architecture in books

Jazzpaths: an American photomemento

David Wild’s ‘photomemento’ tells an Englishman’s story lived to a soundtrack of jazz. At its heart are photographs made during a two-year stay in America in the mid-1960s, on a passage through New York, Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, New Orleans. These pictures, in turn, formed the basis of photomontages. Jazzpaths is a partial document of the jazz scene of that time, mixing remarkable pictures of musicians with biting images of life on the streets.

£20.00
Cover of Jazzpaths

Human space

Human space is an English translation of one of the most comprehensive studies of space as we experience it. Since it was published in Germany in 1963, Bollnow’s text has become a key reading in architecture, anthropology, and philosophy, and has been kept continuously in print (in 2010 the German edition was issued in its eleventh impression). The book is serious academic research and something more – showing a great sensitivity to the near and the everyday. The text is enlivened and illustrated with many quotations, principally from German and English literature. Our edition is translated by Christine Shuttleworth and has an afterword by Joseph Kohlmaier, who places the work in its context of philosophical and architectural discussion.

£20.00
Cover of Human space

At ...: writing, mainly about art, for the London Review of Books

For over ten years Peter Campbell has reviewed art exhibitions for the London Review of Books. His writing is distinctive: often closely descriptive, always inquisitive about technique, it is the product of an independent mind and eye. Easy evaluations are resisted: we are invited to consider the work on show in its present place – ‘at’ the museum or gallery to which the critic has travelled on our behalf. This generous selection of reviews covers a wide range of subjects, from Bellini and Titian to Lucian Freud and Louise Bourgeois, from Hawksmoor to Libeskind. Blockbusting shows are noticed, but so too are exhibitions of unfashionable artists, of photographers and applied artists. Reviews of buildings and pieces on the everyday urban scene add another dimension to this book. Campbell is a typographer and book designer, and is also the draftsman of the London Review’s covers. His writing is of a piece with these accomplishments.

£20.00
Cover of At ...

Typography papers 6

This occasional, book-length work is edited and produced at the Department of Typography, University of Reading, and is now published by Hyphen Press. It publishes extended articles on its subject, exploring topics to the length to which they want to go. Its scope is broad and international, its treatment – serious and lively.

Cover of Typography papers 6

Fragments of utopia: collage reflections of heroic modernism

A set of collages made from mainly contemporary sources, which recount episodes in modernist architecture in the twentieth century. This is a story of a fragile and occasionally noble dream, in the context of a history going violently wrong. These images are supplemented by short parallel prose meditations. Wild’s images have a wonderful rightness of form. But they are far from idealized: politically charged, they have a disconcerting sense of erotics and low humour.

Cover of Fragments of utopia

architecture in the journal

A note on the collages

David Wild recently wrote a brief note on the history of the collages that he has been making over 35 years. We give it here, with the examples to which he refers.

‘Subterranean modernism’

Idea magazine is pleasantly print-fixed: none of the words it publishes are put online, so anyone wanting a taste of it simply has to go out and find a copy. The current issue, no. 341, has an article that refers to Hyphen Press and its efforts. This essay, ‘Subterranean modernism’ by Randy Nakamura and Ian Lynam, is perhaps the first published piece by unconnected observers to address ideas that we’ve been busy with for now 30 years. This is very pleasing.[1]

Cypher House, London N7

This building, designed by David Wild, is now very near to completion: it provides an artist’s studio and connecting top-lit rooms arranged in an interlocking L-shaped configuration.

Signs at the Royal Festival Hall

In summer of this year the Royal Festival Hall, on the South Bank of London’s river, was reopened after a major, two-year refurbishment. The auditorium itself was remade and restored, and the rest of the building was significantly remade/restored too. The spirit and the materials of the original building were respected, at the same time changes needed for the place’s new uses were made. The architects leading the work were Allies & Morrison, among the most convincing and least pretentious of the UK firms practising ‘modern architecture’.

Architectural positions

The faculty of architecture at the TU Delft commissioned Karel Martens to design booklets, flyers, stationery, and a poster for their series of six seminars this spring on ‘Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere’. Martens, working in collaboration with his daughter Aagje Martens, took up the implications of the title ‘Architectural Positions’, and the need to make flyers and booklets for the six occasions and for the series as a whole, but on a small budget. Just three printing plates were used for the colour printing, each containing two of the pieces; colour (cyan, magenta, yellow) was changed three times. In this way six different combinations or ‘positions’ were obtained. The black text is stable and clear. This patterning is enacted again in the website for the series. Not for the first time with this designer, the restrictions were embraced, with maximum effect.

Domus reprinted

In a bravura act of publishing, Taschen Verlag has put out an extended selection, in facsimile, of the magazine Domus. This short review of the venture appears in the November issue of Architecture Today.

The architects of the book

Architectural and design publishing has seen remarkable changes in recent years. How does this sector of publishing work now? How did it come to have this structure? What part does the design of these books play? This article tackles these questions and suggests some answers. After a wide-ranging survey, we profile a number of publishers that help to make up the liveliest sector of the present scene. This text was published, with many illustrations of the books discussed, in Domus, no. 847, April 2002