The recent receipt of two review books got me thinking about the past and the future of architecture books. The first one is This is Architecture: Writing on Buildings, a collection of excerpted texts about buildings, spanning from the mid-1800s to the 2010s. 
This is Architecture: Writing on Buildings edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, published by Unicorn Publishing Group, October 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop)
Edited by Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery, respectively chair and executive director of the UK's Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, This Is Architecture is billed as "different" from the typical "writing on building by architects [that] is limited to exculpatory manifestos or technical sermonizing to a captive congregation of converts." They describe the nearly 100 excerpted texts as "exceptional examples of writing on buildings by writers which merit inclusion on the quality of the writing alone" (emphasis in original). So readers find Lewis Mumford, Ada Louise Huxtable, Ian Nairn, Martin Pawley, and others who wrote (well) about architecture for a living, but also Virginia Woolf, Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, Blaise Cendrars, and others far removed from the field of architecture. The aims of the "non-partisan" and "non-didactic" selection are to "enhance popular appreciation of architecture and to celebrate those who are architecture's eloquent champions."  Pr...