“Although this book includes works from all phases of Kahn’s career, it is neither a “complete works” nor a monographic survey. To maximize the area dedicated to Kahn’s iterative and exploratory drawings means to minimize those photographs and print-ready images that are the conventional means of presenting architecture. The text, too, by focusing on drawing and representation, omit much contextual information that belongs in more general project descriptions. And yet architectural drawings such as those reproduced here work best in the space between what we see and what we know. Those readers who know Kahn’s work well will hopefully recognize in this lack of photos and conventional descriptions an invitation: to dwell in that space between seeing and knowing, and so to participate more intimately with Kahn and his associates in their acts of creation.

• From the Preface

Edited by Michael Merrill, Lars Müller Publishers (2024)

Rare are books that have distilled a subject to its essence, allowing an auteur the ability to curate a reading of a particular idiom, as is the case in this book on architect and educator Louis Kahn. For an architect who passed away in 1971, his legacy continues to inspire architectural students and practitioners alike, and editor Mike Merrill has done a masterful job of providing us with a view of the great architect through his hand drawings, with reproductions of many yellow trace doodles along with formative sketches from his travels.

As noted early in the book, those who know him less (and shame on you!) should have a monograph with the photos of the many works featured here close at hand, but the learned crowd will revel through the details of his work as they appear in a new and wonderful way.

Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing offers a compelling exploration of the relationship between drawing and architectural thought in the work of the celebrated architect Louis Kahn. Rather than presenting drawings merely as preparatory sketches for completed buildings, the book argues that drawing was central to Kahn’s creative process and intellectual development.

Through a rich collection of sketches, travel drawings, architectural studies, and project documents, the publication reveals how Kahn used drawing as a means of inquiry, reflection, and discovery. For architects, students, and scholars interested in design methodology, the book provides invaluable insight into one of the twentieth century’s most influential architectural minds.

The book’s central premise is that drawing was not simply a technical tool for Kahn but an essential way of seeing and understanding the world. Throughout his career, Kahn filled notebooks with observations of landscapes, ruins, urban spaces, and architectural details. These drawings were not intended as polished artworks; instead, they functioned as explorations of form, light, proportion, and spatial relationships.

The authors demonstrate that Kahn’s sketches were instrumental in shaping his architectural philosophy and that many of the ideas found in his most celebrated buildings can be traced back to his drawing practice.

The book itself is cloth-bound and hard-covered, and at 512-pages, 12″ x 9.5″ and two inches thick, it provides for the large-format reproduction of his drawings, in which one can pore over all of Kahn’s glorious details.

The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Kahn’s drawings, ranging from quick observational sketches to carefully developed studies. These images allow readers to witness the architect’s thought process directly. Unlike conventional architectural monographs that focus primarily on finished buildings, The Importance of a Drawing emphasizes the creative journey that precedes construction.

The drawings reveal moments of experimentation, uncertainty, and discovery, reminding readers that architecture is fundamentally a process of investigation rather than a straightforward path from concept to completion.

The organization of the book contributes significantly to its effectiveness—rather than presenting drawings chronologically alone, the editors group them thematically, allowing readers to understand recurring concerns in Kahn’s work. Themes such as light, monumentality, geometry, and the relationship between nature and architecture emerge repeatedly throughout the volume.

This approach highlights the consistency of Kahn’s intellectual interests while also demonstrating how his ideas evolved. Readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the continuity between his early sketches and later architectural masterpieces.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is its treatment of Kahn’s travel drawings. During his journeys through Europe, Egypt, and other regions, Kahn produced numerous sketches of ancient ruins, historic cities, and monumental structures. These drawings reveal his profound fascination with timeless forms and enduring architectural principles.

Rather than merely documenting what he saw, Kahn interpreted these places through drawing, analyzing their spatial qualities and emotional impact. The book effectively illustrates how these experiences influenced projects such as the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the National Assembly Building. Readers can clearly trace connections between the architect’s observations of historical architecture and his own innovative designs.

As we are all currently navigating the undiscovered country of AI, perhaps the book’s most important contribution is its challenge to contemporary assumptions about architectural practice. In an age dominated by machine learning, digital modeling, and computer-generated imagery, Kahn’s drawings serve as a reminder of the value of hand drawing as a mode of thinking. The book argues convincingly that drawing enables a unique form of engagement with space and form that digital tools cannot entirely replace.

Kahn’s sketches demonstrate how the physical act of drawing encourages observation, contemplation, and experimentation. For architecture students accustomed to working primarily on computers, this message is particularly relevant and thought-provoking.

In addition to his drawings, the accompanying essays written by architectural historians, critics, and scholars provide valuable context for understanding Kahn’s work. These texts explore the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of his drawings. Rather than simply describing the images, the essays analyze how drawing functioned within Kahn’s broader design process. They discuss his belief that architecture should express fundamental human values and explore how drawing helped him search for what he called the “beginnings” of a project. These scholarly contributions enrich the visual material and help readers understand why drawing occupied such a central place in Kahn’s practice.

The book also raises broader questions about creativity and design. By examining Kahn’s drawings, readers are encouraged to consider how ideas emerge and evolve. The sketches reveal that innovation often results from sustained observation and reflection rather than sudden inspiration, demonstrating how, in Kahn’s work, a drawing can function as a dialogue between the designer and the world, allowing complex ideas to develop gradually over time.

Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing succeeds as it reconfirms for the Kahn cognoscenti the importance of drawing to the architectural act, while for those new to his work, it will illuminate the importance of this essential but often overlooked aspect of architectural practice—revealing drawing not as a secondary activity but as a fundamental mode of thinking.

Through its extensive visual documentation, insightful essays, and thoughtful organization, the book provides a nuanced understanding of how Kahn developed his architectural vision, deepening our appreciation for both his buildings and his creative process.

Overall, Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing offers an outstanding contribution to architectural scholarship and visual culture, reconfirming for those who know his work well that drawing was at the heart of his approach to architecture and offering readers a rare opportunity to engage directly with his creative thinking.

Richly illustrated and intellectually stimulating, the book will appeal to architects, students, historians, and artists alike in the relationship between observation, imagination, and design. More than a study of one architect’s drawings, it is a powerful argument for the enduring importance of drawing as a tool for understanding and shaping the world.

***

For more information on Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing, go to the Lars Müller website.

***

Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

The post Book Review: Louis Kahn – The Importance of a Drawing appeared first on Spacing National.

We’ve spoken a lot about community land trusts in this series, and it’s been gaining momentum in cities and towns all over Canada. But there are some policy choices that are stalling some land trust projects. Here we bring you two cases from Vancouver, and how these barriers can be removed.

First, we speak to Djaka Blais, executive director of the Hogan’s Alley Society. There is a municipal plan in place to rehabilitate an historically Black community, which was ruined years ago when viaducts were built over top of it for an expressway that was never completed, but the plan can’t move ahead while those unused viaducts still stand:

We want to see municipal, provincial, and federal governments prioritizing moving forward with this plan, which includes the removal of the viaducts, to really be able to deliver on the commitments that were made in this municipal policy, speaking to cultural redress and reconciliation.

And we speak to Andy Bond, executive director of the Downtown East Side Community Land Trust, speaks about his organizations success in acquiring property for affordable housing in this low-income neighbourhood. But the City has also changed zoning in the area that previously mandated 60% non-market housing:

Concerns for us is the possibility of  land values being driven up because of this… the time that we’re in right now with market conditions, I don’t think there’s a rush to buy buildings… but, down the road, it could be problematic in terms of raising land value through speculation.

How can policy changes help community land trusts move forward?

Listen here for The Overhead:

The post THE OVERHEAD: When Policy Pauses Public Ownership appeared first on Spacing National.

Author: Gregory Dreicer (MIT Press, 2026)

We tend to think of infrastructure as something we build. Concrete, steel, timber—assembled into roads, towers, and bridges that quietly organize our lives. But what if infrastructure is not only physical? What if it is also narrative—constructed, repeated, and reinforced until it becomes indistinguishable from fact?

Gregory Dreicer’s American Bridge: Reinventing Building, Making History begins from this unsettling premise. It is not, despite appearances, a book about bridges. Or rather, it is a book about bridges in the same way that a mirror is about reflection. The object is there, but what matters is what it reveals.

At the centre of Dreicer’s account is the nineteenth-century lattice bridge, patented by Ithiel Town in 1820—a structure composed of small, repeatable parts assembled into a seemingly improbable whole. Histories of engineering have long treated such innovations as steps in a linear progression: wood to iron, craft to industry, simplicity to complexity. But Dreicer refuses this narrative. He asks a more difficult question: not how bridges evolved, but how we came to believe that they did.

The answer, he argues, lies in what he calls “evolutionism”—a storytelling device that arranges technologies into neat, forward-moving sequences, imbuing them with inevitability and direction. These stories feel scientific, even objective, but they are anything but. They are narratives that prioritize continuity over rupture, nation over network, and progress over ambiguity. In doing so, they obscure the messy, collaborative, and often contradictory processes through which technologies actually emerge.

This is where American Bridge becomes something more than a history of technology. It becomes a critique of how knowledge itself is constructed. Dreicer shows how historians, engineers, and institutions have collectively reinforced these narratives—often unintentionally—by privileging visible artifacts over invisible processes. The bridge, as an object, becomes easier to document than the systems of labour, organization, and exchange that produced it. The result is a historical record that is materially rich but conceptually thin.

The lattice bridge disrupts this record. Its significance lies not in its form, but in its logic. It reimagines building as a process of assembly rather than craft, distributing labour across standardized parts and reducing dependence on specialized skill. In this sense, it anticipates industrialization—not through the factory, but through the construction site. Dreicer goes so far as to suggest that this transformation rivals the Ford Model T in its impact, though it has been largely forgotten in canonical accounts of industrial history.

But if the lattice bridge is so consequential, why has it remained peripheral?

Dreicer’s answer is as provocative as it is convincing, because it does not fit the story we prefer to tell. It is neither heroic nor singular. It does not belong to a single inventor or nation. It resists authorship. And perhaps most importantly, it foregrounds process—something far more difficult to narrate than object.

This critique extends beyond evolutionism to nationalism. The very term “American bridge,” Dreicer notes, is less a technical classification than a narrative construction—one that assigns identity to an artifact in order to stabilize its meaning. Yet the history he reconstructs reveals a far more fluid reality: one of transnational exchanges, itinerant engineers, and shared techniques that defy clear boundaries. “Places don’t invent,” he reminds us. “People do.”

For readers attuned to contemporary debates in planning and urbanism, these arguments will feel uncomfortably familiar. We continue to rely on simplified narratives—of supply and demand, growth and progress, innovation and inevitability—to explain complex systems. These narratives do not merely describe reality; they shape it. They determine what counts as evidence, what remains invisible, and what forms of intervention are considered possible.

In this sense, American Bridge resonates far beyond its historical scope. It offers a way of thinking about infrastructure not as a fixed system, but as an ongoing negotiation between material and meaning. The bridges we build, Dreicer suggests, are inseparable from the stories we tell about them. Both function most effectively when they remain unseen. Both become visible only when they fail.

If there is a limitation to the book, it lies in its distance from the present. Dreicer stops short of fully connecting his analysis to contemporary conditions, leaving readers to draw their own parallels. Yet this absence may also be its strength. By resisting the temptation to prescribe, the book maintains a critical openness that invites reflection rather than resolution.

That openness is not always easy to navigate. American Bridge is dense… at times demanding and unapologetically theoretical. It asks its reader to question not only what they know, but how they know it. For those expecting a conventional history of engineering, this may prove disorienting. For others, it is precisely the point.

Like the bridges it examines, the book operates as a kind of crossing—between disciplines, between narratives, between ways of seeing. It asks us to reconsider what lies beneath the structures we take for granted, and to recognize that the most consequential infrastructures are often the ones we cannot see.

The question Dreicer ultimately poses is a simple one: can we change the story?

It is a question that extends well beyond bridges—and one that feels increasingly difficult to ignore.

***

For more information about American Bridge, visit the MIT Press website.

**

Erick Villagomez is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

The post Book Review – American Bridge: Reinventing Building, Making History appeared first on Spacing National.

The Balanced Supply of Housing research node was formed to imagine real, working solutions to the housing crisis in Canada. But the first step to solving a problem is understanding it.

We’ve covered many issues with this special series, but the issue we keep returning to is security of tenure (or lack thereof). The BSH has completed various studies into evictions since its inception — why they happen, how, who they impact, and the outcomes — and now they’ve brought all their evidence, data, and recommendations together into a free book for anyone to access.

University of British Columbia Professor Alexandra Flynn and BSH Research Manager Alina McKay return to The Overhead to tell us about the evictions book, a digital tool for comparing tenants’ rights from province to province, and breaking the taboo of talking about evictions.

Here’s Alex:

The majority of evictions are happening through no fault of the tenant… And yet it’s true: it does seem extremely taboo. If you’ve been somebody who’s been subject to eviction, it’s like you’ve robbed a bank, you’ve done something wrong, when it’s a failure of policy. And it’s especially acute because there is so much tied to having a good income and being able to be housed it’s like, if you’re not, you have failed.

What do we know about evictions in Canada?

Listen here for The Overhead:

The post The Overhead: What We’ve Learned About Evictions appeared first on Spacing National.

“To redesign the environment we really have to redesign our whole value system – question the sacred cows – and ask ourselves what we really want, what has priority. For each project in my office we define our goals and set up a priority system. As we work with the client and begin to absorb the pressures to compromise we have a yardstick to measure our changing course. This makes it possible to intelligently evaluate the pressure in terms of our goals and decide whether or not to accept the change and if not, having completely identified the pressure we can at least attempt to reason with it. In practice, we find the system forces a greater depth of involvement between architect and client in the programming and the whole design process ultimately leading to the solving of more aspects of a project than is usually possible.”

• Frank Gehry, from Chapter Nine, ‘Easing the Edges‘

Written by Paul Goldberger, Knopf Publishing (2017)

With Frank Gehry having passed away in December, in memoriam I undertook reading Paul Goldberger’s massive opus on the late architect. Representing some five years of research by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Goldberger must be commended for succinctly capturing both the man and his work in its detail-laced 450+ pages. Providing an inside look at the deal-making behind some of our age’s most famous buildings, and populated with several smaller black and white photos of his personal life, the book’s only shortcoming is its all-too-brief colour insert—providing the requisite images of the Guggenheim in Bilbao. the Disney Concert Hall in his hometown Los Angeles, and one of his last projects, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, along with a picture of himself aboard his sailboat, Foggy.

Many architects may already be familiar with some of his early history, including his childhood in Toronto. Goldberg devotes several early chapters to this period, recounting his father’s struggles to maintain steady employment at the same time his mother was taking him to the Art Gallery of Ontario and to hear the symphony at Massey Hall, opening his eyes to both culture and art.

Along with working as a young boy in his grandparent’s hardware store, Goldberger describes Gehry’s early architectural education, including his introduction to the Los Angeles-based teachers and practitioners who would shape his thinking and provide ongoing mentorship. Most importantly, he describes Gehry’s immersion into the LA art scene and the enduring friendships with artists that would influence his work throughout his career.

Half the book is devoted to his early career, including his time working for a large commercial firm specializing in shopping mall design, where the two senior partners embodied the poles he navigated between throughout his career—one the business-minded dealmaker, the other driven by architectural form-making. If Goldberger has one central task here, it is demonstrating Gehry’s working philosophy—revealing how his buildings were not simply formal flights of fancy, but the result of a rigourous method, one that demanded active participation of the client.

The narrative arc of the book mirrors his professional career, with the pivotal moment being the unveiling of his redesigned Santa Monica home in 1978. Literally breaking the box of the stereotypical suburban home—using cheap materials like chain link and plywood—it ushered in a decade of important milestones, including the Pritzker Prize in 1989, shortly after winning the competition to design the Disney Concert Hall.

The book does not shy away from the challenges Gehry faced over the years, describing both personal and professional setbacks, including the delay of the much coveted LA concert hall through the 1990s, with its complexity to construct becoming one of its main criticisms (with another architect selected as Architect of Record, much to Gehry’s dismay).

Of course, the end of the 1990s brought his crowning achievement in Bilbao (1997), which demonstrated—to the Disney board and the world—that using sophisticated computer software (in his case CATIA) one could translate the architect’s vision into built form for the now unbelievable cost of $100M USD. This breakthrough enabled the concert hall project to resume—and despite having started before Bilbao—it was completed and opened in 2004 to great civic and critical fanfare. Goldberger adeptly captures all the wheeling and dealings between the architect, various clients, and civic authorities for both projects—storytelling that alone justifies the book’s price of admission.

Among many stories and anecdotes, a few stood out, particularly from Gehry’s early foray into architecture in schools in the late sixties, where he and his sister Doreen—herself a teacher and sociologist—worked for one term with a fifth grade class to design a new city. As Goldberger notes, a short film documenting the event may still exist and perhaps could now see the light of day. Another nugget the book daylights is the moment when Gehry shelved his Easy Edges cardboard furniture line—despite its potential to be a huge commercial success—for fear of becoming known as a furniture designer rather than an architect.

Having written about architecture for decades—and counting among his contemporaries such greats as Herbert Muschamp and the late, great Ada Louise Huxtable—Goldberger reflects in the afterword on the challenges of becoming a biographer for this book, a fundamentally different beast from writing about buildings alone. In addition to the several biographers he acknowledges as inspiration for Building Art, he surely owes a debt to Brendan Gill’s Many Masks (1987) about the other Frank, and whose author had a personal friendship with his subject. With Goldberg and Gehry, one senses a comparable camaraderie: a relationship formed before Gehry became a household name, lending the narrative a light, conversational tone, reminiscent of the easy banter Gehry shared with his friend Sydney Pollack in the 2006 film Sketches of Frank Gehry.

Published in 2017, the book’s final hundred pages candidly discuss Gehry’s status as a brand, questioning whether his firm could survive without him, with discussion of a partner’s attempt to buy him out—an offer Gehry declined. Several Gehry Partners projects were surely still underway at the time of his passing in December—and the office will most certainly carry on without him to finish those projects—including the high profile Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.

With Building Art closing out at the occasion of the architect’s 85th birthday—a lavish 400-person affair in the great hall of the Bilbao Guggenheim—one can imagine given his good health at that time he would’ve continued to work right up to his final days. For as the book makes clear, the work was all-encompassing and central to his life—alongside his wife Berta, his friends, and his family.

For Gehry, professional success mattered deeply but so too did living well—and in both respects, he seems to have succeeded.

***

For more information on Building Art, go to the publisher’s website.

***

Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

The post Book Review: Building Art – The Life and Work of Frank Gehry appeared first on Spacing National.

In Ontario, we have rent control on buildings occupied before November 15, 2018. That means the landlords for these buildings can only raise rents for current tenants once a year at a percentage or “guideline” set by the Province. If they want to raise the rent higher, they have to apply for an Above Guideline Increase (AGI), and their stated reasons have to meet certain criteria such as paying for expensive improvements to the building or hiring security.

But researchers have been studying these increases to how and where they’re applied, who is affected, if they’re being used appropriately.

Two of the researchers studying AGIs are University of Toronto Scarborough Professor Julie Mah and University of Waterloo Associate Professor Martine August. They worry these above guideline increases are being used by landlords as an extra revenue tool or even a means to push tenants out. Here’s Martine:

For tenants in these buildings, the landlords are doing things like trying to push people out with more eviction filings, effectively maybe pushing them out through economic eviction as prices are getting higher, making life very unpleasant through very disruptive renovations, while at the same time they’re own individual units are going left and neglected, and then also achieving higher rents through vacancy when people do leave. So it’s kind of lots of different things going on, lots of strategies being used, and lots of loopholes to rent control being exploited in ways that harm tenants and benefit landlords.

To find out how these AGIs affect tenants, we spoke to Douglas Kwan, director of advocacy and legal services at Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. He questions whether AGIs are even necessary in many cases, when the landlords make more than enough from current rents:

It’s really a scheme that is open to abuse because there’s no measure in terms of forcing landlords to justify that type of passing down of the cost is necessary. There’s no analysis in terms of what’s the overall income that they’re generating, rate of return of investment on these buildings to justify passing it down to tenants. And so that’s why tenants are angry. Because they know and see that landlords are earning quite a significant amount of income from their buildings. Why can’t they use that income to pay for the necessary repairs that they’re responsible for?

Are rules around rent increases being exploited for profit?

Listen here for The Overhead:

The post The Overhead: Rent Control and Rent Hikes appeared first on Spacing National.

When Reinier de Graaf published Four Walls and a Roof in 2017, it stood out for its rare willingness to expose architecture’s contradictions from within the profession itself. Architecture appeared there as a strange, conflicted discipline: simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, technically modest yet culturally overburdened, deeply implicated in global systems it neither controlled nor fully understood. The book did not propose solutions so much as illuminate fault lines—an act of exposure that felt both necessary and, at the time, sufficient.

Five years later, de Graaf’s architect, verb—with its chapter on Vancouver, republished with permission in Spacing Vancouver—demonstrated how easily architecture’s language of care, livability, and design excellence could be mobilized to legitimize deeper structural forces. In Vancouver, livability emerged less as a social achievement than as a brand: a symbolic asset deployed to reconcile inequality, speculation, and environmental stress with a reassuring image of urban success. Architecture did not drive these dynamics, but it helped render them palatable.

Architecture Against Architecture marks a decisive shift from those earlier modes of critique. In the book’s Preface, de Graaf offers a revealing self-assessment of his previous work. Four Walls and a Roof, he writes, dismantled myths cultivated by architects themselves, while architect, verb. took aim at myths cultivated about architects. Both were provocations rather than prescriptions. Writing, he insists, “isn’t necessarily propositional; in fact, the best writing isn’t.”

And yet, the Preface closes with an unmistakable escalation. “No debunking of myths this time,” de Graaf declares. This book, he writes, confronts “uncomfortable realities” that, if left unaddressed, will inevitably get the better of the profession. It is, explicitly, “a manifesto for the future of architecture.”

That tension—between a long-standing refusal of solutions and the adoption of manifesto form—animates the entire book.

Structured as a two-part manifesto, Architecture Against Architecture addresses, first, the organization of architectural practice itself, and second, the discipline’s relationship to the wider world. Part I, “Architects,” is an unflinching examination of how architecture is produced: the persistence of figureheads and founders, the feudal logic of authorship, the concentration of symbolic capital in individual names, and the widening gulf between those who design and those who own the means of production.

De Graaf’s discussion of celebrity architects, labour exploitation, and unionization is not framed as moral failure but as structural inevitability within a profession that continues to mistake reverence for relevance.

The now-familiar scandals surrounding high-profile figures are treated not as aberrations but as symptoms. A discipline that insists on branding collective labour as individual genius, de Graaf suggests, should not be surprised when power concentrates, accountability dissolves, and abuse follows. The call to “end the focus on figureheads” is less a cultural critique than a survival strategy.

Part II, “Architecture,” widens the lens. Here, de Graaf argues that architecture’s traditional preoccupations—form, authorship, permanence, even beauty—have become increasingly detached from the realities that now define the built environment: climate breakdown, political instability, inequality, and technological acceleration. The provocation to “stop building” is not a literal injunction but a challenge to architecture’s default assumption that construction itself constitutes social contribution. What the world requires, de Graaf insists, is not more architecture, but fewer illusions about what architecture can meaningfully deliver.

Across both sections runs a consistent claim: architecture depends on the world far more than the world depends on architecture. The discipline’s failure lies not in its marginality, but in its refusal to accept it.

Taken on its own terms, Architecture Against Architecture is at its strongest when it abandons nostalgia for professional authority altogether. De Graaf is unsparing about architecture’s impotence in the face of climate change, its complicity in housing speculation, and its habit of mistaking symbolic gestures for political effect. The book’s clarity derives from its refusal to console: there is no return to ethical purity, no redesigned toolkit that will restore architecture’s moral standing.

At the same time, the manifesto form introduces an interesting, unresolved tension. Historically, manifestos announce collective direction, shared purpose, and future action. De Graaf’s manifesto does something stranger—and arguably more real. It names the end of architecture’s self-mythologizing, but it remains deliberately ambiguous about what follows.

Is “architecture against architecture” a strategy for transformation, or a call for withdrawal? Does the future of architecture lie in institutional reform, in diminished ambition, or in ceding ground altogether to other forms of expertise and governance?

As mentioned, de Graaf has already disavowed the expectation that critique must culminate in solutions. The absence of a program is not an oversight but a position. By invoking the manifesto, the book invites a question it cannot entirely evade: whether refusal alone can constitute action, or whether it merely sharpens the terms of an impasse.

Important food for thought.

The significance of Architecture Against Architecture extends beyond the discipline it addresses. The book reads as an anatomy of professional authority under late modern conditions, tracing how expertise persists even as its capacity to shape outcomes diminishes. In this sense, architecture appears less as an exception than as an early warning. Other fields—planning, academia, policy, even governance itself—may recognize similar patterns: symbolic influence without control, procedural power without democratic legitimacy, and a growing reliance on image to compensate for structural inertia.

De Graaf’s intervention matters because it refuses to defend the profession against these conditions. Instead, it asks whether architecture’s continued insistence on relevance may be the problem itself.

To be clear, Architecture Against Architecture is not a hopeful book…it is an unusually lucid one. Its ambition lies not in charting a new future, but in insisting that the old one is no longer tenable. Whether the profession can endure the level of introspection the book demands remains an open question. What de Graaf makes clear is that the time for debunking myths has passed. What remains is the harder task of deciding what, if anything, architecture is willing to give up to persist at all.

That this question is posed from within one of the world’s most influential architectural practices only sharpens its force. The manifesto does not arrive from the margins. It comes from the center—and it is addressed, uncomfortably, to everyone still standing there. As such, Architecture Against Architecture stands as a must-read for architects willing to confront not just their image, but the costs of continuing to defend it.

***

To learn more about Architecture Against Architecture, visit the Verso website.

**

Erick Villagomez is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

The post Book Review: Architecture Against Architecture appeared first on Spacing National.

• From the press release

Authors: Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman, & Jacob Tilove (Monacelli Press, 2025)

At the end of 2025, architecture lost two juggernauts: Frank Gehry and Robert A.M. Stern. To say we lost two titans is a vast understatement, as collectively the two architects represented in many ways our architecture culture for the last several decades. One, the true formalist and the other, the historicist, their influence was felt in schools and the public realm, in boardrooms and on the city streets, by both seasoned professionals and the laity public alike.

But as yin to the other’s yang, while Gehry was a true design practitioner realizing such projects as the Guggenheim in Bilbao and LA Disney Concert Hall, Stern ran a successful practice and was Dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016. During this time, his academic acumen included documenting the architectural history of New York City, and before his passing this past November, released this 10-pound, 3-inch thick tome of NYC’s five boroughs, containing 2,000 illustrations and accompanied by essays on current events that occurred between 2000 and 2020.

This, of course, means the book begins with 9/11 and closes with Covid 19, which understandably provides a staggering amount of subtext for the buildings that were designed and built at this time. After a 100 page introduction, which concludes with the effects of Covid on the nine million inhabitants of the city that never sleeps, the book’s contents include a chapter on each of the smaller boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—with Manhattan divided into six chapters, including one devoted entirely to the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre. One imagines that the single-page Afterword on page 1,295 is perhaps Stern’s singular voice, a closing comment on the city he loved very much, as attested to by the six volumes he has produced on it over the decades, including New York 1880, 1900, 1930, 1960, and 2000.

And as the book points out, a lot has happened in the past twenty years…

In the first chapter, the editors recount the September 11 event itself, followed by the immediate aftermath to rebuild and the visions that were pursued, right up to its current form, including the architects and developers that made it happen. There is a section on the memorial for the victims, and the competition process that yielded the two fountains occupying the site now. There is also a section on the architecture of Santiago Calatrava, including the PATH station, great hall, and new St. Nicholas church he has contributed to the site, as well as the new Perelman Performing Arts Centre by REX, the most recent addition to the site. And of course, there is a section on the new WTC tower itself, starting with Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower and proceeding to the final WTC One by David Childs and SOM.

The next chapter – Lower Manhattan – includes some of New York’s most notable recent additions, including Little Island by Heatherwick, a curious private-public park development that is accessible from the newest section of the High Line along the Hudson. SANAA’s New Museum of Art, accompanied by its recent addition by OMA is also here. As is the new Whitney Museum, along with 8 Spruce Street by Frank Gehry, the late architect’s last contribution to the New York skyline, in addition to his IAC building in Chelsea, both featured here.

The next chapter, entitled Midtown, also features some formidable recent additions, including the High Line by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, joined by all the new buildings around it. A section on the massive development at Hudson Yards, home to the Vessel and Shed, is also here as one would expect it to be. This is joined by the new Moniyahan train hall next to Madison Square Gardens, representing a throwback to the days of grand transit halls, and perhaps what the original Penn Station might’ve been like. The chapter closes out with the new Supertall high-rises along the south edge of Central Park, with the three tallest by Rafael Vinoly (432 Park Avenue), SHoP (111 West Fifty-seventh Street), and Smith and Gill (Central Park Tower), topping out at 85, 84, and 98 storeys respectively.

Other highlights in the Midtown chapter include updates on such favourites as MoMA, the New York Public Library, and Lincoln Center, which includes the recent renovation of the NY Philharmonic’s home, David Geffen Hall, by Diamond Schmitt Architects.

The Upper East Side chapter also includes a section on Roosevelt Island, where Louis Kahn’s long ago commissioned design of the south point known as FDR Four Freedoms Park, was finally realized and opened in 2012. The chapters that follow on Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island also feature some wonderful new public spaces for the boroughs, including Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards and Barclays Centre, and Queens’ wonderful Hunter’s Point Park by Weiss/Manfredi, including a new Steven Holl-designed library.

Of the book’s 1,488 pages, over 200 are reference notes, a testament to the immeasurable research Robert Stern, David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove undertook for this magnificent tome. One can only hope that with Stern shaking off this mortal coil that its legacy will continue—perhaps New York 2050 when the city has become 100% renewable! If it makes it there, it will make it everywhere, so perhaps its microcosm of New Yorker’s can solve traffic congestion, affordable housing, and climate change all in one false swoop—such would be what Robert Stern would want to see and hear in the next iteration.

And though you may need to buy a new bookshelf to store it in our post-Covid micro-dwellings, it will be, in this architect’s opinion, worth the real estate. Stern and his cohort here have provided what could be one of the last great architectural surveys of its kind, as it will remain to be seen if the next generation prefers to have this kind of information made available in analog paper form or as a digital archive, spoon-fed by AI algorithms. Both Robert Stern and Frank Gehry departed at what is shaping up to be a most interesting time, certainly as along with AI we take the next step into our brave new world, ChatGPT and all.

It is for precisely this reason that we need guidebooks like New York 2020, reminding us that as there are surely nine million stories in the naked city, the way we share and inhabit our communities will always say the most about just how civilized a society we are.

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For more information on New York 2020, visit the Phaidon website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro-Vancouver based architect.

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A good news story in recent years is the amount of progress Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have made in communities across the country.

New CLTs are being established, and existing ones are winning by-in from various levels of government, as well as buying up land to preserve as affordable housing in perpetuity, sheltering units from the runaway, unaffordable housing market.

Often, CLTs preserve often overlooked and stigmatized housing such as rooming houses and single room occupancy hotels.

Joshua Barndt is executive director of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT) in Toronto, one of the first CLTs to rekindle this model in Canada. First, the PNLT was able to acquire property for affordable housing, then the City of Toronto created the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition program (MURA) to help create CLTs across Toronto. We asked Joshua what is needed to scale up, and out, and replicate for other communities:

We have a well-regarded, working program in Toronto, and the best ways for the province or the federal government to support it would be to provide funding to the City, so the City can expand and continue to implement the program… Since the City created the MURA program, other cities across Canada have begun to explore creating similar programs.

Norm Leech is the president of the Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust. They’re just begging their mission in Vancouver’s famously impoverished downtown. Norm tells us how this CLT uses a decolonized governance structure, co-led by Indigenous peoples, and with tenant-led programming:

If we look at the flaws of so-called ‘democratic systems,’ who actually ends up governing… it sure seems to be a pretty small interest group… our governance model was really more balanced. It was not overrepresented by that same small interest group… So we’re trying to consciously see if we can restore the position of authority and respect and power to grandmothers. Because, our communities, that was our greatest source of wisdom and care and compassion.

How can we help communities secure affordable housing for their neighbours?

Listen here for The Overhead:

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On previous episodes of this series, we’ve talked about the impact of an over-financialized housing market. It adds to the affordability crisis, and leads to eviction and displacement.

In this episode, we ask two experts if it’s possible to decommodify housing. To build housing that isn’t simply a product to be bought, sold, and traded.

David Wachsmuth is an associate professor in the School of Urban Planning at McGill University, and he describes a sort of catch-22 in the the current housing market:

It’s actually quite problematic to on the one hand say, very appropriately, we need to protect tenant rights and prioritize letting tenants stay in apartments, but then also say we really hope that the private market is going to build housing to meet those demands. You’re making it impossible for the private market to do that, because you’re not letting them make money. But you’re not supplying the alternative which is non-market housing that can fill that need. So we’re left with the kind of worst of both worlds.

Leila Ghaffari is an assistant professor of geography, planning, and environment at Concordia University, who says part of the barrier to decommodifying housing is it doesn’t actually benefit the politicians who say they want to create more affordability:

They don’t really want to decommodify housing… because our economy is so dependant on real estate right now, the real decommodification of housing is not in the interest of our governments at the moment. Not even at the municipal level: they are so dependant on property tax money. So it’s something we say, but the actions don’t show that we really understand the crisis we are living in. And this crisis today, the vulnerable population has been living through it for years and years. It’s just that now it’s more visible because the middle class is also feeling it.

Is it truly possible to decommodify housing when it’s become one of the biggest industries in the country?

Listen here for The Overhead:

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