10 Books We Are Looking Forward To: William Stout Architectural Books

Focusing on the summer house Danish architect Jørn Utzon built for his wife and himself on the Spanish island of Majorca, this special issue covers the process of its preservation and restoration, its landscape and setting, and the architectural thought of Utzon. Known for his concern for nature and social values, Utzon emphasized these in a synthesis of form, material and function. Unmistakably modern, Can Lis comprises a number of pavilions arranged to serve its various functions, blending effortlessly with its natural surroundings. Includes detailed texts by Lise Juel, architect of the restoration, John Pardley, and Utzon himself, plus numerous drawings and an array of stunning photos. Japanese/English.

From the Publisher. Visionary Danish architect Jørn Utzon was just 38 years old when in 1957 he was named the surprise winner of an international competition to design the Sydney Opera House in Australia. His bold design consisting of five performance halls topped by billowing concrete shells clad in ceramic tile is universally recognized as a masterpiece of 20th-century architecture. While this early triumph brought Utzon worldwide fame, it overshadowed a larger body of work of great importance for modern architecture. Utzon's highly diverse projects around the globe, from the National Assembly in Kuwait and Melli Bank in Tehran, Iran, to the Bagsværd Church and numerous houses in Denmark, are testaments to his belief that modernism need not sacrifice local character to be forward thinking. Organized into six thematic chapters—place, working method, building culture, construction, materiality, and living—Jørn Utzon presents all of his important work as well as many of his lesser-known, though equally important competition entries, furniture designs, and other built projects.

Updated: Forthcoming April 2014. From the Publisher. Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) remains one of the leading landscape architects ever. The significance of his landscape design lies in his use of abstract shapes that rarely employ symmetry, and his use of tropical, mainly Brazilian, flora. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx’s own words have been published. This book of previously unpublished lectures fills this void. The lectures, delivered on international speaking tours, address topics such as: “The Garden as an Art in Living,” “Gardens and Ecology,” and “The Problem of Garden Lighting.” Their timely publication helps shed light on Burle Marx’s distinctive style and ethos of landscape as a way of life.

From Yale University Press. Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), one of the most important architects working in Latin America in the 20th century, was remarkably prolific and intriguingly idiosyncratic. A participant in the efforts to reshape Italian culture in her youth, Bo Bardi immigrated to Brazil with her husband in 1946. In Brazil, her practice evolved within the social and cultural realities of her adopted country. While she continued to work with industrial materials like concrete and glass, she added popular building materials and naturalistic forms to her design palette, striving to create large, multiuse spaces that welcomed public life.

Lina Bo Bardi is the first comprehensive study of Bo Bardi’s career and showcases author Zeuler Lima’s extensive archival work in Italy and Brazil. The leading authority on Bo Bardi, Lima frames the architect’s activities on two continents and in five cities. The book examines how considerations of ethics, politics, and social inclusiveness influenced Bo Bardi’s intellectual engagement with modern architecture and provides an authoritative guide to her experimental, ephemeral, and iconic works of design.

Read the Notable Book of 2013 review.

From the Publisher. Unprecedented in scope and illustrated with more than 700 original drawings, plans, diagrams, and contemporary and archival photographs, Mies by Detlef Mertins is the most definitive monograph ever published on the modern master of architecture Mies van der Rohe. Mertins’ rich and highly readable text traces the aesthetic and intellectual context for all Mies’ work, with in–depth discussions of his most important projects. Featuring some of the twentieth century’s most iconic buildings, such as the Barcelona Pavilion in Spain, the Crown Hall at IIT, and the Seagram Building in New York, Mies paints a fascinating portrait of the famed architect whose contribution to the modern urban landscape cannot be overlooked.

Updated: Forthcoming March 2014. From the Publisher. Unquestionably one of the most influential and revered contemporary architects, Peter Zumthor has approached his work with a singular clarity of vision and a strong sense of his own philosophy, both of which have earned him the admiration of his peers and the world at large. Choosing to only take on a few projects at a time and keep his studio small, Zumthor has produced a comparatively few number of realized buildings, but they rank among the world’s most stunning: St. Benedict’s Chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland; Therme Vals in Vals, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Bregenz in Bregenz, Austria; and the Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, Germany number among his most famous buildings. This collection, however, explores his entire body of award-winning work from 1986 to 2012 in five volumes, including his lesser-known but nonetheless critically acclaimed works such as the Field Chapel for Brother Klaus near Mechernich, Germany, and the Steilneset Memorial for the Victims of the Witch Trials in Vardø, Norway.

Peter Zumthor presents around forty of his projects, both realized and unrealized, through Zumthor’s own writing, and with photographs, sketches, drawings, and plans. A complete catalog of his works starting in 1979 rounds out the book. Richly illustrated and beautifully designed, this book serves as both an introduction to Zumthor’s work and philosophy for the layperson and a required addition to any architect’s library.

Updated: Forthcoming March 2014. From the Publisher. For two decades, the students of Auburn University's Rural Studio have designed and built remarkable houses and community buildings for impoverished residents of Alabama's Hale County, one of the poorest in the nation. Our critically acclaimed bestseller Rural Studio (2002) showed how salvaged lumber, bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, carpet tiles, and old license plates have been transformed into inexpensive buildings that are also models of sustainable architecture. Rural Studio at Twenty chronicles the evolution of the legendary program, founded by MacArthur Genius Grant and AIA Gold Medal-winner Samuel Mockbee, and showcases an impressive portfolio of projects. Part monograph, part handbook, and part manifesto, Rural Studio at Twenty is a must-read for any architect, community advocate, professor, or student as a model for engaging place through design.

From Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna. Catalogue for an exhibition of Walter Pichler’s work at the Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman exhibition in Vienna, April 4-May 10, 2013. With the presentation of Walter Pichler's work Zwei Tröge, Wasserrinnen (Two Troughs, Flumes) our gallery enters new territory. Walter Pichler, with his closely guarded objects and precise drawings, has been a frequent guest to our spaces. Only reluctantly he let his creations, his creatures, as it were, go out into the world from his “Akropolis” in St. Martin, Burgenland. Often it happened that he sent a figure, at times small, sometimes larger, along to protect the drawings and objects. His exhibitions he always prepared meticulously and was at all times present both when it came to the conceptual layout and the technical installation of his objects, so as to not to release them to the spheres of art unguardedly. Walter Pichler passed away in Vienna in the summer of last year. This now is going to be the first public presentation of his works that will have to do without his guidance. The perfection that always could be found in Pichler's works, and thanks to his instructions also in his exhibitions, we will sadly miss this time, as we will miss himself.

With the sculpture/architectural study Zwei Tröge, Wasserrinnen Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Vienna presents a concept that appeared very early on in Walter Pichler's work, that took on its eventual form only at a later stage. It is a tricky balancing act that the artist sets out on with this project. Occupying an undefined state between architecture and visual arts, the flumes are perfect examples of his creative impetus. The buildings housing the troughs and flumes came about in St. Martin not only through a temporal context. The architectural purpose too stands in direct relation to the spatial conditions of Pichler's haven in southern Burgenland. In the hilly expanses of the region water is never far. Rain, brooks and rivers are omnipresent and have carved the gentle cultural landscape. Walter Pichler did not create spatial interventions here, he let the water do what it does naturally, namely flow. An architectural approach to this project would have required but few drawings. Yet this is where one of the main characteristics of Walter Pichler's work as an artist comes to the fore. Time has always been his prime material, time that he devoted to every single detail of his projects, in order to give them the attention they deserved. Working on an impulse, often regarded as a positive quality of the artistic process, never was Walter Pichler's mode of procedure. Every one of his objects was accorded the highest mental concentration and the best craftsmanship. This concentration, combined with his retreat from the hectic art world, makes Walter Pichler an exceptional artist and his work a successful and unique balancing act between art and architecture. Walter Pichler was born in Deutschnofen, South Tyrol, in 1936.

Updated: Forthcoming 2014. From the Publisher. Amateur Attitude examines the recent work of the Chinese architect Wang Shu, Pritzker Prize winner in 2012. Exhibiting a contemporary aesthetic, the architect's buildings show his intense engagement with their setting and its history, coupled with reliance on traditional building techniques. The essays place the architect's work in its contemporary context, while extensive illustrations provide exclusive insights into his varied creative work.