Friday, September 05, 2008

The Shedworker's Bookshelf - BldgBlog Book

Last week a virtual book, this week one that hasn't actually been published yet. Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell magazine, writes arguably the best blog on buildings and their place in the environment at BldgBlog (officially it's all about 'Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures). It's witty, it's wideranging and it's very readable. There's not much directly about shedworking on it but the exploration of our relationship with architecture will strike a chord with many, many readers. I can't recommend the site highly enough and it's the book I'm most looking forward to in 2009. Here's what Geoff says will be in it:
"From plate tectonics and J.G. Ballard to geomagnetic harddrives and undiscovered Manhattan bedrooms, via offshore oil derricks, airborne utopias, wind power, fossil cities, statue disease, inflatable cathedrals, diamond mines, science fiction and the city, pedestrianization schemes, the architecture of the near-death experience, Scottish archaeology, wreck-diving, green roofs, W.G. Sebald, flooded Londons of the climate-changed future, William Burroughs, Andrew Maynard, LOT-EK, Rupert Thomson, The Aeneid, shipbreaking yards, Die Hard, Pruned, Franz Kafka, Rem Koolhaas, tunnels and sewers and bunkers and tombs, micronations, underground desert topologies, Mars, Earth, lunar urbanism, sound mirrors, James Bond, the War on Terror, earthquakes, Angkor Wat, robot-buildings and the Taj Mahal, Archigram, the Atlas Mountains, refugee camps, Walter Murch, suburbia, the Maunsell Towers... and about nine hundred thousand other topics, provided I can fit them all in."

1 comment:

  1. Wow - hey, Alex, thanks so much! Great to see this mentioned here. That's really exciting, actually; I'm glad you're looking forward to the book. I'm actually going through the first galleys now for edits and corrections, but it's all coming together for next spring. I'll see if we can't send you a review copy.

    Thanks again.

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