20 books to read this summer

Many of those studying books on the history of architecture will have wondered what it was like to live in the Modernist masterpieces. Experimental, extreme and avant-garde, the houses designed from the 1930s to the 1950s often heralded new lifestyles, made space for dreams and did not merely provide a roof over a person’s head. In a more original way, Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster asked themselves what memories are left with people who lived in those houses as children. Was playing more fun in the luxurious Villa Tugendhat designed by Mies van der Rohe or in the large garden of Hans Scharoun’s Schminke House? Was it easier to make new friends in J.J.P. Oud’s Weissenhof terraced houses in Stuttgart or in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation maxi-apartment block in Marseille? Architects, artists and university professors, Jamrozik and Kempster devised what they call a remarkable “journey of creative documentation”, now turned into a book entitled Growing up Modern. As they crossed Europe in a camper with their very young son, they became impromptu oral historians, anthropologists, photographers, interviewers and psychologists, meeting up with those former children (in their previous homes), listening to their memories and recording their stories. As occurs with all empirical experiments, especially those involving human nature, their conversations – many more than are published in the book – did not produce a consistent definition which, indeed, would have diminished the richness of the experiences. “Hearing about the history of a place from someone who grew up there would help us understand the architecture better and would make us pay attention to it in a different way.” they concluded, “an obvious but significant fact, but one that the discipline of architecture still needs to absorb and put into active practice.”

Reyner Banham, Philip Johnson, Paul Rand, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Muriel Cooper... There is no architect, designer, graphic designer, artist or critic that Janet Abrams has not met, interviewed and summarised with a critical spirit in these past 30 years spent as editor of Building Design, correspondent for Blueprint and collaborator of I.D. Magazine, Metropolis, New York Magazine andThe Independent plus author of numerous publications. Gathered in the volume Daddy wouldn’t buy me a Bauhaus, the 26 profiles of equally legendary figures, outlined by the ironic pen of the British journalist, come to life thanks to a highly personal style and brilliant prose, which never grows old and shows the best side of biographical journalism.

All that we eat, drink or wear is minutely branded. Yet the identity of a brand begins much earlier, with its architecture. This is the premise for the original and well-documented research of Grace Ong Yan, professor at Thomas Jefferson University. She believes that a building is the most powerful identity tool, for its ability to engage and arouse emotions. Just consider the designs of Koolhaas for Prada or Foster for Apple. But Yan decides to focus on the stories of four modern and exemplary buildings: the PSFS Building by Howe and Lescaze and the Rohm and Haas HQ by Pietro Belluschi in Philadelphia; the Johnson Wax main offices by Frank Lloyd Wright in Racine; and the Lever House by SOM in New York.

What remains, after almost fifty years since it was first published, of the seminal Learning from Las Vegas written by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour? Why is its message and lesson still so relevant and important for architects who have grown up in this hyperglobalised world? When it was first released, back in 1972, the book divided critics but was an overnight success, instantly became a classic and marked a turning point for architecture, transforming the gambling capital of the world into the most emblematic and surprising case study of the urban sprawl. But not only. It also drew considerable attention to the use and value of signs and symbols in both architecture and city planning, which ultimately brought about the rise of Postmodernism. The publication has had incredible global success and a long life: translated into eighteen languages, it is still an essential text found in syllabi at architecture schools across the world. Living up to the original, for its comprehensiveness, plurality of vision and depth of analysis, is the 500 page volume that aims to assess its legacy, starting from the Yale symposium “Learning from Learning from” (2009). Eyes that Saw has two editors worthy of respect: the art historian Stanislaus von Moos, a professor at the University of Zurich, and the MoMA design and architecture curator Martino Stierli, who gathered the writings of various historians (including Eve Blau, Beatriz Colomina, Valery Didelon) and architects (Elizabeth Diller and Rafael Moneo). Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi tell what brought them to Las Vegas and what they learned over the following forty years, implying how, among other things, their book can be credited with suggesting that “communication was an important function of architecture, which helped build a community by sharing information”.

One hundred objects: anonymous (like the gas meter and the Zenith 548 stapler) or cult objects (like Olivetti's Valentine typewriters, the Campari bottle and the Fiat 500). Design objects that imitate art (such as Gufram's Bocca sofa) or, brilliant inventions (like the Bialetti's old-fashioned coffee maker). In her latest book - after Design senza Designer, Le caffettiere dei miei bisnonni and Dopo gli Anni Zero - Chiara Alessi collects the big and small stories of design, which she began writing about on Twitter during the lockdown this past spring. These are stories of brilliance and innovation, many born in factories, that hide inside the things we encounter and use every day and which, all together, lay the foundations for the historiography of an alternative, fresh and surprising Italian creativity.

Student of Giedion, Blunt and Pevsner, lecturer, ante litteram ecologist, ironic essayist: who was Reyner Banham really? Richard J. Williams tries to tell us with Reyner Banham Revisited, an intellectual biography that has a precise objective: to reflect on the legacy of an original thinker who was always ahead of his time and therefore still veryrelevant 30 years after his death in 1988 at the age of 66. A truly ambitious task for Williams, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, given the amount of documents: 750 articles (1,000 according to some), 16 books, radio programs and documentaries, in addition to his involvement in the Independent Group that put him in contact with some of the most radical architects and artists of England at the time, Peter and Alison Skithson and Peter Cook's Archigram. The volume's 200 pages focus on "a history of ideas, only some of them about architecture." They thus go beyond the fundamental reflections on Brutalism, the Modern Movement, and Pop Art, to tell that "there were as many Banhams as there were audiences." And that "often the best way to understand him was to consider his theories as performative acts". Wearing a cowboy hat, dark glasses, a thick beard and the ever-present Moulton folding bike, Banham (who was a big Monty Python fan) took his readers literally by the hand, not just illustrating his ideas, but living and experiencing them firsthand: whether it was car design, the hamburger or Silicon Valley. "Welcome to Los Angeles, super city of the future, the metropolis of California," says the persuasive voice of the gorgeous 1972 documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. Likewise, this book welcomes readers into the universe of one of the most brilliant and least labelable critics of modern architecture, cities, and mass culture. 

A Lucca native who chose Milan as his home, in his latest book the journalist Nanni Delbecchi connects, thanks to a long stroll, the four cities of his life – Lucca, Milan, Rome, Venice – to create four portraits, somewhere between an essay and a story, where his writing is free, “just as walking around is free”, he explains. Wandering, without pedometres or GPS or digital maps, Delbecchi gives life to a unique autobiography, which unfolds by location and confirms we are also the places we inhabit. Each city corresponds to a phase in his life: Lucca, “proudly introverted”; Milan, “hyperactive, dynamic, a braggart”; Rome, “in an ordinary workshop, invisible like the ones found in Dickens’s London”; and Venice, “a city you’d never live in because you’d want to return here too much”.

Deyan Sudjic’s essay The Language of Cities (Penguin, 2017) was translated and published in Italian, by Ilios – a small yet ambitious publishing house and association in Bari. What is a city? How do we create and change one? How do we rule one? Or, why do cities try to erect more and more complex buildings? Why do they empty out? In six chapters and 276 pages, the British journalist and critic for the Observer, architect and former director of the Design Museum in London, draws upon recent news events and history to describe, in his clear, sharp and ironic signature style, what powers, either hidden or in plain sight, shape and influence urban spaces and make cities successful, from Haussmann’s Paris to Robert Moses’s New York, beyond inhabitants and dimensions.

Edited by Mauro Ceruti, the volume Cento Edgar Morin (Mimesis Edizioni) proposes 100 interventions by 100 Italian authors. It pays tribute to an extraordinary figure of our time: a philosopher, writer, sociologist, but above all an architect of knowledge and of the need for infinite fusions and associations. The 100 years of an internationally acclaimed intellectual who has always believed in dialogue and the need to reunite and balance rather than divide and throw off balance. The prophet of planetary humanism against the age of savagery and iron, whose reading, in the heart of one of the most threatening crises in history of which the pandemic is a mere symbol, can help to mark a way to resisting barbarity by creating networks of solidarity, fraternity and creative thinking.

Une vie d’architecte a Tokyo is a compact autobiographical guide to the Japanese megalopolis, presented by Kengo Kuma, an exceptional guide and architect of the upcoming Olympics stadium. Kuma accompanies readers in discovering the 24 places he loves most: the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, designed by Kenzo Tange in 1964, where he used to swim and which inspired him to become an architect (“Looking at the light from the magnificent vaulted ceiling made me feel as if I were in paradise,” he writes), or the SunnyHills cake shop in Aoyama, his design and famous for a Taiwanese pineapple dessert, and the neighbourhood of Kagurazaka (“La Kagu”), where stairs and steep slopes are off limits to cars. Full of personal stories and anecdotes, Kuma offers his take on interpreting today’s Japan.

The last home where Josef and Anni Albers lived, in New Haven, Connecticut, had almost nothing on the walls. There were however four Homages to the Square in the living room and in Anni’s bedroom a single painting by Josef from 1939, titled Equal and Unequal: two black parallelepipeds, different yet similar, facing one another. And it is precisely in this work that Nicholas Fox Weber, author of the first imposing monograph on the artists, found the perfect graphic synthesis to describe an “independent yet interdependent couple”, of two powerful and autonomous individuals, with a magnetic attraction to one another. This is the starting point for Fox Weber, who for over 40 years has been the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, an art critic and author of 15 monographs, to describe the human, professional, artistic and cultural adventure of Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Anni Fleischmann Albers (1899-1994). “I was lucky to have met them back in 1970,” he writes in the introduction: he was 22, and they were 71 and 82, Anni (“more adventurous”) and Josef (“with an extraordinary eye for simple and elegant forms”). Since then, he never stopped seeing them, until Josef passed away in 1976 and Anni, 20 years later. A perfect combination of philological precision with an intimate tone, this enthralling biography (512 pages), magnificently illustrated in 750 images (including archive photos and documents), often lets the words of the artists speak for themselves. In an essential way, the book is divided into five periods: youth, first of Josef and then Anni; the Bauhaus; Black Mountain College; Connecticut, where Josef directed the Yale Design Department; and the final years of Anni without Josef. Friends also make an appearance: architects, like Philip Johnson, a great admirer of Anni and her textile work, and Richard Buckminster Fuller, a colleague from Black Mountain College; artists John Cage and Merce Cunningham; designers Ray and Charles Eames. Letters, documents and, naturally, their works paint a portrait of a couple joined at the hip, well rooted in their times. A sort of Hollywood golden couple, like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. But this is another story.

Through 10 paradigmatic designs belonging to different scales, time periods and geographies, the volume Atmosphere Anatomies by Silvia Benedito, professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD, explores the bioclimate aspects of architecture. From the Rousham Garden by William Kent in Oxfordshire to the 16th-century Villa d’Este by Pirro Ligorio in Como, from the Chandigarh by Le Corbusier in India to the Ortega House by Luis Barragán in Mexico, the author tries to find solutions to face global warming. These are design strategies with a common approach, placing the human body at the centre, and they seem to suggest that perhaps we should begin considering space as an atmospheric and climatic factor.

Dedicated to those who love city sightseeing or those whom the author calls the “urban curious”, The 99% Invisible City is a magnifying lens to observing cities with an attentive and inquisitive eye, something we are certainly not used to doing. But Roman Mars has succeeded in the arduous task of tackling, in an accessible, amusing and engaging way, a complex topic, like a city’s hidden side. At the same time, he does not trivialize what, every day, is in plain sight to millions of people, because it simply – whether we know it or not – crowds the streets of metropolises around the world. Mars, who is neither an architect nor a designer but instead has a degree in plant population genetics, has collaborated with Kurt Kohlstedt, who studied philosophy and architecture. On the heels of their highly successful decades-long podcast experience, 99% Invisible, which describes what most of us do not see (that is, the 99% hidden part), Mars and Kohlstedt (with illustrations by Patrick Vale) review in an ironic and clever way the elements that make up an urban universe. There are the omnipresents (graffiti, sidewalk markings, emergency boxes) or the hiders (fake facades, sewer pipes, ventilation ducts, electrical substations), identity symbols (flags, monuments, commemorative plaques) and useful things (safety and signs). Plus, infrastructures, architecture, geography and city planning. Why are manholes round? Why is red the colour on top of a traffic light? Who invented the revolving door? Offering fun facts, secrets and some surprises, The 99% Invisible City is an original and amusing “field guide to the built world”, according to its subtitle, which gathers and describes the hundreds of microstories that, all together, assemble the story of the cities we live in and of the design of the objects of which they are composed.

In 2006, and for 10 years, the Czech architecture and design critic Adam Štěch travelled the world exploring and photographing modern architecture. Not the masterpieces we all know, but rather the many forgotten treasures, not accessible to the public or abandoned. His attentive eye often focuses on details: the lamps and mailboxes by Antoni de Moragas in the apartment building on Via Augusta in Barcelona, the ceiling decorations at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Stockholm by Gio Ponti, the door of the Al Struckus House in Los Angeles by Bruce Goff. Documenting over 1,000 architectures, this atlas, born from a passionate journey across more than 30 countries, offers a definitive and intimate guide to modern architecture.

Professor of History of Design and director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University in London, Penny Sparke explains, in this volume with its 224 pages and 120 illustrations, how plants and flowers have always conditioned and influenced interior design, at least for the past two centuries. From ferns, which were all the rage in 19th-century English sitting rooms, to green walls in today’s malls, plants and flowers have always been a focal point in designing both public and private spaces. “If styles have evolved and with them the popularity of certain essences rather than others,” concludes Sparke, “man’s need to bring nature inside homes has never waned”. The reason? In the first place, urbanisation, as the author seems to suggest, quickly followed by climate change.

Words and images united in an integral relationship convey Charlie Koolhaas’s imaginary relating to five cities – London, Guangzhou, Lagos, Dubai and Houston – scattered across five continents. “These are places where I’ve worked or lived, so the documentation process unfolded spontaneously, not always in a calculated fashion,” states the artist and author, “but only later did I realise how much these cities were interconnected”. The leitmotif they all share is the global economy, which creates a melting pot of cultures and identities unthinkable in other cities. In fact, these geographic coordinates give rise to that multicultural society which is, at the same time, the reason and product of a capitalist and globalised economy, in which “individuals are mere tools in the system’s expansion”. Rather than objective documentation, Koolhaas’s interventions carefully sift through clues in a human landscape and a multiculturalism that is more complex and deep-rooted than what the Western eye is willing to concede. By expanding the visual message with the text, the author shows, for example, how trade ties between China and Africa are nothing other than the rebirth of a centuries-old relationship interrupted by Europe’s colonial past. In this way, Koolhaas declares she is well aware of her subjective take on things, structured around her own personal experiences and interactions with these places. Beyond the more glaring assonances – like gentrification, hip-hop and rave street cultures, and skylines dotted with shimmering skyscrapers – the images and words are fragments that overturn conventions and highlight unexplored contradictions with gentle curiosity. The effect is a challenge to the contemporary cult of diversity, leaving behind the abstraction of prejudice and allowing humans to show through from behind global capital.

Thirty years later, just like in Alexandre Dumas’s books, David Chipperfield, too, goes back to the roots of his career, in that Japan which represented a major influence upon his style and his approach. An exercise in looking towards the past, or an illumination of perspective, to join past and present, inspiration and experience of maturity as part of a unique project. Making the challenge even more arduous is the complexity of the pandemic, which has changed the sense of cultural axes but also values and words, like aesthetics and design. If the result of architecture depends on spirit and process, over time the process disappears and the result remains. That spirit which the Inagawa Cemetery Chapel and his Visitor Center leave open to interpretation.

Kenneth Frampton (Woking, 1930) is not only one of the greatest reference points of 20th-century architecture history and, in particular, critical regionalism of which he was the first and most illustrious theorist. Winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2018 Venice Biennale, Frampton seems to be a cornerstone for the 21st century as well. Just stop by any bookshop to get an idea, where two of his recently released publications can be found, hot off the press. The first is the seminal Modern Architecture, published for the first time in 1980 and now in its fourth edition. Considered one of the most important and insightful contributions to modern architecture historiography and adopted for decades by universities across the world as part of their syllabi, this book offers a new section that explores the effects of globalisation through some recent designs. As Frampton wrote in Domus in 2013, “the bulk of contemporary practice is global rather than local, with star architects travelling incessantly all over the world in pursuit of the equally dynamic flow of capital”.  

The Other Modern Movement, published in 2015 by Silvana Editoriale and recently translated by Yale University Press, was born from a cycle of classes at the Academy of Architecture at the Universita della Svizzera italiana in Mendrisio (1998-2001). In the volume, edited by his assistant in Mendrisio Ludovica Molo, Frampton carefully examines the figures, ideas and works of 18 architects (one chapter each) over half a century, 1920- 1970. Through the precise reaction of each building with its context (location, climate, historical moment), the book reveals a cultural complexity of the Modern, often taken for granted. Some masterpieces from the time (like the Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareu in Paris) alternate with lesser-known episodes (like the National Social Insurance Board by Sigurd Lewerentz in Stockholm). The only female presence is Eileen Gray with House E1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

Fifty years have passed since his death but he is still considered the “designer of the future”. Prolific and innovative, Joe Colombo (1930-1971) would certainly have changed our way of living, if only he had lived long enough. Ignazia Favata – architect, professor and long-time collaborator of Colombo as well as the current curator of his archive – tries to encapsulate, with rigorous and systematic cataloguing, his versatile personality – in fact Colombo was, among many things, a musician, painter, mountain enthusiast, lover of cars, new materials and building technologies. In 300 pages, this book offers the most complete compilation to date of his designs: a list, nonetheless, that can still change, seeing four editions are underway plus two previously unpublished ones.