Hello Again And Happy Sunday Evening. Welcome To The Fourth Day Of Grindmas!
(If you missed the third day of Grindmas, you can find it here.)
I usually pick up books throughout the year and then do most of my actual reading in the cold winter months. 2022 was no different. In today’s dispatch, I’d like to share some of the books on my bookshelf that I’m most excited to settle into in the weeks ahead. They’re all nonfiction and within the architecture/design world, but beyond that we’ve got quite a range to explore. Rather than offer my own half-baked blurbs about books I’ve only half-read, I’m pairing each book with a review or excerpt that will, I hope, grab your interest and nudge you to read further.
I’m including links to purchase each text; I don’t get any money when you click on these links, but the authors probably do and they’re good people with bills to pay and whatnot. If you purchase through any of the bookshop.org links you’ll be supporting small local bookstores—pretty neat if you ask me. And, if you’d rather borrow a copy from your local library, there are some links for that too. If your library doesn’t have a copy, you can usually suggest that they purchase one and/or request a copy via Interlibrary Loan.
Okay, let’s dive in!
Meet Me by the Fountain
An Inside History of the Mall
Alexandra Lange
Lange points out a keychain shaped like a teeny cup of bubble tea: “It goes with my grand unified theory of boba being the driver for a lot of teen and tween shopping.”
—Christopher Bonanos
Read a conversation between Alexandra Lange and Christopher Bonanos at Curbed
Find Meet Me by the Fountain in a library
When Eero Met His Match
Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect
Eva Hagberg
“Hagberg’s book is bold and original, both in subject matter and structure…Through this proposal of entirely new rules, Hagberg has written a historical study that is useful for thinking about architectural media in the present.”
—Marianna Janowicz
Read Marianna Janowicz’s full review in NYRA
Find When Eero Met His Match in a library
The Polyhedrists
Art and Geometry in the Long Sixteenth Century
Noam Andrews
To artists, mathematicians, and philosophers at the turn of the sixteenth century, these regular solids — the pyramid (four triangular faces), cube (six square faces), octahedron (eight triangular faces), dodecahedron (twelve pentagonal faces), and icosahedron (twenty triangular faces) — radiated a tantalizing promise of divine symmetry, order, and perfection that spanned from the building blocks of matter to the proportions of the human body and the structure of the universe.
—Noam Andrews
Read an excerpt from the text at the Public Domain Review
Find The Polyhedrists in a library
Formulations
Architecture, Mathematics, Culture
Andrew Witt
What Formulations lays out successfully is a much more comprehensive background that shows that the foundation of computational design, of course, wasn’t computers but was math itself; computational design and thinking existed in the practice of architecture long before, with many examples in the book taking place in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This history allows for a broader grounding and legitimization of the ongoing project of computation within architecture as not a fascination within the last 50 to 75 years after modernism, but as an intrinsic and perpetually relevant subject of architectural attention.
—Davis Richardson
Read Davis Richardson’s full review in The Architect’s Newspaper
Find Formulations in a library
On Bramante
Pier Paolo Tamburelli
In recent years, there has been tendency towards highly specific articulation in architecture. This book directs us back to a generous generic sense of beauty. It will be interesting to see how an English audience reacts to the idea that the generic and the generous could be as beautiful and as humanistic as the specific.
—Thomas Padmanabhan
Read a discussion of On Bramante with Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan at Drawing Matter
Vitruvius Without Text
The Biography of a Book
André Tavares
“[Tavares] takes one passage from Vitruvius's original — the first paragraph from Book VI, Chapter III — and examines how its influence jumped from book to building over time. It's an interesting addition to the biography, since it moves the interpretative stances that were found in the various editions of Vitruvius's text in the other direction, in effect turning the Ten Books of Architecture into a hinge upon which its influence moves repeatedly back and forth.”
—Archidose
Read the full review on Archidose
Read Vitruvius Without Text online for free
Inessential Colors
Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe
Basile Baudez
“In concentrating so intently on this largely overlooked and understudied aspect of architectural history, Baudez has opened up a veritable pandora’s box of questions and future researches that will find in his meticulous account a fundamental reference and stimulus.”
—Anthony Vidler
Read Anthony Vidler’s full review at Drawing Matter
Find Inessential Colors in a library
Queer Spaces
An Atlas of LGBTQ+ Places and Stories
edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell
“Queer Spaces is a colorful, moving tribute to the resiliency and optimism of a people now facing some of the most brutal repression they’ve seen since the AIDS crisis…The book is particularly refreshing in that it does not include what most of us see or have to accept as “queer spaces”—the sanitized, commercial spaces pandering to a gay clientele. In fact, it gives us a history and practice of something better.”
—Kate Wagner
Read Kate Wagner’s full review in NYRA here
Find Queer Spaces in a library
Living and Working
DOGMA
These projects do not postulate the end of the family, but question the traditional nuclear family as the only reference for permanent housing…We aim to imagine spaces that are withdrawn from present real estate logics and where inhabitants are able to decide, day by day, how to live and work within them.
—Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara
Read a fuller elucidation of DOGMA’s ethos and design practices, including discussion of several projects published in Living and Working, at the Harvard Design Magazine
Find Living and Working in a library
Once Grindmas seasons concludes, I’ll be reading all day every day. But we’ve still got another week and change of hustle to go. See you tomorrow with eight more things.
—THA