Other Ways of Making Books

We covered two self-published books last year, yet, while those were examples of architecture firms putting out books squarely focused on practice — one a book-length case study of a building, and the other collecting brief case studies of recently completed buildings — the three books here show that architects and related professionals can self-publish books about subjects outside of architecture or on work tangential to their practices.

First is Enclosures by Gil Even-Tsur, an architect and educator based in New York and Tel Aviv. His buildings and renovations, like the Upper West Side Townhouses and 29-31 Leonard Street, are crisp and modern, but instead of presenting these and other projects, Enclosures alternates between moody photographs of cityscapes and short poems. It is a bit like an online diary — or “photo-poetic dispatches,” in the words of David LaRocca in his foreword — jumped into book form, handsomely printed in paperback by KOPA with front and back flaps and high-quality papers. It comes across as an even more honest a portrait of an architect than a monograph or some other traditional architecture book might afford.

Joana Sá Lima, who leads the consultancy Comte Bureau, co-founded InnoArch, and was a co-founder and editor of the late Scandinavian magazine Conditions (2008–2015), wrote and illustrated a Human approach to Architecture: an introduction, published just last month by Comte Bureau. The book, available in print and Kindle, is billed as a “manual [that] provides a practical framework for how architects can play an important role for both society and the environment.” The goal, as the title indicates, is a more human approach to architecture, one that integrates tools and methods from social sciences, design thinking, participatory design, and socially conscious design Though written from a Scandinavian perspective, the timely manual is relevant to all architects, especially young architects and students of architecture.

Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows is a new novel by Anna Kostreva, an architectural designer and co-founder, with Alex Head, of Berlin's Plural Studio. Befitting the apltly pluralist nature of the studio, which put out the book, the novel incorporates architectural hand drawings alongside the narrative — an alternative Berlin “governed by algorithms where human participation is rewarded with creature comforts as well as ecstatic experiences.” The text and corresponding drawings fuse to create a hybrid fiction that should provoke readers to consider the role of technology in the shaping of our cities and our lives. 

A fair amount of architectural publishing comes from academia: the reworking of doctoral theses, the documentation of architectural studios, and the transcription of symposia, among other outputs. Such books being published in both printed and digital versions are now common, given that many academic libraries are focusing on online access over the storage of physical books. Some publishers also give authors the option of making the digital copies open-access and therefore available to people outside of academia.

One publisher that embraces open access — it appears their motto is even “Vive la Open Access” — is Punctum Books, a non-profit, public benefit corporation based in California. A relevant title of theirs is Analogical City by Cameron McEwan, an associate professor at Northumbria University School of Architecture in England. McEwan's book “argues for architecture's status as a critical project” and does so through an in-depth analysis of Aldo Rossi's concept of the analogical city, the famous Italian architect's “most compelling yet diffuse and neglected idea,” in the author's words. The theoretical text is balanced by fifty of McEwan's own illustrations: montages of Rossi's drawings and other relevant images that “explore the formal and graphic operations and critical strategies at stake in the analogical city.”

Building Institution: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York 1967-1985 is a hefty, nearly 600-page expansion of Kim Förster's 2011 doctoral thesis at ETH Zurich, an institutional history, analysis, and critique of the IAUS, the renowned and influential institution founded by Peter Eisenman in 1967. The deeply researched book covers every aspect of the institution, from its early MoMA exhibition and actual architecture commission to its more impactful cultural output consisting of publications, lectures, educational components, and in-house exhibitions. Förster's abundantly illustrated book was published by transcript, a German academic publisher, in two formats: as a handsome, if expensive hardcover, and as an open-access PDF.

Although the MIT Press is not known for releasing open-access versions of architecture books (its digital collection is made up of “classic and previously out-of-print architecture and urban studies books”), a hybrid of sorts can be found in Cities Made Differently. The book is part of the Anthropology for Kids series, which was started by artist Nika Dubrovsky and her late husband, anthropologist David Graeber. The printed book is laid out playfully, with a collage of photographs, sketches, and text across nearly every spread — clearly aimed at children but with intelligent commentary and invitations for them to be creative. The book, being released later this month, will exist in two versions: “one for reading thinking; the other, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.”

If any “other way of making books” were most relevant to architects, it would be finding unique forms, particularly in regard to their construction, their binding. Departing from the traditional sewn or glued pages between paper or cloth covers can result in different forms of books but also different ways of reading them. The three books here, all recently released, exploit the potential of alternative bindings to find suitable formats for their contents and, in turn, elevate the act of reading.

Jointly published by New York's Head Hi and Milan's Mousse Publishing, Days Without Number, New York City is the latest book by architectural photographer Giovanna Silva. The book departs from her usual diptychs — spreads juxtaposing two images on opposite pages — and puts most of the 700 photographs of NYC on large A3 paper with 16 photos to a page, composed like prints on a refrigerator, magnets and all. The layout gives the impression of a calendar, but not as much as does the binding, with the pages folded in the middle and then bound with a plastic coil at one of the short ends. The format combines with Silva's photos to create a dream-like journey across the empty streets of New York, where days are without number and glimpses of people are rare.

A similar folded format is used for EX-CHANGE: Carnegie Mellon Architecture, 2023–2024, which was edited by Phillip Denny, a Carnegie Mellon alum who we are familiar with for curating, with Rem Koolhaas and Irma Boom, The Book in the Age of … exhibition at Harvard GSD last year. Holding the loose pages together is an adjustable elastic band and a cover with a flap that can extend from back to front. People who receive the book in the mail need to unwrap and assemble the book into this final form, an act that invests them in the book's contents — a presentation of student work, exhibitions, and other events that transpired over the last school year — more than a traditionally bound volume.

Haus-Rucker-Co: Atemzonen (Breathing Zones) was on display at the Kunstmuseum Linz from June 2023 to February 2024, coming a few years after the City of Linz purchased the archive of Günter Zamp Kelp, one of the founders of the Viennese utopian group Haus-Rucker-Co. The companion book, Haus-Rucker-Co: Atemzonen, edited by Hemma Schmutz, consists of essays and visual documentation of the archive. The novelty of the book comes in presenting these two types of content in portrait (essays) and landscape (archive) orientations, then putting them back to back in what could be described as a skewed Z-fold format. It's a logical approach that, like the creations of Haus-Rucker-Co after their founding in 1967, is a playful, curious creation, one that just might lead readers to wonder: “Why can't other books be different, too?”