As we turn the corner into summer, it’s time to kick back and dive into a book, whether you’re at the beach, drink in hand, or stuck inside an air-conditioned office. A suite of books about architecture, planning, and urbanism are slated to drop in the coming months, and AN has compiled a list of our favorite page-turners. They range from behind-the-scenes looks into how Disneyland was planned and built, to essays on urbanism, and mellow photo collections of a modernist California.
What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City
Michael Sorkin
Verso
$24.72
In this collection of essays, architecture writer (and AN contributor) Michael Sorkin tracks the conversion of New York City into a playground for starchitects, starting with Bloomberg and moving into the present day. But if What Goes Up has an antagonist, it’s most likely embodied in now-President Trump, who Sorkin views as a product of everything wrong with development in New York.
The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids
Alexandra Lange
Bloomsbury Publishing
$22.77 – June 12, 2018 release
How does design shape our formative years? What did Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller play with when they were growing up? What distinguishes a “good” toy from a “bad” toy, and who decides which is which? Through equal parts history and case studies, Lange deftly explains how children went from playing with blocks to Minecraft, and how the play environment shapes a child’s formative years.
Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America
Michael Osman
University of Minnesota Press
$30.00
When did the modern age begin? The advent of refrigeration and climate control allowed for the mass distribution of food, the rise of tall buildings, and new advances in occupancy comfort. With so many more options for controlling the interior environment, architects took on a much more important role; and as Osman argues, played a major part in introducing the regulations that would standardize the centuries to come.
Landscape of Faith: Interventions Along the Mexican Pilgrimage Route
Tatiana Bilbao, photos by Iwan Baan
Lars Müller Publishers
$32.25
Two million pilgrims annually travel the treacherous mountain path through Jalisco, Mexico to reach a shrine to the Virgin of Talpa. Can a path, typically considered a liminal space, have its own vernacular, culture, and history? In Landscape of Faith, Bilbao and Baan explore the temporary and permanent structures, institutions, and landscapes that pilgrims must pass on their 110-mile journey.
Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability
Eyal Weizman
MIT Press
$35.95
With Forensic Architecture’s shortlisting for the prestigious Turner Prize, the research group/activists/art collective has gotten more media attention than ever. In this recently released monograph, founder Eyal Weizman details how group uses a mixture of architecture, forensic science, and crowdsourced information to reconstruct crimes scenes and obfuscated timelines. Forensic Architecture includes a mix of case studies as well as step-by-step details into how the group conducts an investigation.
Walt Disney’s Disneyland
Chris Nichols
TASCHEN
$50.00 –September 12, 2018 release
Disneyland represents a dream-like ideal for many, but how was the city-within-a-city actually designed and constructed? Nichols pulls back the curtain on Walt Disney’s little-seen inspirations, sketches, original documentation and more from the park’s conception. The design and buildout, opening, and the continued life of the park ever since are presented in context alongside a California that was changing around it.
California Captured: Mid-Century Modern Architecture, Marvin Rand
Pierluigi Serraino, Emily Bills, Sam Lubell
Phaidon Press
$40.19
Keep the California vibes going with California Captured, an index of photographer Marvin Rand’s mid-century work. Rand captured photos of the modernist masters at their peak (including buildings by Craig Ellwood, Louis Kahn, and Frank Lloyd Wright) and exported the “Mid-Century California” aesthetic all over the world.
The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit?
Lydia Kallipoliti
Lars Müller Publishers and Storefront for Art and Architecture
$32.20 – August 28, 2018 release
Closed systems, whether they be a submarine or an office, are designed as self-sustaining environments. In The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Kallipoliti tracks the evolution of closed environment structures from 1928 to the present through 39 case studies of cutting edge prototypes. The relevance of the enclosed space extends into sustainable design and ecological concerns, as designing a self-sustaining system often forces architects and designers to expand their environmental consciousness.
Every book on this list was selected independently by AN‘s team of editors. If you buy something via the embedded links, AN will earn a commission.
