New books in the library

Some new books for the library are listed a below - a mix of print and e-books. Send any purchase suggestions to Tristan.




The Acoustic City

"How does sound shape urban life? What do soundscapes reveal about the experience of modernity?  This innovative essay collection explores a series of critical themes including the diversity of urban soundscapes; acoustic flanerie and different ways of listening to the city; the emergence of specific associations between place, music and sound; and the acoustic ecology of architecture, landscape and urban design"









Hong Kong Architecture 1945 - 2015: From Colonial to Global

"This book focuses on the transformation from colonial to global - the formation, mechanism, events, works and people related to urban architecture.  The book reveals hardships the city encountered in the 1950s and the glamour enjoyed in the 1980s.  It depicts the public and private developments, and especially the public housing which has sheltered millions of residents.  The author identifies the architects practising in the formative years and the representatives of a rising generation after the 1980s. Suffering from land shortage and a dense environment, the urban development of Hong Kong has in the past 70 years met the changing demands of fluctuating economic activities and
a rising population.  Architecture on the island has been shaped by social demans, the economy and technology.  The buildings have been forged by the government, clients, planners, architects, many contractors and end-users.  The build environment nurtures our life and is visual evidence of the way the city has developed" 






BIM Management Handbook

"An authoritative and practical road map for those implementing and managing BIM workflows.  With the 2016 deadline for BIM level 2 fast approaching and the growing realisation of the huge benefits BIM brings these skills are becoming industry essentials.  Concentrating on the how rather than the why this will help you to adapt by clearly, and without jargon, explaining standard BIM processes, Government standards and the effective coordination of design, construction and asset information.  Spanning both organisational strategy and day-to-day practical tasks it explores bottom line business reasoning as well as potential risks and challenges"





Sustainable Cities: Assessing the Performance and Practice of Urban Environments 

"Sustainable Cities is about the challenges faced by our urban environments and how these can be met.  Examining the built environment at three levels of observation  individual buildings, urban neighbourhoods, and entire cities and towns, the first part of the book reveals the scale of the task.  The second part of the book offers a critical assessment of the techniques used to assess urban development, including the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions, ecological footprint analysis, and the measurement of urban biodiversity, where different approaches can yield significantly different results.  It concludes with an alternative approach to greenhouse gases, making the case for them to be seen as a resource rather than as a liability,  In the final part, case studies of best practice are presented"




Deco Room with Plants: Here and There

"The 3rd volume of 'Decom Room with Plants', by the plant artist, Satoshi Kawamoto features the styling of modern apartments with plants including Kawamoto's recent works in Japan, Taiwan, and New York.  Satoshi Kawamoto...demonstrates how to display plants categorised by room type using his own house.  Including indoor plants, dry & preserved flowers, artificial flowers and driftwood, he suggests several ways in which plants can enhance the interior space"





Designing Parks: Berlin's Park am Gleisdreieck or the Art of Creating Lively Places

"The Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin - developed between 2007 and 2014 - was initiated by citizens and built in dialogue with them.  This publication presents the principles underlying his design.  They form a toolbox for big city parks that can be used in diverse ways, stimulate interaction, and appeal to the senses"








Designing Your Business: Professional Practices for Interior Designers

Focuses on strategies for working effectively with colleagues, clients and resources and examines business organisation, legal and ethical issues, and business finance and accounting practices common to the interior design profession.

Drawing is/not Building

"Roland Snooks looks at possibilities offered by the shared authorship of human and computer; Sarah Treadwell merges the conventions of architectural rendering with hand-drawn processes to access the oceanic, and Simon Twose works in the space between building and drawing, by using concrete at full scale as his medium.  The three put material engagements in focus and question building and representation to distill the potentialities in drawing"

Design as Research.

Are there differences between design practice and the practice of design research? What alliances between text and artefact are possible in the search for new knowledge? How does design research translate and transform theories and methods from other disciplines? Is design research moving towards becoming a formal discipline and, if so, would this really be an advantage?

16 international authors address these four different aspects in the form of personal statements, and 19 researchers share their reflections based on their experience of having carried out a practice-based PhD.

This book investigates the status quo of things in the multi-faceted and constantly evolving field of design research, and outlines the elementary issues faced by researchers. The compendium is a survey of a fast-growing field and, at the same time, provides pointers for personal orientation.

Greenery in the City. This book examines new approaches to the planning of greenery in various European countries (Germany, England, Finland, France, and the Netherlands). Ten selected cases highlight various geographical aspects in each of the national contexts and show the influences on spatial, ecological, economic, and socio- political transformations. 

Demo polis: The Right to Public Space. The catalogue for the exhibition includes essays by international experts and case studies from architecture, sociology, art and urbanism for the redefinition of public spaces, such as Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, Trafalgar Square in London, Campo de Cebada in Madrid and Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York. Artistic interventions in public spaces will also be shown, as well as the findings of an international workshop and 3D tools for public participation.

The Changing Shape of Practice provides a handbook of examples for practices that wish to integrate more research into their work and a reference book for students that seek to prepare themselves for the changing shape of practice in architecture. It addresses the increasing integration of research undertaken in architectural practices of different sizes ranging from small to very large practices from the UK, USA, Europe and Asia.

Form & Data. Collective Housing Projects: An Anatomical Review. This publication presents a review of projects built between 2013 and 2016, to which an anatomical dissection of the elements constituting their form has been applied. It offers an integral vision of each work, from its implementation in the territory to the breakdown of its typologies, and continues along the line of inquiry first taken with ‘Why Density?’, developing the concepts on building the dense city expressed therein, this time with new projects. The book is part of the ‘Density’ series, initiated in 2002 by a+t research group (currently Aurora Fernández Per and Javier Mozas), which is considered to be a key instrument in the global investigation of collective housing.

The Curatorial Conundrum: What to study? What to research? What to practice? Today curators are sometimes more famous than the artists whose work they curate, and curatorship involves more than choosing objects for an exhibition. The expansion of the curatorial field in recent decades has raised questions about exhibition-making itself and the politics of production, display, and distribution. The Curatorial Conundrum looks at the burgeoning field of curatorship and tries to imagine its future. Indeed, practitioners and theorists consider a variety of futures: the future of curatorial education; the future of curatorial research; the future of curatorial and artistic practice; and the institutions that will make these other futures possible.
The contributors examine the proliferation of graduate programs in curatorial studies over the last twenty years, and consider what can be taught without giving up what is precisely curatorial, within the ever-expanding parameters of curatorial practice in recent times. They discuss curating as collaborative research, asking what happens when exhibition operates as a mode of research in its own right. They explore curatorial practice as an exercise in questioning the world around us; and they speculate about what it will take to build new, innovative, and progressive curatorial research institutions.

Perspectives on architectural design research: what matters - who cares – how. A collection of short essays, projects and edited transcripts that offers current perspectives on design research in architecture and aligned disciplines. Contributors include Donald L. Bates, Richard Blythe, Nat Chard, Murray Fraser, Dorita Hannah, Jonathan Hill and Vivian Mitsogianni. What emerges from the multiple perspectives is that contemporary design research – transdisciplinary, multi-scalar and concerning place, people, space and time – provides a collective and subtle mechanism that is propositional and transformative. The shared optimism of the contributors is that this propositional mode of research can be of catalytic value for contemporary culture and society. 

Collaboration in Creative Design: Methods and Tools. This book presents a number of new methods, tools, and approaches aimed to assist researchers and designers during the early stages of the design process, focusing on the need to approach the development of new interactive products, systems and related services by closely observing the needs of potential end-users through adopting a design thinking approach.

A wide range of design approaches are explored, some emphasizing on the physicality of interaction and the products designed, others exploring interactive design and the emerging user experience (UX) with a focus on the value to the end-user. Contemporary design processes and the role of software tools to support design are also discussed. The researchers draw their expertise from a wide range of fields and it is this interdisciplinary approach which provides a unique perspective resulting in a flexible collection of methods that can be applied to a wide range of design contexts.

Studio Teaching in Higher Education provides narrative examples of studio education written by instructors who have engaged in it, both within and outside the instructional design field. These multidisciplinary design cases are enriched by the book’s coverage of the studio concept in design education, heterogeneity of studio, commonalities in practice, and existing and emergent concerns about studio pedagogy. Prefaced by notes on how the design cases were curated and key perspectives from which the reader might view them, Studio Teaching in Higher Education is a supportive, exploratory resource for those considering or actively adapting a studio mode of teaching and learning to their own disciplines.

Richard Sapper. This investigation of Sapper's work, based on over forty hours of interviews with the designer Jonathan Olivares, studies his objects, the circumstances that shaped them and the resulting ideals that emerge. The inter-generational conversation explores themes that reoccur throughout Sapper's oeuvre, and which have a particular importance for a younger generation of designers and those with a desire to understand Sapper's work from a fresh perspective.