The dining table book
Seriously, it's that big. Slate's Christopher Hawthorne undertakes a deconstruction of the new Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. I wandered into Dymocks today to have a look - it was set up on a special display stand, with more copies stacked beneath, each in their own nifty clear plastic carry-case. $330.
It certainly is impressive, but with a surfeit of images and little text, the book paints in broad strokes. I imagine that the atlas will be looked back upon as a useful snapshot of the contemporary architecture scene - but more importantly I think that the way the book has been collated and the material selected & presented is a more precise comment on the way we perceive architecture than the actual architecture itself.
Sorry, getting a little academic there - anyway, only four buildings from New Zealand (out of 1052 in the book), and no Gibbs House! Still, I think the Architectus work deserves to be there, as does Thom Craig's house.
Oh, and the Wilco album is brilliant. "At least that's what you said" is the best Neil Young/Crazy Horse song they never wrote.
It certainly is impressive, but with a surfeit of images and little text, the book paints in broad strokes. I imagine that the atlas will be looked back upon as a useful snapshot of the contemporary architecture scene - but more importantly I think that the way the book has been collated and the material selected & presented is a more precise comment on the way we perceive architecture than the actual architecture itself.
Sorry, getting a little academic there - anyway, only four buildings from New Zealand (out of 1052 in the book), and no Gibbs House! Still, I think the Architectus work deserves to be there, as does Thom Craig's house.
Oh, and the Wilco album is brilliant. "At least that's what you said" is the best Neil Young/Crazy Horse song they never wrote.
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