the bldgblog book
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Nearly five million readers have visited the BLDGBLOG Web site since its inception in 2004 for stories about the past, news about the present, and speculation about the future of how humans shape their environment. The site provides intriguing details from the fringes of contemporary architectural practice in an accessible, thought-provoking, and highly entertaining manner. Here, author Geoff Manaugh presents his insights in book form, combining history, urban exploration, science fiction, design, climate change, and city planning with the view that everything is relevant to architecture. With five captivating and colorfully illustrated chapters, The BLDGBLOG Book is sure to delight and inspire the builder, the thinker, and the visionary in all of us……..
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Technical Details
– ISBN13: 9780811866446
– Condition: NEW
– Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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2009-09-23
By Alexander M. Jack (Charlottesville,VA)
Only half way thru , but a so far a greatcross section of the infamous blog. It’s urban fantasy in forgotten or banal cityscapes; the remainders from a very large equation.
2009-09-10
By Maayan Roman (New York, NY)
This book does an excellent job of further developing ideas from the blog into a format appropriate for a book while still maintaining the feel of a blog. Great for a long train ride or as a coffee table book. It uses architecture as a lens for delving into related aspects of society and takes enjoyable turns into the stretches of imagination, science fiction, and fantasy, all while still making observations on society. Definitely recommended. You certainly do not need to read the blog to enjoy the book.
2009-09-02
By Pierre Gauthier (Montréal)
This unusual book, a spin-off from an actual blog, is unusually imaginative, creative and stimulating.
The author’s topic is architecture, which he defines very broadly. So, he discusses underground structures _ largely sewers in fact, climate control _ as a complement to urban design, sound environments as well as landscapes in the distant future. Literature, music and cinema are inextricably meshed into the «architectural» exposés.
Though he often extrapolates lyrically, the author is convincing when he claims to base his discussions on realities and scientific facts.
The book reads almost like a magazine since throughout the main text, neatly organized in chapters, are interspersed related articles and interviews, some very short, some half a dozen pages long.
The work is abundantly and quite pertinently illustrated with quality colour photographs, many very artistic.
A prior visit to the blog may prove useful to the potential reader although the book is definitely more polished and thus highly recommended to anyone curious and open-minded.
2009-08-07
By Robin Sloan (San Francisco, CA)
There are a couple passage in Geoff Manaugh’s intro to The BLDGBLOG Book that are worth noting here, because they frame the book in a way that’s not necessarily obvious just looking at the title & description:
“In other words, forget academic rigor. Never take the appropriate next step. Talk about Chinese urban design, the European space program, the landscape in the films of Alfred Hitchcock in the span of three sentences — because it’s fun, and the juxtapositions might take you somewhere. Most importantly, follow your lines of interest.”
And then:
“Finally, I want to reiterate that BLDGBLOG is fundamentally about following, and not being ashamed by, your own enthusiasms, whether or not they are rigorous and appropriate for the academic mores of the day, or even interesting for your family and friends.”
So that gives you a hint: this is not just a book about architecture. It’s really a book about enthusiasm and imagination. It reads like a catalog of excitement and wondering-what-if. And there’s something in here for anyone with a curious mind.
2009-07-04
By Stephen Silberman (SF, CA USA)
Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG is one of the most invigorating, subversive, visually engaging, and purely pleasurable outposts on the Net, and those qualities carry over into this beautifully written and designed book. The range of Manaugh’s restless intellect is breathtaking, incorporating everything from urban design to climatology, music, astronomy, pop culture, and much more. Under the guise of writing a blog about architecture, Manaugh has crafted a tribute to the world-transforming power of imagination itself. Along the way, he wrestles with some of the most athletic and ambitious minds of our time, including the late novelist J.G. Ballard, classicist Mary Beard, architect Lebbeus Woods, and urban theorist Mike Davis, author of “City of Quartz” and “Planet of Slums.”
It’s hard not to laugh out loud when reading “The BLDGBLOG Book,” because Manaugh’s own imagination is so astonishingly fertile and nearly child-like in its refusal to abide in comfortably deadening assumptions. Like a prodigious three-year old armed with a flaneur’s comprehensive street-level knowledge of the way things work, Manaugh relentlessly interrogates everything we take for granted about the environments we create. The overall effect is to open new vistas in what appeared solid and settled, as if you’d suddenly discovered a secret passageway to the unknown in your own cramped apartment — one of Manaugh’s pet obsessions.
For example, hearing about a collaboration between architects and sound engineers to create “sonic windows” in a house that bring the outside aural environment indoors, Manaugh imagines the resident of such a house — built above a glacier — nearly immobilized by awe and wonder. “Crystalline pressures of melting ice 3,000 feet below you suddenly break, sending cascades of sound shivering upward through the house’s foundations,” he writes, with a taut lyricism rarely found in books these days, much less on blogs. “Some days it’s impossible to get out of bed, hypnotized by unearthly noises.”
What is this kind of writing — science fiction? Magical hyper-realism? Who cares? Manaugh has succeeded in creating his own genre and remaking the world on his own terms. To him, the oncoming parade of catastrophes of economy, population, and climate are arguments for striving ever more boldly to refashion the world in accord with our innermost desires.
One of the first people to recognize the author’s young genius was Allen Ginsberg. Though Manaugh only elliptically refers to his teenage apprenticeship with the late author of “Howl” and other poems in this book, it’s easy to see why Ginsberg was smitten. Manaugh is able to fuse abstract musing with concrete particulars in a way that is particularly suited to our historical moment, yet harkens back to the restless probing of reality embodied by Ginsberg’s own poetic mentor, the pioneering 18th century multimedia poet William Blake. Even the modus operandi of this book — the fervid “hyperlinking” between seemingly disparate realms of emotion, experience, and intellectual discipline — feels appropriate for our densely networked, neurotically twittering era. But unlike other blog books, this volume will outlast our ever-accelerating Now, because it’s so luminously written. It’s easy to imagine a smart kid stumbling on scans of “The BLDGBLOG Book” in some pocket-sized Library of Congress on Mars 100 years from now and feeling energized to take up his or her own outrageous vocation.
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