Van Alen Books heads uptown on Monday, May 13 to present a selection of new and notable architecture and design books at City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture. Please join us on the ground floor of the main architecture library from 12-2 PM.
On Thursday, April 24, we were joined by Georges Teyssot and Cynthia Davidson at the bookstore for a conversation on the latest in the Writing Architecture series, A Topology of Everyday Constellations.
The Graduate Landscape Architecture Program of the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, is launching Volume 2 of its student-edited journal, PLOT. Featuring submissions by students, faculty, and friends of the Landscape Architecture program, Volume 2 explores the theme of PATCHWORK, developed by the second year MLA student editorial board in collaboration with faculty advisor Catherine Seavitt Nordenson and designer Isaac Gertman. Contributions to this issue explore ad-hoc and innovative assemblages, commensal species, and incongruous urban wilds. Come celebrate PLOT’s new issue and raise a toast to the 2013 graduating class of Master of Landscape Architecture students.
Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture joined us at the bookstore on April 11 for a discussion to celebrate his firm’s new book Allied Works Architecture | Clyfford Still Museum, a publication showcasing their design for the Denver institution.
This comprehensive personal and scholarly history chronicles how at 27, Phyllis Lambert, daughter of Seagram founder Samuel Bronfman, took over the search for an architect to build a New York corporate headquarters and chose Mies van der Rohe, resulting in an iconic modern landmark. Designed with Philip Johnson, the 38-story tower also established Lambert as a leading architectural patron and played a substantial role in shaping landmark legislation and zoning laws in New York City. Lambert makes use of previously unpublished personal archives, company correspondence, and photographs to tell an insider’s view of the debates and dramas of the building’s construction, as well as its crucial role in the history of modern art and architectural culture. Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, will discuss this newly launched volume in conversation with Anyone Corporation director and editor Cynthia Davidson, exploring the Seagram’s history in the context of New York’s urban development and the forces that continue to shape the city’s streetscape and skyline.
No one takes cakes more seriously than the Portuguese: every morning, countless one-portion, sweet pastries fill the counters of cafés and stores across the country in a myriad of shapes, doughs, fillings, creams, jams and colors. These semi-industrial cakes are neither precious confections nor factory-made sweets—anonymously made, yet often displaying highly creative designs. Fabrico Próprio means “own production” or “made on premises,” and is a term used on shop signs, windows and packaging as a warrant of baking freshness and quality. This 332-page, hardcover book dedicated to Portuguese confectionery and its relation to design contains an encyclopedic record of sweets accompanied by written and photo essays by architecture and food critics, commissioned illustrations, and much more. Join design critic Akiko Busch in conversation with authors Rita João, Pedro Ferreira, and Frederico Duarte, as well as designer and food blogger behind FeastingNeverStops Naz Sahin, on the intersections between confectionery, culture, and design.
This is the kick-off event for Counter/Point: The 2013 D-Crit Conference.
On Thursday, April 4 at Van Alen Books, the editors of Project journal joined us for a live interview with designer Caroline O’Donnell of CODA.
Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future—and June Williamson shows that they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Drawing on award-winning design ideas for revitalizing Long Island, she offers valuable models not only for U.S. suburbs, but also those emerging elsewhere with global urbanization. Williamson argues that suburbia has historically been a site of great experimentation, and is not destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots. Providing a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island’s highly successful “Build a Better Burb” competition, she presents designs that operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. Join June Williamson; Rob Lane, Senior Fellow at RPA; Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at GSAPP; and Jocelyn Wenk of the Long Island Index as they discuss pragmatic yet visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant, new suburban form.
On March 7 at Van Alen Books, we celebrated Urgent Architecture: 40 Sustainable Housing Solutions for a Changing World, with author and Inhabitat Architecture Editor Bridgette Meinhold.
Today, spaces no longer represent a bourgeois haven; nor are they the sites of a classical harmony between work and leisure, private and public, the local and the global. The house is not merely a home but a position for negotiations with multiple spheres—the technological as well as the physical and the psychological. In A Topology of Everyday Constellations, Georges Teyssot considers the intrusion of the public sphere into private space, and the blurring of notions of interior, privacy, and intimacy in our societies. Thresholds, he suggests, work both as markers of boundaries and as bridges to the exterior. If the threshold no longer separates public from private, and if we can no longer think of the house as a bastion of privacy, Teyssot asks, does the body still inhabit the house—or does the house, evolving into a series of microdevices, inhabit the body? Join author Georges Teyssot in conversation with Writing Architecture Series and Log editor Cynthia Davidson.
