Holiday Gift Books: 2009.1

As in the last four years, I'm presenting a list of gift books just in time for the holidays. This time around I'm presenting one each by 50 publishers, posted in five digestible installments of ten each, in alphabetical order. Below is the first installment. Once posted, the rest can be found here.

010 Publishers:

Archiprix 2009 edited by Henk van der Veen
"Each year the Dutch institutions teaching architecture, urban design and landscape architecture select their best final-year projects. The crop is unfailingly rich and varied and reflects the ambition of a new generation of designers ready to take on every imaginable design task that comes their way."

Actar:

The Function of Form by Farshid Moussavi
"A thought-provoking account of the challenges facing the 21st century built environment, and an enlivened awareness of the wider possibilities of architectural form."

A&S Books:

Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History by Andrew Leach
"The first English-language book to consider [critic Manfredo Tafuri's] contribution to architectural culture, it opens an overdue discussion on both the premises of his practice and the historical questions that consequently emerge."

aperture:

The Transparent City by Michael Wolf
"Bringing his unique perspective on changing urban environments to a city renowned for its architectural legacy, Wolf chose to photograph [Chicago's] central downtown area, focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux."

a+t:

HoCo: Density Housing Construction & Costs by Aurora Fernandez Per, Javier Mozas & Javier Arpa
"The new volume published by a+t forms part of the Density series, dedicated to the analysis of collective housing. HoCo is noted for including construction systems within the field of study and comparison, besides the costs of each project." Read my review of the book here.

Arvinius:

Nordic Architects by David Sokol
"Readers will engage with the region's enduring legacy of modernist architecture that is sensitive to both site and occupants, as well as the global currents that are roiling designers toward experimental work and provocative thinking."

AVA Academia:

Basics Landscape Architecture: Urban Design by Tim Waterman and Ed Wall
"Providing an overview of urban design from a landscape architecture perspective and a brief history and definition of urban design, it looks at the elements of urban form and the importance of contextual details."

Birkhäuser:

Visualizing Landscape Architecture: Functions, Concepts, Strategies by Elke Martens
"This books sifts through the currently commonplace and available techniques [for communicating landscape designs] and evaluates them in terms of their informative value and persuasive power, always illustrating its points with analysis of examples from international firms."

Black Dog Publishing:

Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism by Alan Colquhoun
"Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism encompasses the clarity of style and rigorous, erudite analysis that Colquhoun has brought to bear on a diverse range of subjects, including Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the Pompidou Centre, Postmodernism and the design of museums."

Charta:

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews, Volume 2 edited by Charles Arsène-Henry, Shumon Basar, Karen Marta
"A rich trove of international cultural thought spanning the past 100 years. Encyclopedic in scope but intimate in tone, these exchanges provoke unexpected torrents of biographical trajectories, theoretical adventurings and inklings of projects to come."