"Old + New" is a new series that pairs two books: one old and one new. Most of the reviews on this blog are fairly recent titles sent to me by publishers, but I wanted to expand the reviews to include older books from my library. To do so I'm using this series to review new books and, when appropriate, dig out an old book and include it as part of the review. This series does not replace my typical book reviews or book briefs or my Unpacking My Library blog; it merely expands how I present books on this blog.

Architecture in Austria: A Survey of the 20th Century edited by Sasha Pirker (Architekturzentrum Wien), Jaime Salazar (Actar)
Birkhäuser/Actar, 1999
Hardcover, 334 pages

Architecture in Austria in the 20th and 21st Centuries edited by Architekturzentrum Wien AzW/Park Books, 2016
Flexicover, 440 pages

Ever since undergraduate architecture school in the early 1990s, I've been a fan of Austrian architecture. I've never taken the time to understand or explain why this is, but I've noticed my appreciation for everything from the early modern designs of Otto Wagner and his other Viennese contemporaries, to the avant-garde projects in the 1960s by Coop Himmelb(l)au and others, to the wooden buildings that draw people to Vorarlberg, and even to Raimund Abraham's Austrian Cultural Forum New York, which is still my favorite building in New York City from this century. Perhaps the appeal is found the diversity of the country's modern and contemporary architec...