After 25 years of running this blog under various names ? all of which can be lumped under the "Archidose" monicker ? I\'ve decided to shut it down, moving this hobby, this labor of love, to Substack, which I have used since mid-2021 and where I...

Instead of digesting a new book or diving into a novel, something others do often but I do rarely, I spent my holiday break reading a five-year-old book about a trio of intertwined topics I\'m particularly fond of: drawings, exhibitions, and New...

For the fifteenth and last time on this blog, I\'m highlighting my favorite books of the year, selected from the many books I reviewed or featured as "Book Briefs" on this blog, and the few titles that I reviewed at World-Architects. From the 86...

Just as last week\'s Places in Time III post featured a trio of books that were initially listed in my earlier holiday gift books post, two of the three monographs featured here were also on that list. As happened when I wrote this post, each...

This third and most likely last installment in the inadvertent "Places in Time" series looks closely at three books: the first about Chicago from the Great Depression to the mid-1980s; the second one about the broader American built landscape over...

(Covers of some of the books discussed in this post)If your first reaction to the title of this post is something along the lines of, "Wait, isn\'t critical regionalism just 40 years old"," then everything you think know about critical...

A review of a new book released this week:The Japanese House Since 1945 by Naomi Pollock, published by Thames & Hudson, November 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop)What makes modern and contemporary Japanese houses so appealing" Much of it stems from the...

Last week dose explored three "places in time": St. Louis in the early decades of the 20th century; Detroit between 1935 and 1985; and Chicago suburb Oak Park ca. 1906, when Frank Lloyd Wright completed Unity Temple. Those three US-centric books...

In 1939, Otto Neurath\'s Modern Man in the Making was released by Alfred A. Knopf. Neurath was director of the International Foundation of Visual Information and used the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) system to...

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...

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...

Blue Dream is a house designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for Julia "Julie" Reyes Taubman and her husband Robert "Bobby" Taubman. The house, located in East Hampton, on the South Fork of Long Island, was completed in 2017, nearly 30 years...

This year\'s roundup of books to give to discerning architects for the holidays is presented in pairs. While at least one book in each pair is new, the other one isn\'t necessarily so ? new, old, or not-so-old, it is related to the first in some...

Like many people with a lot of books, I keep track of my library with an app/website, tagging books with keywords to better filter and find them. The tags I use move from general terms like "architecture" (the most) and "fiction" (the least) to...

The recent publication of two books prompted me to ponder the future of cities and do a write-up of them together:Implementing Urban Design: Green, Civic, and Community Strategies by Jonathan Barnett, published by Routledge, June 2023...

Like most human beings, I can be contradictory at times. One area where this manifests is architectural surveys: books that usually collect buildings of a certain typology, but also ones spanning a particular timeframe or through some other theme....

Over at World-Architects I reviewed As Found: Experiments in Preservation (Flanders Architecture Institute, 2023) edited by Sofie De Caigny, Hülya Ertas and Bie Plevoets, the companion to the exhibition of the same name at the Flanders Architecture...

Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, the English architect who was born in 1869 and died in 1944, that is. Although a famous name, Lutyens was not an architect I had much familiarity with before I received a review copy of the first volume of The...

Last week I cobbled together eight books, some of which publishers had sent me more than a year ago, in an effort to write a "Better Late Than Never" installment of "Book Briefs,"  something I had done back in April 2018 with Book Briefs #35....

The most recent numbered installment of "Book Briefs," the series of occasional posts featuring short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that publishers send to me for consideration on this blog, was #48, back in December. I...

Two weeks ago I was in Venice for the Biennale, covering the 18th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Lesley Lokko for World-Architects. It was my first trip back to Venice since the 2018 Biennale, which was the 16th edition and was...

On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism edited by Wilfried Wang, published by Park Books and University of Texas at Austin, 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop)Who Is the City For": Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago by Blair...

Tomorrow is Valentine\'s Day, so I put together a list some things I love ?? about architecture books ? and just as many things I don\'t love ? about them: 20 pairs in 4 categories. I can\'t be alone in having these opinions and I might be...

This year\'s New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is my third, following the 2022 book fair and, just days before lockdown, the 2020 book fair. Three hardly makes me an expert, even in my specialization of architecture books, but it does...

Monday is when I would normally post a new book review, but instead, this blog and its related newsletter are going on hiatus indefinitely due to a family emergency.