Author: Annie Coggan

Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns is a fine text for professionals and student of urban design. This book can live on one’s desk and be a constant reminder of the New Urbanist standards that can craft urban environments. The textbook-like graphic interruptions and the uneven quality of images makes it feel more guidebook than linear narrative, but it is a thorough compendium of urbanist information. Authors Victor Dover and John Massengale, AIA, specify a series of typologies in the first chapter, “Historic Streets,” which is a tremendous argument in itself for how to read various cities. Massengale has an affable tone and gentle manner. This is exhibited in his prose as well as at his presentation for the AIANY Oculus Book Talk given at the Center for Architecture on 08.11.14. Time spent with the book and Massengale himself renders decades of street observation and interrogation. We all yearn for his vision of a Good Street. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: “Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns””

The recent publication Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering is, dare I say, delightful. It is the fourth in a series of conference publications at Columbia University that investigated materiality, this effervescent compilation of history, theory, and, in this case, actual chemistry made for a fascinating reading experience. At the Oculus Book Talk on 07.01.14, Co-editor Michael Bell, professor of Architecture at Columbia University, chair of the Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials, and director of the Master of Architecture Program Core Design Studios, led us through the conference proceedings to shed light on this complex cultural condition called “plastics.“ He also highlighted many of the conference participants and writers. Participating in the Book Talk were: Dr. William F. Carroll, Jr., vice president of Industry Issues for Occidental Chemical Corporation ; Billie Faircloth, research director at KieranTimberlake, a a leader in practice-based architectural research and innovative buildings; and George Middleton, AIA, CSI, president of George Middleton & Associates, a construction industry consulting firm based in Chicago. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: “Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering””

The June Oculus Book Talk was introduced by AIANY Executive Director Rick Bell, FAIA, who presented a short, well-produced film on the newly opened “Open to the Public: Civic Space Now” exhibition at the Center for Architecture. The film features AIANY 2014 President Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, speaking about the Center’s commitment to civic space, and served as an adept way to usher in Hillary Brown’s extensive research in and around civic space. Brown’s talk was entitled “Future Proofing,” which is an evocative tag line for her line of inquiry. What Brown sets up in her lecture as well as her book, Next Generation Infrastructure: Principles for Post-Industrial Public Works, are a series of projects and consequences that can be described as “solving for pattern,” an analysis technique coined by environmentalist Wendell Berry. The phrase gets to the core of Brown’s interests. She starts and ends her book with Minnesota’s 2007 I-35W bridge disaster, and begins her inquiry by quoting from the book Natural Capitalism: “you can actually make a system less efficient while making each of its parts more efficient…” This is the tragedy of the I-35 incident. Multiple municipalities were not acting as a whole to maintain the bridge. And this is the genesis of Brown’s research for examining infrastructure projects globally. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: Next Generation Infrastructure by Hillary Brown, FAIA By Annie Coggan”

AIANY Executive Director Rick Bell, FAIA, introduced Françoise Astorg Bollack, AIA’s 05.12.14 Oculus Book Talk at the Center of Architecture by proclaiming that her book “makes sense” and “is essential.” This is very true. Bollack’s Old Buildings New Forms: New Directions in Architectural Transformations is a rare artifact that will be an important tool for the design classroom as well as for designers of and participants in the urban fabric. With this book you are in the hands of a skilled scholar as well as designer. Bollack establishes a framework of basic formal diagrams to structure her argument, and lays an elegant foundation in her introduction by looking at the avant-garde art scene in New York in the 1960s and 70s.

Bollack describes how the then-new postmodern dance movement – the work of Simone Forti and Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece – established a particular sensibility in the art world that forced tradition and progressive practice into a new form. The ad hoc quality of these works, along with the works of Eva Hesse, Gordon Matta-Clarke, and many others, generated a world of ideas that eventually made its way into built space. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: “Old Buildings New Forms: New Directions in Architectural Transformations” by Françoise Astorg Bollack”

The Center for Architecture hosted authors Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre at the 02.05.14 Oculus Book Talk, co-sponsored by the AIANY Planning & Urban Design Committee. AIANY 2014 President Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, pronounced Gehl as “my hero” and a “kindred spirit” laying the ground work for a warm and delightful evening. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: “How to Study Public Life” by Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre”

The Nature of Urban Design is the product of a mind that can work on many intellectual levels and emotional constructs. This book, by Alexandros Washburn, Assoc. AIA, former chief urban designer for the NYC Department of City Planning, is many books: a precisionist explanation of the premise of urban design; a concise map of the historic conditions of New York City’s urban construct; and a personal journey through Hurricane Sandy. Through it, we get a glimpse of the urbanist as poet. One gets the sense that the book is not quite finished, which is refreshing and true to Washburn’s ethos of an artist’s fluidity influencing space rather than exerting control over the city. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: “The Nature of Urban Design” by Alexandros Washburn”

Martin Filler is the architecture critic for The New York Review of Books (NYRB) and the author of Makers of Modern Architecture (2007) and, most recently, Makers of Modern Architecture (Volume II). This new book is comprised of 19 essays that were originally published in the NYRB between 2008 and 2013. The volume is a lovely size, convenient to carry, elegantly typeset, and convivial to absorb. Each essay is a small jewel meticulously crafted and filled with a dense personality. The tone and physical attributes of the book illustrate an old-school reverence for and the craft of writing about architecture. This stance is the tome’s greatest asset and Filler is a fine architect of writing. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: “Makers of Modern Architecture (Volume II)” by Martin Filler”

“An elegant building, an elegant book, an elegant writer,” is really all anyone needs to say about the newly published Building Seagram by Phyllis Lambert, Hon. FAIA, and her delightful Oculus Book Talk at the Center for Architecture on 10.28.13, featuring Lambert and attentive foil, Barry Bergdoll. Continue reading “Oculus Book Review: “Building Seagram” by Phyllis Lambert”