"The Smart Growth Manual" is a citizen’s pocket guide to anti-sprawl planning practices and a primer on New Urbanist thought.
The latest book by Andrés Duany, the galvanizing force of the New Urbanist movement, and Jeff Speck, the city planner and designer who was Duany’s collaborator on a previous book, Suburban Nation, attempts to codify thinking about Smart Growth. (source architect) Read more…

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, or so the saying goes. Clearly it's not one that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown subscribe to. Their 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas is one of the most famous tributes to the city's charms. (source iconeye) Read more...

With the many boxes of architecture books in our basement you could say that they’re helping to support our house, and with all the architecture books on our shelves you could also say that they’re helping to weigh it down. (source eye on design) Read more…

Farshid Moussavi [now formerly of FOA], Harvard’s GSD, and Actar have responded to the widespread success of 2006’s The Function of Ornament – a self-described ” graphic guide to ornaments in the twentieth century” – with a second volume entitled The Function of Form. (source AMNP) Read more…

A new collection of writing by the late Herbert Muschamp reveals, beneath his lavish praise for Gehry & Co., a surprising (and ambitious) reading of 20th century culture. Like the man himself, Hearts of the City: The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp (Knopf, $50) is going to offend a lot of people. The book is nearly 900 pages long, the vast bulk of it in the form of 1,500-word articles written during Muschamp’s 12-year stint as The New York Times’ architecture critic. Who deserves 900 pages? How dare he? (source architect) Read more…

As Seen from Abroad (As Imagined from Within)
In conjunction with the release of GA Japan magazine's 100th issue is an exhibition entitled "Contemporary Japanese Architecture Seen from Abroad" at the GA Gallery in Sendagaya, Tokyo. GA is the ubiquitous Japanese publisher of hefty magazines, quarterlies and retrospective volumes on architecture and interior design. (source artscape) Read more…