New Books in Architecture

Phoebe Lickwar and Roxi Thoren's book Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge, 2020) situates agriculture as a design practice, using a wide range of international case studies and analytical essays to propose lessons for contemporary landscape architects who are interested in integrating agriculture into their designs. Agricultural processes, technologies, and cycles have long shaped landscape architectural projects, from the ornamented farm of the eighteenth century, to contemporary projects that integrate agriculture and ecological restoration. The book describes the history of agriculture within landscape architecture and reveals the diversity of current design practices that use the rhythms and forms of agriculture to create productive farms that are also sites of beauty, community, ecological conservation, remediation, and pleasure. Highly illustrated in full colour, this book provides essential context, resources, and best practice examples of rural and periurban designed sites for professionals and students alike.Phoebe Lickwar is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. She is founding principal of Forge Landscape Architecture, an award-winning critical design practice based in Austin.Roxi Thoren is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon. She studies the integration of second nature, productive landscapes, in landscape architectural design through research and design projects around agriculture, forestry, and power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Landscape designers have long understood the use of plants to provide beauty, aesthetic pleasure and visual stimulation while supporting a broad range of functional goals. However, the potential for plants in the landscape to elicit human involvement and provide mental stimulation and restoration is much less well understood.Patrick Mooney's book Planting Design: Connecting People and Place (Routledge, 2020) meshes the art of planting design with an understanding of how humans respond to natural environments. Beginning with an understanding of human needs, preferences and responses to landscape, the author interprets the ways in which an understanding of the human-environment interaction can inform planting design. Many of the principles and techniques that may be used in planting design are beautifully illustrated in full colour with examples by leading landscape architects and designers from the United Kingdom, Europe, North America and Asia.Planting Design stimulates thought, provides new direction and assists the reader to find their own unique design voice. Because there are many valid processes and intentions for landscape design, the book is not intended to be overly prescriptive. Rather than presenting a strict design method and accompanying set of rules, Planting Design provides information, insight and inspiration as a basis for developing the individual designer’s own expression in this most challenging of art forms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, Theodora Vardouli and Olga Touloumi's book Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (Routledge, 2019) paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development.The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi- material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.Theodora Vardouli is Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University, Canada.Olga Touloumi is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Bard College, USA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Public spaces tend to over-represent facilities and spatial design for the young and the middle-aged, whereas elderly citizens are all too often neglected by contemporary urban design practice. Dominique Hauderowicz and Kristian Ly Serena's edited volume Age-Inclusive Public Space (Hatje Cantz, 2020) establishes a dialogue between architects and academic contributors from a range of disciplines.Collecting examples and showcasing architectural case studies as well as providing a broad portrait of age-inclusive design methodology, it provides practitioners with inspiration and theoretical and practical knowledge on how to design public space to meet the needs of people of all ages.Drawings, photographs and illustrations of contemporary built environments, historic gardens, art installations and atmospheric landscapes provide a range of contexts for spatial practitioners of all stripes.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

The US population is estimated to grow by more than 110 million people by 2050, and much of this growth will take place where cities and their suburbs are expanding to meet the suburbs of neighboring cities, creating continuous urban megaregions. There are now at least a dozen megaregions in the US. If current trends continue unchanged, new construction in these megaregions will put more and more stress on the natural systems that are necessary for our existence, will make highway gridlock and airline delays much worse, and will continue to attract investment away from older areas. However, the megaregion in 2050 is still a prediction. Future economic and population growth could go only to environmentally safe locations. while helping repair landscapes damaged by earlier development. Improved transportation systems could reduce highway and airport congestion. Some new investment could be drawn to by-passed parts of older cities, which are becoming more separate and unequal.In Designing the Megaregion: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale (Island Press, 2020), planning and urban design expert Jonathan Barnett describes how to redesign megaregional growth using mostly private investment, without having to wait for massive government funding or new governmental structures. Barnett explains practical initiatives to make new development fit into its environmental setting, especially important as the climate changes; reorganize transportation systems to pull together all the components of these large urban regions; and redirect the market forces which are making megaregions very unequal places.There is an urgent need to begin designing megaregions, and Barnett shows that the ways to make major improvements are already available.Jonathan Barnett is an Emeritus Professor of Practice in City and Regional Planning, and former Director of the Urban Design Program, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an architect and planner as an educator. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Increased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These suburbs are often missing basic transportation, and strategies to address this are lacking. This absence of public transit creates barriers to viable employment and accessibility to cultural networks, and plays a role in increasing social inequality.In her book Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form (Routledge, 2017), Diane Jones Allen investigates how housing and transport policy have played their role in creating these "Transit Deserts," and what impact race has upon those likely to be affected. Jones Allen uses research from New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago to explore the forces at work in these situations, as well as proposing potential solutions. Mapping, interviews, photographs, and narratives all come together to highlight the inequities and challenges in Transit Deserts, where a lack of access can make all journeys, such as to jobs, stores, or relatives, much more difficult. Alternatives to public transit abound, from traditional methods such as biking and carpooling to more culturally specific tactics, and are examined comprehensively.This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in transport planning, urban planning, city infrastructure, and transport geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Shanghai’s role in shaping modern China and indeed the very idea of what modernity is in China can hardly be overstated. Much of this long-lasting influence can be seen in how the city itself came into being as a complex product of Chinese and colonial forces, and as Cole Roskam shows us in Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937 (University of Washington Press, 2019), it is in the very material actions of architects and town planners that this is most obvious.Accompanied by a rich array of archival photos, maps and designs, Roskam’s book takes us down to street level, showing up close how the competing influences of Chinese, British, French, American and other governance and architectural regimes interacted and shaped the urban landscape. As Shanghai has again become an arena where global markets and design innovations collide, appreciating this tangled legacy is key to understanding this metropolis and indeed China as a whole.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) is a landscape architecture firm based in Seattle, Washington. GGN was founded in 1999 by Jennifer Guthrie, Shannon Nichol, and Kathryn Gustafson, and it is world-renowned for designing high-use landscapes in complex, urban contexts. Thaïsa Way's GGN: Landscapes 1999 to 2018 (Timber Press, 2018) is the first book devoted to their ground-breaking work. It surveys some of their most important achievements including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Campus in Seattle, Washington; the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park in Chicago, Illinois; and the Venice Biennale in Italy. Packed with practical design lessons and inspiration, this is a must-have resource for design students and professionals, and fans of beautifully designed public spaces.Thaïsa Way is an Urban landscape historian teaching and researching history, theory, and design in the Dept. of Landscape Architecture at the College of Built Environments, University of Washington, Seattle. She is the current Chair at Dumbarton Oaks Research Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

In Heirloom Houses : the Architecture of Wade Weissmann (Gibbs Smith, 2018), Steven Stolman explains how the houses designed by Wade Weissmann and his firm tell the stories of the homeowners. Like beautiful music, a Wade Weissmann house is composed of notes and expressions, rhythm and syncopation, moving forward in time and space toward a resolution that separates ordinary from extraordinary architecture: harmony. Known for their shingle-style homes, they also design ranch houses and equestrian estates, romantic cottages, contemporary penthouses, and lake homes.There is nothing ordinary about a WWA house; custom wood work, architectural details, and the finest materials set these residences apart from all others. Also featured are a couple of striking commercial designs.Steven Stolman is a writer and designer with an observant eye on high society. He has a keen sense of the history of design in fashion, architecture and interiors. He is a brand consultant and sought-after speaker. He has authored four previous books, among them Scalamandre: Haute Décor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture