New Books in Architecture

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for over twenty-five years. His primary teaching and research interests are in environmental planning and policy, with a special emphasis on coastal and natural hazards planning, environmental values and ethics, and biodiversity conservation. He has published extensively in these areas, including the following books: Ethical Land Use; Habitat Conservation Planning: Endangered Species and Urban Growth; Natural Hazard Mitigation; and An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management. In recent years much of his research and writing has been focused on the subject of sustainable communities and creative strategies by which cities and towns can reduce their ecological footprints, while at the same time becoming more livable and equitable places. His books that explore these issues include Biophilic Cities, Resilient Cities, and Blue Urbanism (Island Press).In The Bird-Friendly City: Creating Safe Urban Habitats (Island Press, 2020), Timothy Beatley, a longtime advocate for intertwining the built and natural environments, takes readers on a global tour of cities that are reinventing the status quo with birds in mind. Efforts span a fascinating breadth of approaches: public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more. Beatley shares empowering examples, including: advocates for “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy backyards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes. Through these changes and the others Beatley describes, it is possible to make our urban environments more welcoming to many bird species. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Today I talked to Enoch Sears about his short ebook Social Media for Architects. The book details how architects can use social media for lead generation through didactic examples, commentary and case studies.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the average American family still lived by kerosene light, ate in the kitchen, and used an outhouse. By 1940, electric lights, dining rooms, and bathrooms were the norm as the traditional working-class home was fast becoming modern—a fact largely missing from the story of domestic innovation and improvement in twentieth-century America, where such benefits seem to count primarily among the upper classes and the post–World War II denizens of suburbia. Examining the physical evidence of America’s working-class houses, Thomas C. Hubka revises our understanding of how widespread domestic improvement transformed the lives of Americans in the modern era. His work, focused on the broad central portion of the housing population, recalibrates longstanding ideas about the nature and development of the “middle class” and its new measure of improvement, “standards of living.”In How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940 (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Hubka analyzes a period when millions of average Americans saw accelerated improvement in their housing and domestic conditions. These improvements were intertwined with the acquisition of entirely new mechanical conveniences, new types of rooms and patterns of domestic life, and such innovations—from public utilities and kitchen appliances to remodeled and multi-unit housing—are at the center of the story Hubka tells. It is a narrative, amply illustrated and finely detailed, that traces changes in household hygiene, sociability, and privacy practices that launched large portions of the working classes into the middle class—and that, in Hubka’s telling, reconfigures and enriches the standard account of the domestic transformation of the American home.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture (Monacelli Press, 2020), architect, architectural historian, and preservationist Françoise Bollack presents eighteen projects that use traditional materials to build contemporary forms or use modern materials to build traditional forms, blurring the boundary between tradition and modernity in architecture.Bollack rejects the modernist taboo against imitation and precedent, tracing the history of adaptive and imitative design from the Renaissance to the Greek and Gothic revivals and to the nineteenth-century modular cast-iron facades that Philip Johnson considered "the basis for modern design."The book examines projects in the US, Europe, and Japan, encompassing a broad range of building types: residential, hospitality, commercial and retail, and cultural spaces. All share an intriguing, even radical, approach to reinterpreting traditional forms and materials. Humble thatch moves beyond the farmhouse roof to clad the walls of a Danish environmental center; a photographic image of a Parisian facade becomes a scrim on the facade of a new building; the ghost of an ancient Italian basilica is outlined in wire mesh.Among the featured architects are Kengo Kuma, architect of the Tokyo 2021 Olympic stadium; MVRDV, a highly regarded Dutch firm; Lacaton & Vassal and Chartier/Corbasson in France; Skene Catling de la Peña in the UK; Morris Adjmi in the USA; Max Dudler in Germany; Dortre Mandrup in Denmark; and Herzog & de Meuron in Switzerland.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020) Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation.Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

It is a major challenge to write the history of post-WWII architectural theory without boiling it down to a few defining paradigms. An impressive anthologizing effort during the 1990s charted architectural theory mostly via the various theoretical frameworks employed, such as critical theory, critical regionalism, deconstructivism, and pragmatism.Yet the intellectual contours of what constitutes architectural theory have been constantly in flux. It is therefore paramount to ask what kind of knowledge has become important in the recent history of architectural theory and how the resulting figure of knowledge sets the conditions for the actual arguments made.The contributions in The Figure of Knowledge: Conditioning Architectural Theory, 1960s-1990s (Leuven UP, 2020) focus on institutional, geographical, rhetorical, and other conditioning factors. They thus screen the unspoken rules of engagement that postwar architectural theory ascribed to.Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and ProjectMuseBryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In the course of the Cold War, architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe engaged in a vibrant collaboration with those in West Africa and the Middle East in order to bring modernization to the developing world. Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton UP, 2020) shows how their collaboration reshaped five cities in the Global South: Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City.Łukasz Stanek describes how local authorities and professionals in these cities drew on Soviet prefabrication systems, Hungarian and Polish planning methods, Yugoslav and Bulgarian construction materials, Romanian and East German standard designs, and manual laborers from across Eastern Europe. He explores how the socialist development path was adapted to tropical conditions in Ghana in the 1960s, and how Eastern European architectural traditions were given new life in 1970s Nigeria. He looks at how the differences between socialist foreign trade and the emerging global construction market were exploited in the Middle East in the closing decades of the Cold War. Stanek demonstrates how these and other practices of global cooperation by socialist countries—what he calls socialist worldmaking—left their enduring mark on urban landscapes in the postcolonial world.Featuring an extensive collection of previously unpublished images, Architecture in Global Socialism draws on original archival research on four continents and a wealth of in-depth interviews. This incisive book presents a new understanding of global urbanization and its architecture through the lens of socialist internationalism, challenging long-held notions about modernization and development in the Global South.If you are curious to see some of the architectural projects discussed in Stanek's award-winning book, please review some images here.  Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Katherine Zubovich, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Buffalo, delves into the transformation of Moscow under Stalin through her book, "Moscow Monumental." She discusses the societal implications of the iconic skyscrapers, often called 'Stalin's wedding cakes.' Zubovich reveals personal letters that highlight the frustrations of residents affected by urban redevelopment. She explores the architectural ambitions of the era and their deep connections to Soviet identity, aspirations, and the resulting social impacts.

One hundred years ago, the Addison Act created the circumstances for the large scale construction of municipal housing in the UK. This would lead to the most prolific phases of housing estate building the country has ever seen. The legacy of this historic period has been tackled for the last twenty-five years as these estates began to suffer from misguided allocation policies, systemic building and fabric failure and financial austerity. A series of estate regeneration programs sought to rectify the mistakes of the past. Estate Regeneration: Learning from the Past, Housing Communities of the Future (Routledge, 2020) describes 24 of these regeneration schemes from across the UK and the design philosophy and resident engagement which formed each new community. A number of essays from a wide range of industry experts amplify the learning experience from some key estate regeneration initiatives and provide observations on the broader issues of this sector of the housing market. Regeneration is inevitable; it is a matter of the form which regeneration should take. The information presented here is a guide to an intuitive approach to estate regeneration which commences with the derivation of strong urban design principles and is guided by real community engagement. The experience presented seeks to learn from the mistakes of the past to create the best possible platform for regeneration of the housing estates of the future.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Practiceopolis: Stories from the Architectural Profession (Routledge, 2020) is a graphic novel about the contemporary architectural profession, in which it acts as the protagonist in the form of an imaginary city called Practiceopolis. The novel narrates quasi-realistic stories that exaggerate the architectural everyday and the tacit, in order to make them prominent and tangible. They depict and dramatize the value conflicts between the different cultures of practicing architecture and between the architectural profession and other members of the building industry as political conflicts around the future of Practiceopolis.The book uses the metaphorical world of Practiceopolis to provoke big questions about everyday routines in the profession that practitioners may take for granted and to examine different ideologies at work among architects and other members of the construction industry. The novel ends in the tradition of dystopian worlds common in a certain strand of graphic novels.By vividly illustrating and narrating the critical issues he interrogates, the author has created a world which any architect, student or professional, will both instantly recognize and simultaneously reject, provoking the reader to challenge themselves and the profession at large.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture