March 20, 2010 | Broadcast | News | Reviews | books

maki & ban release books

Robert Taylor review’s Fumihiko Maki’s Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City [MIT Press, 2008] and Shigeru Ban’s 1985–2007 [self-published] for The Design Observer. Maki’sNurturing Dreams is an essay collection by a stellar member of the postwar generation that played a central role not only in rebuilding Japan but also in defining contemporary Japanese architecture. Ban’s 1985–2007 is a mid-career monograph by an influential practitioner in the generation that followed. In his review, Boston-based architect Taylor notes that the books represent different traditions of architectural bookmaking, and each, he says, merits our attention.

via Design Observer

November 7, 2009 | Features | Reviews | books

Book Review: City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong

by Non Arkaraprasertkul

Harris Manchester College & The Oriental Institute
The University of Oxford
non.arkaraprasertkul@orinst.ox.ac.uk

–

Having for some time been a fan of Professor Leo Ou-Fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, I did not hesitate to grab Lee’s newest book City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong from the shelves during my last visit to Hong Kong. Like other urbanists, I savor the study of Hong Kong with alacrity. Though I must admit I have never been very clear about what Hong Kong is all about. To me, Hong Kong is a city of hyper-industriousness, located in the point of transition between two political realms, which survives for the sake of China’s financial enterprise.  The culture of the place remains intact despite the shifting global economy (and, of course, global economic downturn). Don’t be frightened: it is my intention to obfuscate the previous sentence with conflicted ideas.  The sentence, in fact, is intentionally written to represent my confusing perceptions of Hong Kong. Quite simply Lee defines the place as such: “a city of confusion and contradiction.” For some time, in this city of mainly Chinese residents that had been foreshadowed by the colonialist enterprise for almost a hundred years, the use of a question of history – is Hong Kong Chinese? – is the principal manner by which scholars analyze Hong Kong.

continue >>>

June 30, 2008 | Reviews | books

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World

The Edifice Complex
Deyan Sudjic

Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (November 28, 2006)
ISBN-10: 014303801X
ISBN-13: 978-0143038016
Hardcover: 405 pages

Deyan Sudjic’s latest offering is a witty, sometimes lighthearted look at some really very real issues pertaining to the world of architecture and its promiscuous relationship with power.

The book looks towards architecture and the role it plays within dominions of power and leadership, and how it is being wielded on today’s global construction sites, where iconic just so happens to be the overused word of the day; a phenomenon undeniably launched by the advent of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. The building holds an interesting place in this discourse: Once touted as the single reason for post-industrial Bilbao’s successful urban regeneration, it has now become the subject of scrutiny as the culprit for the now famous/infamous Bilbao Effect. Referencing age old examples like Francois Mitterand’s Grand Projets in Paris, or Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer’s Germany, to more recent instances of architects’ brushes with the powers that be, that include the activities of the offices of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, Sudjic makes exceptionally clear his thesis that architecture has and continues to be utilized as an instrument for the raw expression of power.

Architectural space, language and tectonics – are explored in detail, with Sudjic in one instance describing Speer’s design of the German Chancellery and its very physical and political role in the war; and in one riveting and revealing chapter, charts the gradual physical-political crumbling of then-Czech president Emil Hácha as he traversed through the endless catacombs of what was really a superfluous display of Adolf Hitler’s power. Needless to say, Stalin and Mao and their respective pet projects are given equal attention in what emerges to be a study of the (very architectural) devices of power.

Far from being one-sided, Sudjic draws attention to an equal and complimentary attitude of architects; that of the undying hunger and thirst to build, and the unimaginable lengths to which architects would go to just to realize a project. Philip Johnson, and even Mies gain honorable mention, as Sudjic digs up the latter’s lesser known past of having flirted with building for Hitler’s Third Reich, showing that even the Modernist master himself could not resist the idea of building for the progressive elite, in hope of even further commissions of a similar nature.

Through explicit descriptions of spaces and environments, and voyeuristic demonstrations of the manipulation and games that go on behind the doors of the rich and powerful, Sudjic also sheds light on architecture’s rat pack of the day – Koolhaas, Gehry, Hadid, Foster – among others, and brings to mind the world’s current fascination with the icon, and its inexorable relationship to – the very real, and sometimes ugly – human instinct to wield and display the extent of one’s power. Architecture, as Sudjic argues, must be understood primarily not as art, but as an expression of power over a landscape that will last far longer than we do – a unique instrument of statecraft.

Price TBA
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April 18, 2008 | Reviews | books

Designing Design

Designing Design
Kenya Hara

Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
ISBN-10: 303778105X
ISBN-13: 978-3037781050
Hardcover: 467 pages

“Kenya Hara is a complex man. He views the world through his many lenses of seeing, tasting, smelling, erasing, evaporating, and all the forms of construction and deconstruction.” Those are the words by John Maeda as he attempts to introduce Kenya Hara, one of the masters in today’s design world, in the introduction of Designing Design.

Hara, a key member of world famous Muji brings to us a deeply philosophical text about design. As he puts it, “Articulating design is design in itself”. Touching on deep issues about design, Kenya Hara brings to us questions about designing sensations with the concept of haptic design and also asks its readers to think about the importance of emptiness in design. The book also presents some of his exhibitions such as Re-Design: The Daily Products of the 21st Century of 2000.

This white, hardcover book published by Lars Müller Publishers is a truly beautiful as a book and sophisticated design book on both levels; as a book (object) and its content. With intelligent writing and amazingly simple,clean and powerful images, Designing Design fascinates the reader with its poetic-ness and intelligent. It is a book that needs to be read slowly and enjoyed at a calming pace, allowing each page to sink in and have its profound impact on one. With its array of powerful images and diagrams, this book transmits the ideologies deep from the mind of Hara and also other like minded Japanese designers of his time, in a delightful manner yet without losing any of the complexity of the thoughts in it.

This is an important book that should be compulsory reading for anyone who is studying and/or practising design. A strong underlying message that is driven home at the end of the day is probably the idea that one of the goals of design, as envisioned by Hara, is to create products, advertising, and objects of culture in which functionality might meet simplicity with elegance and improve the human condition through the expression of beauty. And of course, to develop an understanding of ‘white’, which to Hara is not just a colour but a whole design concept in itself.

S$85.80

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December 31, 2007 | Reviews | books

Conflict Urbanism in a City of Collision

CITY OF COLLISION
Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism
Edited by Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets
Birkhauser
ISBN-10 3-7643-7482-9
ISBN-13 978-3-7643-7482-2
Paperback: 391 pages

Conflict resolution and conflict urbanism are intrinsically bound to both the political and social spheres spinning amidst countries with sensitive and ambiguous boundaries. In times like these, architecture can hardly avoid being a political handle between these tenuous boundaries. In the light of recent violent conflicts unfolding around the world in urban environments, an editorial team comprising of members from ETH Zurich, Berlin University of the Arts, IPCC Jerusalem and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, launched an open research process incorporating Palestinian, Israeli, and European participants in 2003. This initiative set out to understand the production of space in Jerusalem in convergence with the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also sought to study the city inhabitants’ parallel strategies of resistance, adaptation, and survival.

Tracing a Jerusalem through essays, photographic documentary and a series of narrative and conceptual maps, this publication reads as a spatial and cultural navigator into the ambivalence, dynamism, and complexity of life lived at the borders. As hints the title, the crux of this endeavour illuminates the multifarious situations the city’s inhabitants have been living in, in terms of barriers and violent frontiers, confrontations and spaciocide, destruction and planning deadlocks, no-man’s-lands and imprisonment.

The exposé on reading such contested space is aptly illustrated by one of the contributors to this publication, Shmuel Groag – ‘in Jerusalem, the quality, size, and nature of each road… is a fair indicator of whether Palestinians or Israelis move along it’. While these studies may be site-specific, cities worldwide are already ‘exposed to dramatic changes following new security policies and preventative measures against real or imagined threats’ (book jacket). Our acquaintance with these extremely estranged spaces through this book will elicit a better grasp on what space means, what space could be – applied to our own explorations on the collision of site forces.

S$92.00

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December 31, 2007 | Reviews | books

Speculations on NYC

CITY SPECULATIONS
Edited by Patricia C. Phillips
Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN 1-56898-077-9
Paperback: 101 pages

Located within the Queens Museum of Art, The Panorama of the City of New York occupies close to one-third of the museum’s exhibition space. Projects like City Speculations are part of an ongoing presentation which the museum hosts, to bring the Panorama model and a definitive sense of New York City urban dynamism to its museum-goers.

This publication documents the diversity of City Speculations exhibits that were presented under the curatorial wing of Patricia C. Phillips, Associate Professor and Chair of the Art Department at the State University of New York, New Paltz. The main conceptual handle of this project was to reveal ‘the complexities and turmoil that animate urban life and comprise the character of New York’. Moving decidedly away from the caricaturized Panorama portrayal of the city, this series of exhibits included works by Diller + Scofidio, Keller Easterling, Andrea Kahn and RAAUM, which subvert normative modes of city-reading. The tag of an ‘art exhibit’ allowed these architects, theorists and designers to interpret their personal experiences and observations of NYC and translate these ideas into provoking abstract models and images.

Diller + Scofidio took their exhibit, Soft Sell, street-walking on Forty-second Street in the entrance of the former Rialto Theater, now an abandoned pornographic theatre. Forty-second Street, a site of ‘reversible values’ with ‘unsightly’ tourist on-goings, is a meeting ground between decadence and delight (think Geylang-meets-Orchard-Towers, perhaps our best local counterpart). A video screen on which flashed a pair of sensuous plump, red lips and tantalizing script – “Hey you, wanna buy a full service secretary?� or “Hey you, wanna buy the fountain of youth?� or “Hey you, wanna buy a left kidney?� – became the means by which the seedy and secret layers of the site were unearthed, and displayed to all and sundry.

With explorations like, The Hidden City, Second New York, Scoring the Park and Fresh Kills, one is drawn into an otherworldly and panoramic representation of a New York City, which perhaps is more of a truth than the brilliant verisimilitude of an objectified Museum panorama.

[images: Debbie]

S$35.30

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December 24, 2007 | Reviews | books

When Space meets Art / When Art meets Space

WHEN SPACE MEETS ART / WHEN ART MEETS SPACE
Spatial, Structural and Graphic Design for Event and Exhibition
Edited, produced and published by viction:workshop ltd.
ISBN-13: 978-988-98228-0-4
Hardcover: 240 pages

What makes a good events exhibition? What makes for a spectacular experience at an events exhibition? I believe this book answers the latter question with a succinct, punctuated reply. On two counts, it answers two salient questions in the realm of curatorial, gallery and artistic exhibitions. With the increasing number of art, design and architecture galleries and exhibitions sprouting around Singapore and the region, this book is a source of inspiration for you out there, if you plan on brainstorming for your next events or exhibition project.

Each of the 35 featured international design firms range from BRUCE MAU DESIGN INC., and Amsterdam-based MAXALOT, to TOKUJIN YOSHIOKA DESIGN whose works are now found in the permanent collection of the MoMA and other major museums around the world. When Space Meets Art operates on the theme of spatial design, where the use of sensuous form and structure within a given space creates exceptional exhibitions and toys with the senses of the spectator. On the literal flipside, When Art Meets Space highlights the power of graphical elements which transform ordinary exhibitions into mind-blowing walkthroughs.

In fact, get this publication, even if you’re not planning on designing or setting up any exhibitions anytime soon. This is a fuss-free, straightforward, eye-candy collection of award-winning and inventive events and exhibition spaces from inter-disciplinary design firms around the globe.

I’ll let the images speak for themselves.

(images: debbie)

visit viction:ary.com to see projects/books/collaborations

hit on viction:ary on myspace

S$58.00

Available at Basheer Graphicbooks
#04-19 Bras Basah Complex
Block 231 Bain Street
Singapore 180231

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October 29, 2007 | Reviews | books

(Im)materiality and (Other)architectures

IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURE
Jonathan Hill
Routledge
ISBN 0-415-36342-1 (pbk)

Can architecture be regarded merely as a composite of its materials? Is a building only what it is made of, as opposed to the architect’s decisive interplay of space and volume? If the three little pigs had built invisible houses of motion-sensor laser guns, would the big bad wolf have been tricked into dashing at them, and end up pulverised into smithereens before he could even huff and puff?

Immaterial Architecture questions the material in architecture, and what are our oft-held ideas of conventional materiality. No, it does not take the stance of recycling unconventional materials in building, nor that we rethink the use of materials in the building fabric. Rather, it highlights a foreign realm of materials that, surprisingly, do make other architectures as insidiously as we strain to reject its rational. continue >>>

October 22, 2007 | Reviews | books

Creative Users

ACTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE
Architects and Creative Users
Jonathan Hill
Routledge
ISBN 0-415-29043-0 (pbk)

If you are one to be drawn to innovative and alternative strains of architectural thought, this book will whet your intellect with its multi-disciplinary approach to understanding architectural design. Drawing on the text ‘The Death of the Author’ by French literary critic Roland Barthes, Actions of Architecture is inspired by Barthes’s argument for a writer who is aware of the creativity of the reader. This approach compares the relations between the author and reader and the artist and viewer, thus informing us on the relations between the architect and user. continue >>>

September 10, 2007 | Reviews | books

Redefining Material Use

SUPERUSE
Constructing new architecture by shortcutting material flows
Ed van Hinte
Cesare Peeren
Jan Jongert
010 Publishers
ISBN: 978-30-6450-592-8

A practical, inspiring book about constructing new buildings with surplus materials, SUPERUSE was initiated as a movement by the Recyclicity foundation in Rotterdam. Compiled by Ed van Hinte, Cesare Peeren and Jan Jongert from 2012 Architects, the book presents ideas for tools and methods for SUPERUSE, such as a ‘harvest map’ of everything reusable within a given distance of a building’s site. continue >>>

July 29, 2007 | Reviews | books

Light Reading

The Reflections of Tokyo
Hiroya Kawabata
DESIGN OFFICE K Co. Ltd. 2005
ISBN: 4-902684-05-5

Light seems to cut both ways. Without it, there would be no depth to reality; no texture to perceive, no polish and shine to fathom. On the contrary, it reveals the inequities of man’s modern constructions, which strive for the immaculate, the precise, and the perfect.

Vertical Mullions and sharp, reflective panels of glass become pillows of golden light, superimposed on the city fabric – the perfect garnish to complement the already rich and cosmopolitan surroundings that is Tokyo.

The Reflections of Tokyo, as observed by Hiroya Kawabata, reveal a raw, incidental beauty, entirely resultant of materials and their inherent character. Light and shadow collaborate once again in often unusual but beautiful display of reflections in the city.

This is a collection of worthy, but pitifully small photographs of reflections in Tokyo, accompanied by the author’s occasional poetic interjections. The book ends with a novel flip-book section showing the movement of a reflection through the course of the day; reminding us also of the fleeting, temporal nature of the fast and instant world we now live in.

S$38.50

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July 22, 2007 | Reviews | books

Temporary Urban Spaces

[Image: Cover and contents of Temporary Urban Spaces. Photograph by JJ Yeo. All copyrights of book belongs to their respective owners]

TEMPORARY URBAN SPACES: Concepts for the Use of City Spaces
Edited by Florian Haydn, Robert Temel.
Published by Birkhauser.

ISBN-10: 3-7643-7460-8
ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-7460-0

—————

New approaches to the planning and the use of public and private space have begun to spring up in cities the world over. Here, the spotlight is no longer on the master plan, or the making of long-term arrangements. Instead, the ephemeral, trial and error, and the unplanned are gaining legitimacy in many cities the world over. Temporary uses are both indicators of this development and beneficiaries of a new way of seeing.

This not-so-temporary journey (it gets quite wordy) starts off with a brief definition index, exploring the meanings and implications of words and issues like the temporality versus the temporal nature of such events. Strategies, as long term solutions, are compared to tactics, as short term guerrilla solutions, which are aimed at achieving a certain short term goal in a given period of time, maybe in hope for permanent deployment in the future.

Covering the use of temporary spaces in the urban context, this volume features 10 essays from 10 experts on the topic, supported by 35 fully photographed sample projects that have been instrumental in establishing temporary use of city spaces of late, in the United States and Europe. Not so much a coffee table read, Temporary Urban Spaces seems more a useful glossary of examples from which to take reference from.

Singapore’s very own local creative-collective, otherwise known as FARM, would have been a worthy addition to this collection of temporary use projects, with their ongoing series of ROJAK events; currently running a “Save the Modern Buildings” series where ROJAK proceedings are held at a different ‘endangered building’ each time, to raise the awareness that architectural icons of the city’s past are fast disappearing in lieu of the ongoing construction boom.

Read this book, and I dare say you’ll be getting creative with your own HDB void deck sooner than you can say ‘Temporary’.

S$68.90

Available at Basheer Graphicbooks
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July 15, 2007 | Reviews | books

Do not Asian-ize European Urbanity.

[Image: Cover and contents of Europan 8. Photograph by Adib J. All copyrights of book belongs to their respective owners]

EUROPAN 8. European Urbanity
Edited by Europan Europe
Published by Europan Europe.
ISBN 2-914296-07-X
Book comes with CD-ROM of featured works.

—————

5 themes. 74 sites. 143 projects. Participation by 19 countries. 134 renowned European professionals and experts in 15 international juries. This is nothing more than a mega compilation of selected entries for a mega European competition.

Being a competition for young architects, the works featured in this compilation are truly fresh and delightful in ideas and presentation. Also, being of a cross-disciplinary theme: European Urbanity, the projects displays a sense of ingenuity, pushing the boundaries of various involved professions. (architects & urban designers, landscapers, engineers, sociologists, geographers, etc.) The young practices featured in this publication is perhaps a reflection of the dynamism of young European architects- with the will to experiment and venture into new territories.

The publication is organised into the 5 sub-themes of the competition namely: Building With Nature, Urbanising with Infrastructures, Recycling Urban Fabric, What Sort of Urbanity for the Inhabitants? and Generating the New. Each of these sections begins with an introductory essay, followed by key images and texts from the selected entries.

Seductive diagrams and renderings fill this publication and it is not surprising, considering that these were produced for a design competition. However, in order to showcase all 143 projects, the entries had to be distilled to its key imageries and texts limited to a few paragraphs. Some may find this frustrating as some of these diagrams while beautiful, are difficult to read by the mere fact of its size and/or lacking in informational clarity and this is where the accompanying CD-Rom makes up for it.

[Image: Contents of Europan 8. Photograph by Adib J. All copyrights of book belongs to their respective owners]

By now, one would note that the projects are sited in Europe, designed by Europeans and judged by Europeans who have a certain position on the concepts of urbanity (probably Eurocentric). One then wonders, why is such a book being featured in Five Foot Way Magazine, which is supposed to be ‘Exploring Asian Architecture’?

The answer is precisely because it is not Asian. By featuring such a book, I am proposing that we take a good look at how others are approaching their issues of urbanity. With a focused and concerted effort by professionals and intellectuals to think about the issues inherent within their region, Europe is attempting to critically examine themselves and push on to explore how they can evolve. What about us in Asia? What are we doing to examine ourselves and solve our urban issues? Do we know what we are dealing with or are we too busy looking at the images in these books and attempting to Asian-ize them? If there is such a thing as European Urbanity, then what is Asian Urbanity?

Undoubtedly, some of the ideas in the publication may be relevant for adaptation to us here in Asia, however, it would be a folly for us to use some of the ideas as precedents in dealing with issues of urbanity in our region. For this book to be truly useful, one must look at the projects with a filter. Approaching the projects with a clear understanding of the differences in climate, culture, socio-political climate and most importantly, a diffferent concept of urbanity that exist within the Asian region.

There is no doubt that the featured works are of a high quality but the responsibility is on us, the readers of such publications, to examine critically the relevance of these ideas to us for if we are not careful, the ideas that arise from us are merely derivatives and adaptations of what are still fundamentally European concepts. Lets stop Asian-izing European Urbanity.

S$138.00

Available at Basheer Graphicbooks
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Singapore: (65) 6336 0810
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