Why Architecture Matters

Because this guy says so.

Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, will be part of the Critical Mass speakers series on May 3rd in Toronto (tickets at hotdocs.ca). The conversation will also include Sasha Frere-Jones, Robin Givhan, Eric Friesen, Michael Enright and Jeanne Beker.

If you can't make it to the lecture you can watch his interview on The Colbert Report, in which Paul and Stephen argue about whether or not American architecture still has "big tits".

You can also check out his latest book, Why Architecture Matters, and many others on display in the library.

Fresh and crisp

New books to get the season off to an invigorating start:

How to Build an Igloo and Other Snow Shelters

Norbert E. Yankielun

TH 4890 .Y36 2007

In this instructive, whimsical manual, U.S. Army engineer and seasoned cold-regions explorer Norbert Yankielun takes readers through the process of constructing and inhabiting a range of useful snow structures step-by-step. Whether you want the know-how to protect yourself from adverse weather conditions while back-country skiing or want to try your hand at building a backyard igloo just for fun, this book can show you how.

Extreme Architecture: Building for Challenging Environments

Ruth Slavid

NA 2543.35 .S624x 2009

Architects face some of their m

ost difficult challenges designing for extreme environments. Divided into sections titled Hot, Cold, High, Wet and Space, Extreme Architecture showcases 45 recent buildings designed for these challenging environments, giving valuable insights into the extremes of architectural thinking. Projects range from the fantastic – a lunar hotel – to those already built, including a school in Burkina Faso, a floating sauna in Sweden and an underground seed vault in Norway.

Smart Surfaces and Their Application in Architecture and Design

Thorsten Klooster

TA 418.7 .K56x 2009

Luminescent wallpaper, curtains which generate electricity, self-cleaning windows: new developments in the field of surface technologies will continue to influence the

ways in which materials can be used in architecture and design. Smart surfaces expand the range of design options available to architects, leading to new concepts which can meet the changing requirements of buildings and design. Smart Surfaces provides background and technical information for the categories of surfaces, nano, energy, light climate and information, with samples of amazing and often mind-boggling projects from around the world.

Albert Speer & Partner: A Manifesto for Sustainable Cities: Think Local, Act Global

Jeremy Gains & Stefan Jäger

HT 166. G24x 2009

For more than forty years, Albert Speer & Partner have been designing ecologically sensitive communities throughout the globe. As one of the world’s most forward-thinking architectural and urban planning practices, many of their trailblazing projects are discussed and analyzed for their success in satisfying the array of social, economic and environmental demands of the twenty-first century. Focusing on projects in cities such as Shanghai, Baku, Cairo, Changchun and Abuja, this book explores themes like the redeveloping of aging cities, resource conservation, urban density, zoning and new technology.

The Dutch, Denmark and Deutschland, oh my!

Check out these new books on architecture abroad...

Nordic Architects
David Sokol
NA 1208 .S65x 2008

Nordic Architects surveys some of the most dynamic architects in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, celebrating the recent works of established as well as up-and-coming talents. In their own voices, architects discuss the opportunities and challenges of working within a renowned design heritage – and rebelling against it.

FollyDOC EXPO
NA 846 .F65x 2008

In 2005, the Dutch artist Lowieke Duran announced an international contest to design an architectural folly - a visually provocative, poetic structure without a specific function - for a once flourishing, now down-and-out industrial dockland area of Rotterdam where there has recently been some promising new development. This catalog documents the second FollyDOC held at the same venue in 2007. The structures range from the silly [Hairy Monster] to the sublime [Free Standing Dome]. Check out the catalogue from the earlier exhibition too [NA8460 .I58x 2006]. It’s on Reserve for the term.

Updating Germany: 100 Projects for a Better Future
Friedrich von Borries + Mattias Bottger (eds.).
NA 1068.6 .U64x 2008

Solutions have to be found for the great global inequalities – social, economic, and ecological. Architecture can and does make a contribution to this process. The ninety-nine realized and experimental projects depicted here were originally presented at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition held in Venice in November 2008. This book aims to provoke action, encourage new ideas, and to help nurture the conviction that all of us can make contributions to a better future.

Back to the City: Strategies for Informal Urban Interventions
Steffen Lehmann (ed.).
N 72 .A75 B33x 2009

The quality and potential of disused sites, vacant buildings, and abandoned spaces is frequently hidden in the urban fabric, but once revitalized, these spaces can be an important urban resource. Back to the City documents a series of innovative site-specific installations and temporary interventions in public spaces, in Germany and Australia, by interdisciplinary teams of architects, artists, urban planners, and landscape architects. These informal interventions add to the meaningful discourse of contemporary urban culture, challenging our architectural stereotypes in a sustainable way.

Hot off the presses

Portraits from Above, the latest tome from our very own Rufina Wu, is now available on the New Book shelf...check it out!

New Books...on natural and fashionabe technology

For more about these books, check out our New Book Spotlight!

Learn from experience...

With these NEW BOOKS!

Books in the Spotlight

Check out these books featured in this month's spotlight. And don't forget to visit the library for even more fresh titles!

Let's get on the same page!

This year's choice for Waterloo Region's 'One Book, One Community' is...

The 100-mile Diet: A year of eating locally
by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon

The book chronicles their year of strictly eating only the foods that came from within a 100-mile radius of their home in Vancouver. You can now find this book in our collection (call# TX 360 .C22 B74x 2007a).

While you're at it, come and check out our multi-media display of related materials, from books to DVDs, local articles and the Waterloo and Hamilton Buy Local, Buy Fresh maps!

In a time of global warming, food riots and rising gas prices, growing your own food or buying locally is a great way to start building sustainable communities. It's summer and we live in Southern Ontario...fresh and local food abounds! While it may be hard to give up on things like rice, olive oil, coffee or chocolate, it's easy to make up the rest of your diet with food that is only a short walk away. Try eating locally for a weekend, go a month without buying processed foods, walk over the Farmer's Market every Saturday morning, grow some tomatoes in your window. Eating fresh and locally will benefit your health AND the planet's. I challenge you!

Wondering what 100 miles means to you here in Cambridge? Have a look...

...want to know how I made that map? Interested in finding out what kinds of maps YOU can make? Ask me!

New Books - on what's natural...

Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness

Elizabeth Farrelly

BF 575.H27F37 2008

Welcome to Blubberland – a world of quadrangle-garaged mansions, vast malls, gated communities, stretch limos, and posh resorts. Blubberland is a place, but it is also a state of mind: we expect to be happy [trophy house, SUV in the driveway, home entertainment system, pension fund, cosmetic surgery], but in fact we’ve grown increasingly bloated, bored, and miserable.

In Blubberland, award-winning critic Elizabeth Farrelly looks at our “superfluous superfluity,” our huge eco-footprint, and asks why we find it so hard to abandon habits we know to be destructive. Why can’t we build human-scale cities, design meaningful public spaces, eat reasonable meals, and stop assaulting nature. 

Nature Design: From Inspiration to Innovation 

N7650 .M386x 2007 

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for the design of the human environment, but in recent years this relationship has grown even more intense, being revealed in a broad spectrum of forms and functions. This book presents complex and innovative projects and objects from design, architecture, landscape architecture, photography, and art that have been inspired by nature. Themes include: sea, topography, plants, human beings, animals, scent, and climate. Watch how 1^st Ave Machine has inserted artificial natural elements into real nature to create an eye-popping music video

Biophilic Design 

Stephen R. Kellert, Judith H. Heerwagen, Martin L. Mador 

NA2542.35.B56 2008

Biophilic design is about humanity’s place in nature and the natural world’s place in human society, where mutuality, respect, and enriching relationships can and should exist at all levels and should emerge as the norm rather than the exception. Incorporating the positive experience of nature into the design of the built environment is critical to human health, performance, and well-being.  Learn more about the theory, science, and practice of biophilic design through this guide.

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature

Douglas Farr

HT241.S8736 2008 

Written by the chair of the LEED-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) initiative, this book is both an urgent call to action and a comprehensive introduction to "Sustainable Urbanism" - the emerging and growing design reform movement that combines the creation and enhancement of walkable and diverse places with the need to build high-performance infrastructure and buildings. Farr shows where we went wrong and how we need to implement Sustainable Urbanism through leadership and communication in cities, communities, and neighborhoods.

It's ama'zine! (sorry)

Pick it up!
Take a look!
Put it back!
Tell your friends!!!

Stay on top, with hot new books

Do like to browse the New Book shelf, but can't make it in to the library every day to have a look?

Did you know that by doing an Advanced Search in TRELLIS, and selecting the New Items tab, you can view all the books we've added to our collection in the past week or the past month?

You can also view a PDF of all of last month's books right from our web page.

Check it out and see what you're missing!

New books!

...on innovators

& Fork

Tom Dixon

TS 171.4 .A49x 2007

What do an inflatable bridge, a TV for-and controlled by-pigs, a chaise lounge featuring a beating heart and breathing lungs, and a light that can bring brightness to the most inaccessible spaces have in common? They’re among the many innovative product design ideas featured in & Fork. Ten renowned industrial designers were asked to select the 100 most interesting and creative designers working in the world today. The resulting book provides a comprehensive survey of their work over the past five years.

Check out & Fork’s companion volume, Spoon TS 171 .S64x 2002.

Mosaics

West 8

NA 9207 .W48x 2008

What firm is about to revitalize the Toronto Waterfront? Rotterdam’s urban design and landscape architecture firm, West 8, led by Adriaan Geuze. Known for combining ecology, people, and weather conditions with building programme “West 8 aims to incorporate awareness of these various aspects in a playful, optimistic manner that stimulates the desire to conquer and take possession of a space.” Take a peek at what the firm has done in other parts of the world to prepare yourself for Toronto’s waterfront transformation.

Riess Wood³: Modulare Holzbausysteme

Otto Kapfinger & Ulrich Wieler (Eds.)

NA 4110 .R54x 2007

Get your wood on! Hubert Riess is an Austrian architect whose work has explored the characteristics of wood as a construction material, particularly as a modular component, throughout his 30 year career. This book documents the potential of prefabricated wood modules in projects ranging from individual residential units to larger commercial buildings through to a complete building programme covering entire city blocks.

New books... on photography

The Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture, 1922-1932

NA 1188 .P37 2007

Renowned architectural photographer, Richard Pare, spent more than a decade documenting the work of modernist architects in the Soviet Union during the years following the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war. In little more than ten years, some of the most radical buildings of the twentieth century were completed by a small group of architects who developed a new architectural language in support of new social goals of communal life. Rarely published and virtually inaccessible until the collapse of the Soviet regime, these important buildings have remained unknown and unappreciated until now.

The Nature of Photographs

TR 179 .S56 2007

At the age of 23, Stephen Shore became the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In The Nature of Photographs, he explores ways of understanding and looking at all types of photographs – from iconic images to found pictures, negatives to digital files. Based on Shore’s many years of teaching photography at Bard College, this book serves as an indispensable tool for students, teachers, and everyone who wants to take better pictures or learn to look at them in a more informed way.

Shanghai: A Century of Change in Photographs, 1843-1949

DS 796 .S243P36x 2000

In 1843, the great city of Shanghai was opened up as a treaty port. Like Hong Kong, that other great port on the China coast, the Shanghai portrayed in these pages represented the first door opened into China by British mercantile interests and power. A door is a meeting point, a place of encounter--in this case all kinds of encounter, between peoples and cultures, between stages of civilization, between ways of thought and ways of life. During the hundred-odd years spanned by the photographs in this book, Shanghai was an arena for encounters more varied and vivid than those experienced by any other city in the Far East.

New stuff! 'scape subscription and featured books

We've just added a new title to our growing collection of journals! Even more to come in the near future.

Also, if these feature books don't quench your thirst for exciting new materials, check out our New Books Spotlight page or come in and browse the new book shelf here in the library...get it while it's hot and fresh!

'scape: The international magazine for landscape architecture and urbanism

Each issue of 'scape is oriented around a single principle subject, with four profiles of internationally significant projects and personalities, three critiques by knowledgeable authors, and important information from other areas of landscape architecture and town planning.

The first issue of 2007 is entitled 'Tempting Strategies.' Articles focus on the urban revival of Bogota, the growing consumption of space worldwide, a profile of Dutch architect and urban planner Sjoerd Soeters, and a review of villages and gardens for senior citizens.

The Architect, the cook and good taste

Cooking and building have forever been among humanity's most basic occupations. While both are rooted in necessity, they also possess a cultural and sensory, aesthetic dimension. Both arts give expression to periods of human cultural history and both accord a central role to the materials employed. They involve measuring and proportioning, shaping and designing, assembling and composing.

This book pursues the astonishing parallels and deeply rooted connections between the art of building and that of cooking. Essays take up questions of materiality and proportioning, and attention is given to food cultivation and architecture, to the places where meals are prepared as well as a range of different culinary spaces.

Hiroshi Naito: Innerscape

This book documents the work of one of Japan's most prolific and innovative young architects, known for his complex wooden structures and ornate roofing tiles.

Selected projects include the new Shimane Arts Center, and extensive museum and theater complex, the municipal library in Tokamachi and the botanical museum in Makino. These, and other projects from 1985-2005, are presented with numerous technical drawings showing all their details and material characteristics.

New Books, New Ideas!

We've just added to our collection of books on contemporary architecture with three great books on new movements and innovation in design...have a look!:

NA209.5.S66x 2006

The definitive history of experimental architecture since 1945, Visionary Architecture contains three essential sections: a thematic overview of the most important and far-reaching work produced in the last sixty years; a survey of contemporary experimental practices, shown through case studies of some of the most exciting names in architecture such as Diller + Scofidio, Asympote, Morphosis and NOX; and an illustrated glossary of ideas, movements, people and terms. This book has lots of cool ideas and numerous illustrations.

NK1390.N38x 2006

Catch up with the latest design innovations! Design Life Now features eighty-seven individuals and companies that are changing the face of design including Pixar, Apple, Google, Nike, Target, Narcisco Rodriguez, Tobias Wong, Santiago Calatrava, Herman Miller and NASA. Four original essays by the exhibition’s curators, profiles of the designers and over 400 vibrant illustrations bring to life the ways in which these designers are challenging existing paradigms and expanding our understanding of the design world.

NA687.R36 2006

In Europe 75% of the population now live in cities. The figure for Asia is 40%. But what about the city of tomorrow? What kinds of buildings will it have, and what kinds of public spaces? What ideas and concepts will shape the next twenty years? These are the issues raised by Architecture Tomorrow in its survey of the living environment in an increasingly globalized world. Whether designed for work or leisure, for living or business, for health or education, urban spaces are becoming steadily more hybrid… And because transversality is what the 21st century is all about, architecture is borrowing from other disciplines – especially contemporary art - and broadening its scope via technology transfers. Thanks to computers, architects are now exploring new domains and turning their spatial dreams into realities.

New Journal - Volume

Brought to you by OMA, Columbia's C-Lab and MIT, Volume from Amsterdam bills itself as a "platform for debate; a laboratory for research; an engine for ideas" taking architecture "right across culture".

Back issues will be added soon. In the meantime, check out the latest issue focused on the architecture of destruction...

Volume 11:
Cities Unbuilt. To beyond or not to be.

"In an age of conflict, civil war and the (re)construction of urban spaces, destruction has become an alternative form of architecture, challenging both the traditional role and place of architecture and various forms of international supervision. Volume examines this new realism through a variety of different studies, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Kosovo."

This journal [NA 1 .V65x] is indexed in Avery.

New E-Journals!

The library has just added 2 new titles to its collection of online journals.

Each issue of Architype Review focuses on a specific building typology. Projects featured in this publication are "challenging the limits and redefining the norms of a certain building type." Images and content are supplied by the creative teams behind the projects. Past issues have featured innovative schools, houses, offices and university buildings.

The International Journal of Architectural Heritage provides " a multidisciplinary scientific overview of existing resources and modern technologies useful for the study and repair of historical buildings and other structures." First published in March 2007, this journal has featured articles on buildings in Mexico, Italy and Slovenia.

Neither journal is indexed in the Avery Index.

See all of our E-Journals relating to architecture and design.

Chinese Architecture collection

We've added to our growing collection of books on the history of Chinese architecture with two beautifully illustrated volumes from China Architecture & Building Press.

The brick and stone art of ancient Chinese architecture by Lou Qingxi explores the use of brick and stone sculpture as decorative elements with over 600 colour photographs and line drawings.

Ma Weidu, an eminent Beijing antique collector examines the design, construction and evolution of Classical Chinese doors and windows in this new book. Beautiful photographs help to delve into the cultural implications and aesthetic significance of this ancient craft.

Check out these books and more on the New Book Shelf in the library every week, or on our Book of the Month website!