Geography of Home. Writings on where we live. Akiko Busch. Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. paperback 2003. distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books. Essays on the house and its various rooms. Intelligent, unsentimental, so astute about what is dramatic about every- day life. Akiko Busch’s writing through all the rooms graphs where America, and thus the western world, is drifting domestically. We are like underwater swimmers in this book, the sharks of time, work politics — inescapable contempo- rary values — nipping at our feet. We are trying to find not style in our houses, but order and comfort. She has a wonderful turn of phrase —the garage,‘the kitchen drawer of the house…remains a place that holds out the possibilities of flight’ (p 147). This and more eccentric insights from Metropolis architecture essayist in this great little book.
two books
Hiding. Mark C Taylor. University of Chicago Press, 1997 . Still perplexed by the depth of modern life and its global consequences, where nothing is as it seems, where capital and its accumulation make our decisions? This brilliant discussion accepts the complexity, running often three dif- ferent texts on a page, graphically intercutting each other. Architecture is placed beside fashion, religion, the modern economy, medical history, painting, politics, Bernard Tschumi next to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas gives La Villette a context crystalline in its contrariness. Architecture here is not buried in its own self-generated history but is shifted into the real, infinitely layered universe where Donna Haraway meets Vogue, Cindy Sher- man meets prosthetic genetic engineering and architecture darts amongst it all. Big section on skin, surface abounds throughout. Impossible to paraphrase, just a startling book. —sw
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