Julie Iovine
An Architecture Critic Commits
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I think of this book together with Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son as it was through Imagined Cities that I came to consider Dickens anew. For once, in describing the wrenching toll of industrialization—specifically constructing the new railroad slashing through neighborhoods—Dickens’s melodramatic writing seems just the thing. Alter goes on to brilliantly explicate carriage traffic in Flaubert as well.
This five-volume set out of Harvard traces the cultural threads spun in pagan and ancient times leading to our contemporary obsession with private space. Plus, it’s a great resource for illustrations.
The landscape in China is changing so fast that this 2008 report from the front lines is already past tense. But as a record of attitudes held by a just-exploding economy, it couldn’t be more riveting.
I’m fairly obsessed with tracking the modern mindset to its earliest sources and most warping traumas. World War I was the ultimate defining wrench in our mental works. Fussell considers not the battles fought but the culture that resonated around battle and transformed subsequent thinking about the modern experience.
There was a moment in history when any thinking person in the known world headed for Alexandria and there invented geography, mathematics, astronomy, religious tolerance and, convincingly, the modern mind. The book is especially fascinating on detailing revelations achieved simply through time and observation.
One of Stephenson’s first books, published in 1995, it anticipates iPads, 3-D printing, the dangers of mass customization, and enslavement through craft.
About dictator moths drawn to lightbulb architects. The chapter on American presidential libraries is scathing and hilariously depressing. It does not say whether or not architects have a moral responsibility when working for power mongers, but it eloquently poses all the right probing questions.
Tufte has written a handful of eye-popping books with ahead-of-the-curve titles (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information had to be self-published in 1986). Beautiful Evidence, published in 2006, is his most accessible, with tipped-in sheets for the famous graphic on Napoleon’s March on Moscow, how-to-dance-the-gavotte charts, and an 1823 map showing how many slaves fit into a ship named Vigilante. Data visualizers may prefer the earlier, wonkier tomes, but this one provides the pure pleasure of browse and learn.
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What is Universal Everything? edited by Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook
What is Universal Everything?
Edited by Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook; designed by Spin
Publisher: Unit Editions
Published: June 2019
Matt Pyke, founder and creative director of Universal Everything, calls his studio a “digital art and design collective.” Now, after 15 years of revolutionary work in the digital realm, the studio has its first book. For anyone interested in the future of digital design, the book features a unique cover for each copy of the book (limited to 2,000)—every buyer owns a one-off.
The Future of Design: Global Product Innovation for a Complex World by Lorraine Justice
The Future of Design: Global Product Innovation for a Complex World
by Lorraine Justice
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey
Published: June 4, 2019
Internationally recognized product design expert, TED speaker, and consultant to companies like Microsoft and Levi’s, shares the ten global factors that directly impact product design success and failure.
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul Goldberger
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City
By Paul Goldberger
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: May 2019
An illustrated, entirely new look at the history of baseball: told through the stories of the vibrant and ever-changing ballparks where the game was and is staged, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic.
Charleston Fancy by Witold Rybczynski
Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City
By Witold Rybczynski
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: May 2019
Charleston, South Carolina, which boasts America’s first historic district, is known for its palmetto-lined streets and picturesque houses. The Holy City, named for its profusion of churches, exudes an irresistible charm. Award-winning author and cultural critic Witold Rybczynski unfolds a series of stories about a group of youthful architects, builders, and developers based in Charleston: a self-taught home builder, an Air Force pilot, a fledgling architect, and a bluegrass mandolin player.
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