Book Recommendations

George_Apley

George_Apley

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It will be nice to have a thread depository for good books about architecture, urbanism, Boston history, etc.

I just dug into this one from 2015 and it’s a good dive into metro-Boston suburban development, evolution and its impacts on the region. Based on my reading so far, I recommend.

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Informal by Cecil Balmond, an engineer that had a bit more of a creative edge and worked with Koolhaas, Libeskind, and the likes to find structural solutions to their designs and/or visions.

From the website:
informal articulates Balmond’s manifesto for a new approach to design. Charting the evolution of form, his explorations into structure, pattern and geometry challenge conventional ideas, uncovering the possibilities for a more intuitive and dynamic approach. Toppling a tradition of Cartesian stability, informal reveals a process that allows for mystery, mysticism, doubt and fluidity, shifting the ground in engineering and architecture.

Through lyrical personal sketches, theory and prose, informal reveals Balmond’s intimate moments of creation with his co-collaborators Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, amongst others.
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For the history nerds, you may remember about Prop 2.5 when it was implemented and what cuts resulted in public services. You may also remember about the arson spree in the 80's. Burn Boston Burn talks about the investigation of that spree from the perspective of the ATF agent that investigated the case. Was highly recommended by several people to me and I just picked it up myself. Just listening to a podcast interview of the author, some of the stuff in the book is wild (arsonists driving a unmarked cop car with the license plate "Arson", a off-duty cop waving a gun in the air like he's at a rodeo at a fire, people cheering at fires, and other stuff that just seems insane). I can't wait to read it.
 
I'll recommend "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, which came out this year. Each chapter is case study on a different city, looking at the politics and decisions along the way from great public transportation to roughly zero public transportation in many cases (like Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc).

There are a couple of chapters devoted to Boston, which is held out as an example of generally doing things right, or best as could be in any given era. It's a nice reminder of how good Boston's public transit is (was? can be again, eventually?). Even in the pretty garbage state of the T these days, it carries more people than the metro systems of much larger cities. It's kinda crazy how far Boston punches above its weight
 
Not directly tied to architecture, but this one has been catching my eye recently at bookstores, and I noticed it is now a free audiobook on Spotify with a premium account. A little into the first interview so far and its pretty good. It does include architects in the discussion eventually (also helps that her father was an architect), and ties a lot of things together on solving the climate crisis. It helps frame climate solutions in the same "visionary" way an architect might think, in my opinion.

This book is an anthology of sorts, a mosaic — 20 interviews, 5 poems, 3 co-authored chapters, 2 artists’ new works, a note from my dad, and a quote from my mom.

It includes visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, producers and policy wonks. Mega brains. All stars.
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https://www.getitright.earth/
 
I would like to highly recommend "Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston". It is incredibly detailed and exhaustively researched - it's explicitly a spiritual successor to "Boston: A Topographical History", and actually corrects a few errors in it. It's also very readable and engaging for an academic text/reference work. I've been savoring a dozen or two pages a night for the last few weeks and I'm sorry it's almost over.


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stefal said:
Not directly tied to architecture, but this one has been catching my eye recently at bookstores, and I noticed it is now a free audiobook on Spotify with a premium account. A little into the first interview so far and its pretty good. It does include architects in the discussion eventually (also helps that her father was an architect), and ties a lot of things together on solving the climate crisis. It helps frame climate solutions in the same "visionary" way an architect might think, in my opinion.



https://www.getitright.earth/
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(This ended up in the okay-good range. She's absolutely great and tremendously inspiring at the stuff she knows. I found her interviews with people outside of her realm of climate knowledge (~50% of the book) to contain rather surface level/non-directed questions, to which the interviewees had a tough time answering, and more congratulations-you're-smart interviews than I would have liked.)
 
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