New Books in Architecture

Some utopian plans have shaped our cities —from England’s New Towns and Garden Cities to the Haussmann plan for Paris and the L’Enfant plan for Washington, DC. But these grand plans are the exception, and seldom turn out as envisioned by the utopian planner. Inviting city neighborhoods are more often works of improvisation on a small scale. This type of bottom-up development gives cities both their character and the ability to respond to sudden change.Hank Dittmar, urban planner, friend of artists and creatives, sometime rancher, “high priest of town planning” to the Prince of Wales, believed in letting small things happen. Dittmar concluded that big plans were often the problem. Looking at the global cities of the world, he saw a crisis of success, with gentrification and global capital driving up home prices in some cities, while others decayed for lack of investment.In DIY City: The Collective Power of Small Actions (Island Press, 2020), Dittmar explains why individual initiative, small-scale business, and small development matter, using lively stories from his own experience and examples from recent history, such as the revival of Camden Lock in London and the nascent rebirth of Detroit. DIY City, Dittmar’s last original work, captures the lessons he learned throughout the course of his varied career—from transit-oriented development to Lean Urbanism—that can be replicated to create cities where people can flourish.DIY City is a timely response to the challenges many cities face today, with a short supply of affordable housing, continued gentrification, and offshore investment. Dittmar’s answer to this crisis is to make Do-It-Yourself the norm rather than the exception by removing the barriers to small-scale building and local business. The message of DIY City can offer hope to anyone who cares about cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media at MIT, builds the case for designers and researchers to make the communities they impact co-equal partners in the products, services, and organizations they create.This requires more than eliciting participation from community members, particularly if the goal is extraction. On the contrary, design justice demands a deep understanding of the community and its needs, engagement with community members, and a recognition of their expertise, along with reciprocation of value. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Thomas Bishop details the remarkable cultural history and personal stories behind an iconic figure of Cold War masculinity—the fallout shelter father, who, with spade in hand and the canned goods he has amassed, sought to save his family from atomic warfare. Putting policy documents and presidential addresses into conversation with previously unmined personal letters, diaries, local media coverage, and antinuclear ephemera, Bishop demonstrates that the nuclear crisis years of 1957 to 1963 were not just pivotal for the history of international relations but were also a transitional moment in the social histories of the white middle class and American fatherhood. During this era, public concerns surrounding civil defense shaped private family conversations, and the fallout shelter emerged as a site at which ideas of nationhood, national security, and masculinity collided with the complex reality of trying to raise and protect a family in the nuclear age. 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 Laurie Olin about his book Be Seated (ORO Editions, 2017). Olin’s interest in public outdoor seating in parks and civic spaces revolves around two poles: the first is a concern for aspects of the ordinary in our settings and actions, the apparatus and effects of the quotidian in our individual lives and experience; the other is the utility of public seating in the conduct and potential of our role as citizens and the establishment of place and community. A not inconsiderable aspect of both is the engendering of pleasure. In a democracy we are expected to fulfill two potentials – those of private citizen and contributing member of a community. When sitting on a bench or chair in a park or plaza we inevitably participate in the life of a particular space, city, and society while simultaneously pursuing our own life with its demands and aspirations. Chairs and benches in their many varieties and situations are the setting (pun intended) for profoundly simple, albeit important, and largely unnoticed aspects of our lives.Laurie Olin is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. From vision to realization, he has guided many of OLIN’s signature projects, which span the history of the studio from the Washington Monument Grounds in Washington, DC to Bryant Park in New York City. His recent projects include the AIA award-winning Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Robert Sroufe and Steven Melnyk's Developing Sustainable Supply Chains to Drive Value (Business Expert Press) provides a multi-perspective approach to sustainability and value chains to allow understanding from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds.Some of the key features of this book include: Short vignettes of important trends along with relevant management issues; Evidence-based management examples from leading multinational companies, small, and medium enterprises spanning supply chains; References to appropriate tools, emerging technology, and practices; Chapter action items for the reader to take a deeper look at integration opportunities involving sustainability and supply chain management; An action-learning approach to applying concepts and tools so readers from any functional perspective can implement and manage sustainability projects including; Guidelines on how to move forward with your first supply chain sustainability initiative.Robert Sroufe is Ph.D., Operations, Michigan State University M.B.A., Materials and Logistics Management, Michigan State University. Tricia Keffer ASLA, MLA Landscape Architecture with a design practice in the Florida Keys PlantsPeopleLove.com 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 Thaisa Way, editor of River Cities, City Rivers (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2018).Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers can shape a city’s success or cause its destruction. At the same time, city-building reshapes rivers and their landscapes. Cities have harnessed, modified, and engineered rivers, altering ecologies and creating new landscapes in the process of urbanization. Rivers are also shaped by the development of cities as urban landscapes, just as the cities are shaped by their relationship to the river.In the river city, the city river is a dynamic contributor to the urban landscape with its flow of urban economies, geographies, and cultures. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. Building on emerging interest in the resilience of cities, this book and the original symposium consider river cities and city rivers to explore how histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.Thaisa Way is Program Director, Garden & Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Professor Urban University Of WashingtonTricia Keffer ASLA, MLA Landscape Architecture with a design practice in the Florida Keys PlantsPeopleLove.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

For centuries artists and designers have recorded places, people, and life in travel sketchbooks. Over a period of fifty years, Laurie Olin, one of America’s most distinguished landscape architects, has recorded aspects of France: its cities and countryside, streets and cafes, ancient ruins, vineyards, and parks—from humble to grand, things that interested his designer’s eye—taking the time to see things carefully. Paris in its seasons, agriculture in Provence and Bordeaux, trees, dogs, and fountains, all are noted over the years in watercolor or pen and ink.Originally intended for the pleasure of merely being there as well as self-education, Olin's France Sketchbook (ORO Editions, 2020) offers a selection from his many sketchbooks is accompanied by transcriptions of notes and observations, along with introductory remarks for the different regions included: Paris, Haute Loire, Provence, Haute Provence, Normandy, Aquitaine, and Entre des Meures.Laurie Olin is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. From vision to realization, he has guided many of OLIN’s signature projects, which span the history of the studio from the Washington Monument Grounds in Washington, DC to Bryant Park in New York City. His recent projects include the AIA award-winning Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Integration has been a key theme across the general management, organizational behavior, supply chain management, strategy, information systems and the environmental management literature for decades. Sustainability continues to be, at the “top of the agenda” in the C-suite. Despite this, specialists in academia and organizations lack the peripheral vision to understand the power of a more integrated approach that will empower functional groups to become best-in-class without forcing trade-offs that pull down other groups connected to overall operations. Integrated Management is the key driver of innovation and profitability in progressive companies. It reduces risks while pursuing new opportunities, and the checks and balances for prudent management are baked in the strategy for modern go-to-market synergy and growth.What can be done, then, by individuals, functions, organizations, value chains, and even whole cities to integrate and align sustainability? In his book Integrated Management: How Sustainability Creates Value for Any Business (Emerald, 2018), Robert Sroufe answers this question. Sroufe considers the opportunity we have to enable an enterprise value proposition that includes environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. Integrated management applies a proven strategic planning approach to uncover the tools and actions available for change management and performance measured with an Integrated Bottom Line (IBL). Using evidence based examples from best-in-practice enterprises, proven management tenets, models and tools alongside emerging technologies, we can develop integrated solutions aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).Tricia Keffer ASLA, MLA Landscape Architecture with a design practice in the Florida Keys PlantsPeopleLove.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In his new book A History of New York in 27 Buildings: The 400-Year Untold Story of an American Metropolis (Bloomsbury, 2019), New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the story of the city through bricks, glass, wood, and mortar, revealing why and how it evolved into the nation's biggest and most influential. From the seven hundred thousand or so buildings in New York, Roberts selects twenty-seven that, in the past four centuries, have been the most emblematic of the city's economic, social, and political evolution. Roberts describes not only the buildings and how they came to be, but also their enduring impact on the city and its people and how the consequences of the construction often reverberated around the world.A few structures, such as the Empire State Building, are architectural icons, but Roberts goes beyond the familiar with intriguing stories of the personalities and exploits behind the unrivaled skyscraper's construction. Some stretch the definition of buildings, to include the city's oldest bridge and the landmark Coney Island Boardwalk. Others offer surprises: where the United Nations General Assembly first met; a hidden hub of global internet traffic; a nondescript factory that produced billions of dollars of currency in the poorest neighborhood in the country; and the buildings that triggered the Depression and launched the New Deal.With his deep knowledge of the city and penchant for fascinating facts, Roberts brings to light the brilliant architecture, remarkable history, and bright future of the greatest city in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

From the New York Times, best selling author Erica Bauermeister comes House Lessons: Renovating a Life (Sasquatch Books, 2020). This memoir is about the power of home, and the transformative act of restoring one house in particular. In this mesmerizing memoir-in-essays, Erica Bauermeister renovates a trash-filled house in eccentric Port Townsend, Washington, and in the process takes readers on a journey to discover the ways our spaces subliminally affect us. A personal, accessible, and literary exploration of the psychology of architecture, as well as a loving tribute to the connections we forge with the homes we care for and live in, this book is designed for anyone who's ever fallen head over heels for a house. It is also a story of a marriage, of family, and of the kind of roots that settle deep into your heart. Discover what happens when a house has its own lessons to teach in this moving and insightful memoir that ultimately shows us how to make our own homes (and lives) better.Erica Bauermeister is the bestselling author of four novels, and the co-author of two works of non-fiction: 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader's Guide and Let's Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Washington and has taught there and at Antioch University. She is a founding member of the Seattle 7 Writers and currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington, in the house she renovated with her family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture