The Atlantic

October 26, 2006

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ARCHITECTURE

The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin (Belknap Press)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwartz ("Babes in Toyland", November 2006)

"An undeveloped and, at more than 1,000 pages, unfinished (!) minute examination of nineteenth-century Paris's glass-roofed shopping galleries."

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This Land, by Anthony Flint (Johns Hopkins)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz ("Cover to Cover", June 2006)

"A look at the long odds faced by the 'smart growth' movement as suburban sprawl goes unchecked and its negative consequences become increasingly clear."

.....

Glenn Murcutt: Building + Projects 1962-2003, by Francoise Fromonot (Thames and Hudson)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwartz ("Modernism, Minimalism, Fundamentalism", May 2006)

"This book is among the stellar works of contemporary architectural publishing... Containing two lengthy and perceptive critical essays and chapters on nearly forty of Murcutt's buildings...this book illuminates both Murcutt's work and the art of architecture generally."

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Hariri and Hariri Houses, by Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwartz ("Modernism, Minimalism, Fundamentalism", May 2006)

"Those in the mood for some modernist eye candy will be sated by Hariri & Hariri Houses"

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Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, by Tristram Hunt (Metropolitan Books)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ( "The Not-So-Second City,"January/February 2006)

"Hunt evokes a time of intense public-spiritedness, upright municipal leadership, and a strong and locally rooted civic culture...that thrived before a mobile national elite absorbed it. Although he recognizes that the clock can't be turned back, he has clearly written a paean to the provincial bourgeoisie."

.....

The Perfect $100,000 House, by Karrie Jacobs (Viking)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz ( "Cover to Cover", September 2006)

"Although Jacobs's journey is a cheerful one, it also reveals the inescapably darker truth that affordable comfort is remarkably hard to come by in the candy store of American consumption."

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Chicago Architecture and Design, by Jay Pridmore and George A. Larson (Abrams)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("The Not—So—Second City," January/February 2006)

"Pridmore...has achieved a feat of synthesis as he chronicles a century and a half of the city's architectural history in a smooth, lucid, style that eschews the gaseous abstractions infecting far too much writing about architecture."

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Basilica, by R. A. Scotti (Viking)
Reviewed by Benjamin Healy and Benjamin Schwarz ("Cover to Cover", June 2006)

"The construction of St. Peter's in Rome required the combined efforts of Michelangelo, Raphael, and more than twenty popes, not to mention countless others."

.....

Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray (Chicago)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz ("The Not—So—Second City," January/February 2006)

"[Several superb pieces] inventively illuminate the historical circumstances in which the city's architecture was realized."

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Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City, by Alex Wall (University of Pennsylvania)
Reviewed by Benjamin Schwartz ("Babes in Toyland", November 2006)

"An unusually handsome and well-illustrated book."

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