New Urban Housing

New Urban Housing

Product Type: Book

Product Price: $50.00

Manufacturer: Yale University Press

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Description

The design of high-density housing is inextricably linked to the growth of towns and cities: as urban centers have increased in both geographical size and density, housing has had to be provided to accommodate the numbers and needs of the population. Whether highly visible or merged with the existing cityscape, a vast proportion of the fabric of any city is made up of residential space. New Urban Housing looks at a selection of some of the most inventive contemporary projects built in countries around the world.
Author Hilary French provides a comprehensive introduction to this building type, from its industrial beginnings in London and Paris to New York City’s Lower East Side and the 20th-century designs of Le Corbusier, Antonio Sant’Elia, and Mies van der Rohe. Lavishly illustrated, the book examines different formal typologies of urban housing: terrace and row houses, quadrangles and courtyards, city blocks and infill (or renovated and reused sites), and towers and slab blocks. Thirty-six case studies from fourteen countries are presented by architects including Steven Holl, Richard Meier, KoningEizenbergArchitecture, Eduardo Souto de Moura, and Renzo Piano. Each is illustrated in full color and is accompanied by detailed plans and sections that discuss the needs of the site and place the project in its surrounding context.
New Urban Housing features these buildings and more:
·        Contemporaine, Chicago
·        Donnybrook Quarter, London
·        Harold Way Apartments, Hollywood
·        Mondrian Apartments, Sydney
·        Simmons Hall, MIT, Cambridge, MA
·        Yerba Buena Lofts, San Francisco

Reviews

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2008-12-06
Summary: "Euro-centric but useful typological reference."

The tragedy of this book is its confusing title. The irony of the phrase 'new urban' with the playful facade of student dorm is appreciated - however, it doesn't bode well for those browsing it in a google-powered age of internet time. Without the cover image of Steven Holl's Timmons Hall in MIT, it is very easy to mistake the title for a book as one among the recent many that caters to a developer-driven, badly-detailed kitsch often marketed under the umbrella term of New Urbanism. This book is anything but that.

Most of the multi-family housetypes featured in this book are grounded in the language of well detailed, modernist aesthetic, that has nothing to do with cutesy gables and white picket fences. As a practicing urban designer in the US, I was disappointed there is not much in the way of North American examples. But that has probably more to do with the dismal state of multi-family architecture in the US than with the preferences of the author.

Most of the apartments featured in the book - European prototypes of public and student housing - have little or no parking demands. Unfortunately it would be very hard to realize most these typologies in a developer-driven US market where plan often start taking shape from the economic and physical footprints of a parking plan. Every project is clearly illustrated with scaled plans and building sections with brief narratives - and thats always refreshing in the age of koolhas-powered photoshop'ed abstract image overload where the reader is often left wondering what the author is trying to say.

This book is definitely a refreshing addition in a shelf reserved for illustrated building types.