Norman Weinstein

Critic; Writer / United States /

www.archnewsnow.com

Norman Weinstein’s Notable Books of 2013

Nonfiction, Architecture

title a–z

6 books

Álvaro Siza: Complete Works 1952–2013

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Philip Jodidio

The monumental heft and dimensions (12-by-15-inch format) of this six-decade retrospective of the great Portuguese modernist architect Álvaro Siza offers a surprisingly charming window into Siza’s talent. A wealth of drawings, a major component of this designer’s creative process, appears in playful profusion in all their outrageous glory.

Siza’s drawings maintain a singularity transcending their pragmatic utility in bringing his concepts into sharp architectural forms. Human figures—or perhaps fanciful mythic spirits, his architectural muses?—peek out of his architectural sketches. Often proportionally larger than his drawn buildings, they seem to comprise a “Greek chorus” capable of commenting on Siza’s first creative impulses.

While the uniformly high-quality color photographs of Siza’s buildings are welcome and expected in this volume summarizing a remarkably fertile career, the architect’s sketches offer a complex counterpoint. Siza’s buildings embody stark white rectilinear forms seemingly springing out of the rocky ground of his native soil, but in his sketches Siza discloses a different sensibility than that of his obvious precursors, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. Not involved with Le Corbusier’s utopian reveries or Kahn’s classically inflected, archetypal, spiritually driven architecture, Siza operates by mingling inspiration from the sensual textures of Nature with the conceptual rigors of geometry. Arguably his masterwork, the Ibere Camargo Foundation Museum combines an undulating facade, perhaps evoking the Atlantic constantly reshaping Portugal’s coast, with an interior full of dramatic light and shadow play, the spectacle of high-tech and natural lighting strategies creating brilliant corners inviting museumgoers’ contemplation of art.

Siza tends to speak of his designs by offering concise Zen-like quips that puzzle as much as clarify. Philip Jodidio does well in offering very brief descriptive paragraphs linked to large-scale photographs, apparently in consultation with Siza. Packaged in a cardboard suitcase, this is a massive tome inviting the mind to travel through an architectural opus that defines simple description, yet affirms the constant appeal of clean minimalist design that draws meaning from the jagged ground it rests upon.

Architecture of Santiniketan

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Samit Das

Rabindranath Tagore is best known as India’s first Nobel Prize–winning poet and hardly known at all as an architect. But if self-taught architects with a lyrically philosophical bent interest you—Heidegger and Wittgenstein were fellow travelers in this rare realm—then this groundbreaking book by Indian artist and Tagore scholar Samit Das will be a highly satisfying read.

Tagore’s sole architectural achievement was Santiniketan, a West Bengal ashram-university incorporating a religiously focused arts curriculum completed in 1921. Through Das’s finely grained black-and-white photography and carefully crafted descriptions, we obtain a vision of a singular architecture compound, all buildings and landscaping intended as objects of meditation on the place of humans in the natural world. What Santiniketan looks like in these pages suggests a blend of Indian vernacular architecture synthesized with Corbusian modernism. Anyone interested in where modernism and Asian vernacular styles intersect will find Das’s book consistently insightful.

Creative Engineering, Architecture, and Technology

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Ralph Hammann

This collection of both built and unrealized architectural projects associated with Munich-based technology expert Klaus Daniels offers a provocative survey of the rapidly dissolving boundaries between design and engineering. Although the book opens with an overblown hallelujah chorus of praise in the form of eight prefaces crowning Daniels by eight like-minded colleagues, Daniels is part of a new breed of aesthetically oriented engineers exemplified by Cecil Balmond and Werner Sobek. Talented and worthy of this extensive monograph? Absolutely. As original as these prefaces claim? That is another matter.

The deep worth of this book stems from an intriguing and far from self-serving history of Daniels’s firm, HL Technik, as its engineering focus expanded to accommodate supporting architects in an age of dwindling resources and climate change. Daniels expresses his feelings about the rapidity of change at his engineering firm in his opening essay, “Engineering Design Competence in a Changing World”: “It is astonishing that many professional tasks of our work as an engineering firm today were entirely unknown to use when we established our consultancy in the 1960s.” These include double-skin facade solutions for skyscrapers and natural ventilation systems.

In addition to energy savings over the long haul, Daniels constantly works with architects to develop energy-conservation designs that are beautiful as well as problem-solving. Ten projects are extensively documented in these pages. Especially inspiring was his collaboration with architect Dominique Perrault on the Marinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, which melds Daniels’s concern for an economical natural ventilation system with Perrault’s plan for a diamond-shaped building facade marked by a metallic textile material looking like gargantuan snowflakes in fractal profusion. Alas, disputes with the building’s client and budget cuts left the building an unfulfilled vision, but the plans in this book reveal just how fertile a richly nuanced engineer-architect meeting of minds this was.

Hope for the future of an aesthetically inspiring integrative fusing of engineering and architecture is supported by the book’s final section honoring innovative educational experiments that mesh the two disciplines. Daniels worked as a technology advisor to a student-led German team from the Technical University at Darmstadt that won first place in the U. S. Department of Energy’s “Solar Decathlon” competition. Far more modest than the Perrault collaboration, graphics reveal a structure just as creative in exemplifying what one planner aptly called “beautility.”

Experiments with Life Itself

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Francisco González de Canales

That much abused term “radical” assumes fresh life in this sensitively written account of five experiments in domestic architecture created against a societal background of war (actual or threatened) and exile. The spotlight is turned largely to the designs of well-known iconoclasts: Charles and Ray Eames, Juan O’Gorman, and Allison and Peter Smithson. But rather than write conventional case studies of their designs for houses, de Canales takes a daring interpretative leap that interfaces the crafting of the formal aesthetic of their domestic designs with the designers’ psychological imperatives to survive threatening times through radical design. The illuminating chapter on O’Gorman’s Mexican cave house masterfully brings together the designer’s desire for a womb-like safe haven with O’Gorman’s deep affection for pre-Hispanic ornamentation.

Particularly penetrating is de Canales’s study of the jousting working relationship between the poet Pablo Neruda and architect German Rodriguez Arias. Neruda’s mastery in unpredictably destabilizing many of the fixed facets of Arias’s designs for his three houses wryly reminds us of the extreme challenges an architect can face when his client is a poet as well as unschooled designer.

The Most Beautiful Opera Houses in the World

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Photographs by Guillaume de Laubier

Text by Antoine Pecqueur

If this book’s title evokes an expensive coffee-table collection of gorgeous color photography of for the most part traditionally designed opera houses, you’ll be largely, and yet insufficiently, correct. The text is considerably more worthwhile than the clichéd title suggests. Through 32 examples of global opera houses—the focus generally avoids multi-functional concert halls and cultural complexes—the photographs and text present an exceptionally detailed overview of varieties of opera-driven design luxuriance. Many of the same qualities of “over the top” melodramatic musical ornamentation found in classic opera find expression in classic opera house design.

Guillaume de Laubier is a photographer who relishes details a hair’s breadth from kitsch, highlighting an Edwardian stained glass design crowning an exit door in the London Coliseum as well as rococo tapestries and murals florid to the nth degree. There is enough sweet eye-candy in these photographs to send a reader with modernist and/or inimalist proclivities into an aesthetic equivalent of diabetic shock. But a half dozen opera houses far more congenial to those sensibilities also are showcased effectively, including Snøhetta’s Oslo Opera House and Henning Larsen’s Operaen Store Scene in Copenhagen.

Antoine Pecqueur’s writing is entertaining, breezy, anecdotal, and situated effectively facing each page of Laubier’s photography of a particular structure. Those seeking information about the acoustical imperatives facing opera house designers won’t find much enlightenment here. Luckily, Victoria Newhouse’s magnificently written Site and Sound: The Architecture and Acoustics of New Opera Houses and Concert Halls will help in that area, although the uneven quality of its often undersized photographs is annoying. Designers interested in extraordinary opulence, particularly in terms of finely finished public interiors, will rejoice in consulting de Laubier’s and Pecqueur’s tome.

Staircases

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Oscar Tusquets Blanca et al.

Designing an outstanding staircase is not a challenge for the faint of heart. It is a daunting feat, since any notable staircase design is an exercise in matching the utilitarian need to traverse building levels with a designer’s wish to invent an individualistic artistic statement, a memorable monument evoking straightforward or curvilinear “poetry in motion.”

In this stunning coffee table book, a team of erudite European writers and world-class photographers offers an affectionate tribute to grand staircases. Their spotlight lingers upon the most monumentally grandiose staircases found in European palaces and other structures associated with the rich and famous from the Renaissance to the 19th century. Generously, the book offers an expansive (if concise) global survey of staircases pre-Renaissance, including examples of stairs (designs without guard rails and defining enclosed spaces) rather than strictly staircases. And a closing chapter on contemporary staircases includes I.M. Pei’s luminously futuristic staircase at the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar and Norman Foster’s swirling City Hall for the Greater London Authority emanating vertiginous grandeur. Oddly, many of the most groundbreaking examples of modern staircases are omitted—think of Peter Eisenman’s inverted and column-interrupted staircases and that surreal vernacular stair complex in Mexico, Las Pozas, created by Edward James. But what this book does with considerable charm and visual flair is offer a mesmerizing meditation upon the richness of luxurious detail in inventive European staircase design, raising staircases from a necessary building element to a major gateway catalyzing movement into architectural experiences of a rare order.