Of the numerous books publishers send me for review ? be they requested by me, pitched by them, or arriving at my doorstep unsolicited ? the highest percentage of them are monographs. This fact goes against the occasional sirens over the irrelevance and anachronistic nature of monographs in our digital age, with free access (for now) to voluminous amounts of information on buildings and architects readily available online. But books, in my opinion, are better archives than websites, offering architects a further level of control over the finished product compared to websites. It's not uncommon today to find architecture firms, no doubt driven by savvy marketing departments and PR firms, merging their brands across platforms, such that their monographs resemble their websites. But in five or ten years time, only the books will retain that expression, thereby making them important archives of architects' work and the means of presenting it. The four recently published monographs that follow provide four diverse expressions for architectural monographs today. Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual by Bryan Cantley, edited by Peter J. Baldwin, published by Routledge, April 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop)Merging City and Nature: 30 Commitments to Combat Climate Change by Batlleiroig, published by Actar Publishers, March 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop)I'm not sure when I came across the architecture of Bryan Cantley, but for...