Articles
Reviews
The latest iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial is not a place, it’s a direction. Who knows where it’s going?
American Framing: The Same Something for Everyone by Paul Andersen, Jayne Kelley, and Paul Preissner (eds.). Park Books, 252 pp., $40.
American Framing is overly eager to claim new ground for something that is surely unsustainable in the long term.
The sixty-first New York Film Festival.
“Trying hard to be the New York Film Festival—not the Lincoln Center or Upper West Side Film Festival.”
How to Live with Objects by Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer. Clarkson Potter, 318 pp., $60.
Therapy-speak for those bitten by the shopping bug.
Terrace Story: A Novel by Hilary Leichter. HarperCollins, 208 pp., $28.
A tale where there’s never enough room, where nothing but the essential lasts, where there aren’t morals so much as morality.
Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture by Matthew Allen. Gta Verlag, 140 pp., $26.
What is at stake in Flowcharting is the role that computation might play in a project for a “progressive” architecture.
Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, curated by Carson Chan with Matthew Wagstaffe, Dewi Tan, and Eva Lavranou, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, until January 20, 2024.
For the most part, Emerging Ecologies occupies a mundane topography of composting toilets, upcycled materials, bioshelters, and geodesic domes.
Within so much physical unobtrusion and almost self-negating structures, you’ve got to supply your own atmospheric narrative.
Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change by Lynne B. Sagalyn. MIT Press, 440 pp., $40.
How did a seemingly incorrigible part of New York, which countless mayors had promised, but failed, to clean up, change so drastically?
All the Queens Houses: An Architectural Portrait of New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough by Rafael Herrin-Ferri. Jovis, 272 pp., $26.
Rafael Herrin-Ferri’s guidebook to Queens’ polymorphous saltboxes, shotguns, and McMansions is a romp through New York’s “global village.”
We the Parasites by A. V. Marraccini. Sublunary Editions, 148 pp., $18.
The most striking thing about A. V. Marraccini’s new book on criticism is not that it is personal, or even intimate—it’s that it is, against all odds, uncynical.
Various architectural exhibitions in 2023
In a time of multiple crises and an increased understanding of architecture’s complicity in spatial injustice, what and who is an architectural exhibition for?
Architecture and Abstraction by Pier Vittorio Aureli. MIT Press, 320 pp., $35.
In his latest treatise, Pier Vittorio Aureli frames architectural production as a stand-in for the much larger and more complex system of economic production as a whole. The problems start there.
The Ideal Communist City by Alexei Gutnov, et al. Weiss Press, 192 pp., $25.
Newly reissued, The Ideal Communist City presents an abstract dreamworld whose contemporary relevance is questionable, to say the least.
Some Rockin’: Dan Graham Interviews by Gregor Stemmrich (ed.). Sternberg Press, 384 pp., $28.
Dan Graham’s quirks were the stuff of legend. They’re also key to appreciating his artworks.
The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s by Alexander Nemerov. Princeton University Press, 336 pp., $35.
The Forest reads like a heady and roving literary essay, whose forays into art and environment have a “blink and you’ll miss it” quality to them.