Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2
Jane Poynter
The controversial creation of Biosphere 2 still lives on today. This radical experiment to have eight people live in a sealed environment for two years was the brainchild of ecologist John Allen, and funded by billionaire Ed Bass. Based on …
Text and captions by Donald J Johnson
Old photos are always fun to look at, but this collection is especially fun as so many locations in Madison (WI) are still in existence. The collection starts at the very earliest days of Madison’s history and follows it through major events, such …
Inside the Homes of the World’s Most Creative People
Sam Lubell
This solid collection is a slow read to carefully work your way through. The content itself is not dense – one to three pictures of a home interior along with a page description. But nearly every room and its …
Phaidon
Brutalism, or Brutalist Architecture, is aptly named. There is nothing soft, friendly, or accommodating about it. It is stark, harsh, hard, powerful and massive. Many Brutalist buildings have the strange ability to look simultaneously futuristic and highly dated.
A favorite of the Communist Bloc housing, fascist dictators like Mussolini …
Dominic Bradbury with Photographs by Richard Powers
The seem to be an endless stream of collections featuring “the best…,” “the most iconic…” “this centuries most important…” buildings, furniture, artists and more. Bring ’em on, I say! They’re a fast, interesting way become familiar with various architectural, design and art vernaculars …
Robert Winter and Alexander Vertikoff
Craftsman Style is a good starter overview coffee-table book on Craftsman style architecture. Springing from William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, this architectural movement aimed to be the antithesis of industrialized, modern building. In the views of the Arts and Crafts movement, things started going …
Thomas Stender
If you’re wood crafty, like architecture and have a few woodworking tools, this book is for you! This is not a beginner guide to woodcrafting. You need both some base skills and a decent number of tools. However, the …
John Hill
Despite being an architecture fan, I was delighted to find in this book a number of buildings and architects that I wasn’t familiar with. There were certainly some of the biggest and most familiar names – Frank Lloyd Wright, Atoni Gaudi and Oscar Niemeyer and their well known …
Phaidon
This beautiful overview of historical and influential home styles is perfect for the architectural dilettante. Each pages features a large photo with a short paragraph on the chosen house, architect and influences. Most are highly liveable styles – though are a few houses, like one by Buckminster Fuller – …
Photos by Alan Weintraub | Text by Alan Hess
At least for me, Niemeyer’s houses vacillate between stunningly beautiful and almost repugnantly spare, even Stalinish, in design. Many of his houses, built primarily in Brazil now have the feel of “has-been modernism.” They were the stuff of the future sixty …
Japanese Detail: Architecture by Sadao Hibi & The Art of Japanese Architecture by David and Machiko Young
Both of these architecture books are unique to the standard Japanese architecture books I’ve looked through in the past. Generally, the standards fall into the categories of brief overviews of large buildings, cities …
John Wehrheim
Taylor Camp’s hand-built tree houses gets some coverage in Tiny Homes, but it is the stories of the residents that are truly fascinating. Started by a group of people tired of the Vietnam War and exhausted from the anti-war movement, the original founders of Taylor Camp are …
Lloyd Kahn
“Joyful” is the best word I can use to describe Kahn’s new collection of tiny homes. Each under 500 square feet is a gem. Many are handbuilt and lived in by the builders. Others are from built by companies specializing in downsizing for the 21st century. The book …
Lester Walker
Like Lloyd Kahn, architect Lester Walker loves small homes. His book features an array of small homes, ranging from historic like those of Thoreau at Walden Pond and Thomas Jefferson’s “honeymoon cottage” to modernist mock-ups created by his students. There are less pictures of interiors than Kahn’s …
Andrew Moore
I find something incredibly satisfying about Moore’s photos of a decaying post-apocalyptic Detroit. While the building are crumbling to nothing, nature is reasserting herself. Man has not conquered nature, nor ever will. We may be doing our damnedest to overpopulate and pollute the planet, but nature will have …
Christopher Payne
This collection of photos is a true Rorschach test for the reader. The decrepit Victorian-era buildings are both beautiful and sinister. Abandoned rooms show both care and terrifying restriction – gardens, beautify parlors, movie theaters, coffee stands, barred doors and rooms of straightjackets. As one after another of …
