Thomas Wensing

Kean University · Michael Graves College of Architecture & Design

This is a review of Tim Benton's LC Foto Le Corbusier Secret Photographer (2013), an immaculately researched and well-written book which covers the development of Le Corbusier’s photographic output. Le Corbusier had an ambiguous relationship with photography throughout his career; on the one hand he relied heavily on professional photography to pro...

Spaces of Disappearance by Jordan Carver is an attempt at a reconstruction or representation of the classified incarceration network of the early years of the USA's War on Terror by way of maps, diagrams, photographs, witness statements and redacted government and legal memos. It aims to not only reveal the physical nature and experience of these s...

John Boughton's first book, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing, is a well-written, humane and even-handed appraisal of the successes and failures of municipal and national housing programmes from the 1890s to the present. The introduction to the book starts out by documenting the strain of causes and failings that led to the Gre...

In Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities, journalist Juan González documents de Blasio’s rise to power and places it in the context of ‘the maturing of a new grassroots urban political revolt in America’. For those unfamiliar with Juan González’ reporting, he is one of the anchors of Democracy Now, t...

Italomodern 1 and Italomodern 2 are extensive surveys of modern architecture in northern Italy from 1946 to 1976. The authors — Vienna-based architect Martin Feiersinger and his brother, artist and photographer Werner — started this collaborative project in 2004 when, on their way back from a trip documenting Le Corbusier’s buildings in France, the...

Maison d’Artiste’ is an art-historical investigation which tries to make the case for the posthumous execution of one of the movement’s most iconic designs, namely the 1923 Maison d’Artiste by Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren. The book, edited by Dolf Broekhuizen, is organised in three parts: an examination of the cultural-historical sig...

This exhibition and catalogue is the result of a cooperation between the Jewish Museum New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and through years of research and preparation it sheds a comprehensive light for the first time on the complete oeuvre and achievements of architect and interior designer Pierre Chareau.

The book Kiyonori Kikutake Between Land and Sea came out of an exhibition, organised at Harvard GSD, and consists of essays by Mohsen Mostafavi, Ken Tadashi Oshima, Seng Kuan, Fred Thompson, Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima and Mark Mulligan. Japanese metabolism, an architectural movement founded in 1960 by Kenzo Tange, which included members such as Kiyono...

A Genealogy of Modern Architecture is the latest book by Kenneth Frampton and the fruit of decades of teaching activity and gestation. The class on which this book is based was originally more succinctly called Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form, and was taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia U...

Renowned for his humane and imaginative school buildings, and especially famous for the original and somewhat anarchistic Centraal Beheer insurance building (1967–72), Hertzberger has long since been the éminence grise and moral conscience of Dutch architecture. The book Architecture and Structuralism — The Ordering of Space is intended as Hertzber...

This book is essentially advocacy for the continued development of the skyscraper as a building type. In spite of the terrorist attack on the WTC, a new spate of supertalls were conceived, especially in emerging economies. Sensing that the development of skyscrapers is entering a new phase in its existence, and inspired by the desire to let skyscra...

Review of the monograph of the work of Riegler Riewe, an Austrian late modernist architecture practice.

This is a momentous exhibition covering 500 modern works from more than a dozen South American countries. It celebrates the 60th anniversary of Henry Russell Hitchcock’s 1955 MoMA show ‘Latin American Architecture since 1945’ and was organised over a period of five years by curator Barry Bergdoll, head of the of the department of architecture and d...

The Whitney Museum’s move to its new building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, ends the long saga to expand the institution. Thomas Wensing visits the new Whitney Museum for an appraisal.

This is the closing show of a 14-month initiative in which interdisciplinary teams of local practitioners and international architecture and urbanism experts have been invited to produce tactical interventions for six rapidly and unevenly growing global metropolises — Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, New York, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro. The six differe...

While in recent decades political leaders have managed to destroy the European social model in both word and deed, a retrospective of Bakema's vision for architecture and the open society points to a direction that was not pursued further. In this vision, the Netherlands is modern and completely urbanized, and of course designed in a modernist mann...

This is a riveting travelogue that narrates the stories and lives of activist architects, politicians and radical communities in pursuit of a more dignified existence for the inhabitants of barrios, barriadas, villas miserias and favelas across South America. The title alludes to both David Harvey’s Rebel Cities and to Le Corbusier’s famous manifes...

This book is the English translation of Provoost’s doctoral thesis, first published in 2003. Provoost is part of Crimson Architectural Historians, a collective based in Rotterdam and which, together with the recently disbanded practice FAT, was selected to curate the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Crimson’s stance to...

Molenaar & Co, Hebly Theunissen, and Michael van Gessel led a pristine renovation of the Spangen social-housing complex, which pioneered public deck access. The revolutionary Spangen social-housing complex (1919-1921) in Rotterdam, by Michiel Brinkman, has recently been immaculately restored. The project pioneered “street in the sky” deck access, a...

The book Megastructure Schiphol — Design in Spectacular Simplicity charts the design development of the airport, and reveals how Schiphol is both international in its orientation and as a result of the landscape and public-infrastructure planning tradition of the Netherlands. The various aspects of Schiphol’s design, such as its growth over time, s...

Book review of Double Dutch by Bernard Hulsman.

A review of the book Adhocism by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver

It is well known that the Swiss architect had an ambivalent attitude towards photography: on the one hand, he relied heavily on professional photography to promote his built work and support his discourse but, on the other, he said that he abandoned photography quickly in his career. The life of Le Corbusier is presented by Benton by way of the cam...

The Spectacle of Disintegration — Situationist Passages out of the 20th Century is McKenzie Wark’s third book on the Situationist International, after The Beach Beneath the Street and 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. The new book discusses the later work of the group and focuses on the material practices as well as the cr...

MVRDV Buildings is a reflection on the practice’s built work over these past two eventful decades. It is edited by Ilka and Andreas Ruby, two self-confessed admirers of MVRDV, and it offers a mainly image-based tome and relaxed read. The monograph of MVRDV is specifically not intended to be a glossy advertorial, but qualifies more as a revisit and...

The Seagram Building in Manhattan (1954-58), by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, is one of those rare pieces of architecture which has come to define an era. For Mies van der Rohe the achievement of the Seagram Building was the resolution of years of theoretical and exacting architectural investigation. The influence of the Seagram Buil...

A book review of the book Brinkman & van der Vlugt Architects [by] Joris Molenaar. Brinkman & van der Vlugt, under the direction of van der Vlugt, became one of the leading and most prolific modernist architectural practices in the Netherlands before the war. With the unique combination of a progressive clientele and talented staff (most memorably...

Book reviews of Wang Shu –Imagining the House & Eduardo Souto de Moura – Sketchbook No. 76

Book reviews of Tumult and Order: La Malcontenta 1924-39, Antonio Foscari & The Private Palladio, Guido Beltramini

After decades of passionate collecting, the Deutsches Architektur Museum decided to curate an exhibition on architectural models (no drawings!), for which the book Das Architektur Modell – The Architectural Model is the catalogue. The first impression of the book is one of inspiration and sheer visual delight, testament to the quality and substance...

Owen Hatherley’s most recent book, A New Kind of Bleak – Journeys Through Urban Britain, is an animated narration of Hatherley’s latest travels through the UK, away from world heritage sites and conservation areas into what is arguably the day-to-day reality of how cities present themselves to their inhabitants.

The Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture is a worthwhile collection of essays that explores sustainability as it relates to architecture and aesthetics. The many writers, including Sang Lee, Kenneth Frampton, Kengo Kuma, Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton, and the more left field like Ralph L Knowles, raise pertinent questions about the state...

In late 2010, Kenneth Frampton celebrated his eightieth birthday with a one-day conference at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The conference was, typically, an act of resistance against the prevalent culture of commodification and globalisation and focused on architecture as practice. To this...

Book review of Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. In Project Japan, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist revisit what is arguably the last Utopian movement in architecture, the Japanese Metabolists. In 2005, in the realisation that the members of this diverse group of architects, designers, and artists were soon to pass away, Kool...

Pallasmaa’s new book, ‘The Embodied Image – Imagination and Imagery in Architecture’ is a phenomenological account that offers architecture as a multi-sensory experience as an alternative to the current emphasis on visual spectacle. In doing so Pallasmaa reminds us that one of the tasks of architecture is to address the deeper existential questions...

A new book [The Art-Architecture Complex] by the art historian Hal Foster argues that the global styles of contemporary high architecture offer inauthentic spectacle in place of visceral experience. Thomas Wensing meets him to ask what went wrong, and what architecture can learn from art.

The Situationist International was a loose association of left-wing radical artists, writers and architects, centred around the philosopher Guy Debord, which existed from 1957 to 1972. As with so many radical splinter groups, its membership went through several rounds of purges, and the aims and interests of the group shifted over time. The Beach B...

Originally published under the title: "Tracing the influence of urban design and the CIAM architects". The book under review ‘Defining Urban Design’ expands the historical reappraisal of the influence of Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Modernes (CIAM) to the American context and shows in great detail how CIAM doctrine was received, expanded a...

This is a book review of Philip Johnson. The Constancy of Change, Petit, Emmanuel, ed. It was published in Building Design, UK, March 04th, 2009.

This is a book review of Modern Swedish Design. The essays in this volume, translated for the first time into English, are three formative texts of the modern movement in Sweden from the turn of the 19th century to the 1930s. They chronicle the gradual move from a strong craft tradition towards an organic, naturalist and humanist strand of modernis...