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A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books is on Substack
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I\'m breaking my blogging silence to do two things: Alert readers to the fact I am still writing reviews of architecture books under the title A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books, but over at Substack, not Blogger.Put a new post at the top of...
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Archidose, 1999?2024
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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...
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Reading About Drawings
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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...
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Favorite Books of 2023
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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...
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Three Monographs
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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...
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Places in Time III
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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...
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Visualizing the World, Visualizing Change
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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...
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Four Monographs
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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...
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The Past and Future of Architecture Books
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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...
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From Slow House to Blue Dream
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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...
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Ten Pairs of Books for Christmas
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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...
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The Latest from MoMA: Emerging Ecologies
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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...
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On the Future of Cities
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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...
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Places in Time I
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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....
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The 'As Found'
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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...
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A Modernist Reads About Lutyens
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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...
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42 Years of Critical Regionalism
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(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...
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Eight Decades of Modern Japanese Houses
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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...
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Places in Time II
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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...
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Book Briefs #35 Revisited
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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....
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Book Briefs #49
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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...
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My Biennale Haul
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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...
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Learning from the 2023 Book Fair
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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...
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On Hiatus
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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.ÂÂ
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From the Mouths of Architects
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I\'m not sure when it happened, but at some point I went from disliking interviews ? preferring texts written by architects, much of it in the vein of theory ? to gravitating to them. Now I find myself opting to read interviews, be they online or...
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