating flick-through. The book’s ambition to inspire takes it beyond a purely architectural audience, so it comes as no surprise that the Danish government has decided to purchase a copy for every primary school in the country.

BOOKS Seventies Celebration

Charles Holland on a transitional decade that set the parameters for today’s architectural scene.

Burrell Collection, Glasgow (1978-83), Barry Gasson (ph: Glasgow 

Journal 10: The Seventies

Edited by Elain Harwood and Alan Powers

Twentieth Century Society, 184pp, £19.50

At the back of this fascinating study of the architecture of the 1970s is a highly revealing timeline linking the decade’s key buildings to contemporary art, films and pop music. So we see the decade open with Lyons Israel Ellis and the Beatles, and close with Norman Foster and the Human League.

These names mark far more radically different points in time than would seem possible given the short space of nine years that separates them. While the former belong firmly to the post-war settlement and to Britain of the fifties and sixties, the latter are part of the neo-liberal landscape we inhabit today.

College of Engineering & Science, London (1970), by Lyons Israel Ellis

Thus the seventies appears as a period of radical transition and change. It was also unmistakably a profoundly depressing decade in which the seeds of Thatcherism and the end of the welfare state were sown. While the critique of modernism that was thrown up during the time offered new and radical possibilities for architecture, it was the more conservative and reactionary ones that proved most influential.

As this book makes clear, a lot was going on. There was the burgeoning conservation movement, detailed here by Gavin Stamp, the beginnings of ecological design, activism and public participation as well as an interest in high-tech materials and temporary, supposedly egalitarian structures. All these sub-movements grew out of a creeping disillusion with modernism and the social democratic project that was its patron.

Above Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters, Ipswich (1975) by Foster 

Fans of the poor taste and louche sensibilities associated with the decade may well be disappointed however. The book offers no analysis of the importance of the ‘conversation pit’ or the shag-pile rug in domestic planning for instance. Indeed, it has a dryness in parts that even the most dedicated seventies enthusiast might find challenging. Two of the essays focus on such currently uncelebrated buildings as Arup Associates’ Gun Wharf, Chatham, and Barry Gasson’s Burrell Collection in Glasgow. The latter essay though offers a fascinating cross section of 1970s architectural tropes via a study of the unsuccessful entries to the gallery competition. High-tech sheds predominate naturally, alongside shameless rip-offs of late-period Corb and early-period Stirling.

Aside from this appearance by proxy, James Stirling is strangely absent from the book, despite his now-demolished Runcorn housing estate gracing its cover. This absence is all the more marked because Stirling’s work of this period encapsulated the decade’s more adventurous mix of Brutalism, space-frames and acid-pop colours.

Hillingdon Town Hall (1976), by Andrew Derbyshire at RMJM (ph: JOD/EH).

Against this backdrop, Geraint Franklin’s mapping of the ‘White Wall Guys’ – the architects and critics (including Alan Colquhoun, Douglas Stephen and the late John Winter) who rediscovered the radicalism of 1920s modernism – stands out. This loosely affiliated group represented a home-grown version of the New York Five, although in typically British style, they were less prone to outlandish formalism than Eisenman, Graves et al.

Such restraint characterises the book. Aside from Louis Hellman’s slightly self-indulgent reminiscences, the tone is serious and scholarly, almost to a fault. As you might expect of the book’s publisher, the Twentieth Century Society, it eschews grandiose claims and polemic in favour of considered research and historical accuracy.

It ends with Kenneth Powell’s account of the early post-modern work of Terry Farrell and Jeremy Dixon. Were it not for the elderly Ford Escorts and Transit vans in the photograph of his Lanark Road housing, Dixon’s neo-Georgian design could have easily been built today. This familiarity reveals much about the continued influence – both good and bad – of the architecture of this period as well as the relevance of its reappraisal.

Underhill, near Holmfirth, Yorkshire (1978) was the UK’s first latter-day earth-sheltered house and home of its architect Arthur Quarmby;
King's Walden Bury, Hertfordshire (1971), by Raym

Charles Holland is a director of FAT and a visiting tutor at UCA in Canterbury.