By Erick Villagomez
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Book Review – Set Pieces: Architecture for the Performing Arts in Fifteen Fragments
By Diamond Schmitt Architects (Birkhäuser, 2024) In a media and cultural landscape shaped by screens, it may seem counterintuitive that live performance...
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Book Review – platform.MIDDLE: Architecture for Housing the 99%
Written by 5468796 Architecture (Arquine, 2024) In an era where towering residential skyscrapers increasingly shape urban landscapes—often with...
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Book Review – The Artful Plan: Architectural Drawing Reconfigured
Editors: Martin Søberg and Anna Hougaard (Birkhäuser, 2020) Architectural representations are more than just visual aids—they are the foundational...
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Book Review: The Ecologies of The Building Envelope – A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces
Author: Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Jeffrey S. Anderson (Actar Publishers, 2021) Given the number of books I read and review every year, it is rare to be...
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Book Review | The City is Not A Computer
Author: Shannon Mattern (Princeton University Press, 2021) As we know, the world is in the thick of a data explosion that is affecting all facets of...
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Book Review – The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
Authors: Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) It is not a stretch to say that most contemporary urbanists have come across the...
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Book Review – The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness
Author: Emily Anthes, Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2020) We spend most of our lives in buildings. According to well-known The National...
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Book Review: Draw In Order To See
Author: Mark Hewitt (ORO Editions, 2020) Visualizing one’s ideas is a well known standard in the design fields. Thinking visually is particularly...
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Book Review – Sao Paulo: A Graphic Biography/Uma Biografia Gráfica.
Author: Felipe Correa (Texas University Press, 2018) Clocking in at roughly 12.2 million people, the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo is the largest metropolis...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 8
By Way of Conclusions We’ve come a long way, covering a lot of meaningful ground around the city-wide planning process. Like Lynch over half a century...
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Book Review – Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
Author: Vaclav Smil (MIT Press, 2019) There are few terms as pervasive in discussions about contemporary cities than “growth”. It monopolizes debates...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 7
Time and the City: A Living City-wide Plan We’ve come a long way in addressing the many challenges associated with city-wide planning, but the issue of...