2017 holiday books gift guide
“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book,” wrote the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Which is yet another reason why books are among the best gifts. Discover someone’s passion — whether it’s music or movies, nature or travel — and there will be innumerable books devoted to that subject.
Below are dozens of titles from the past year that will appeal to all sorts of readers. None require plug-ins, nor will their technology go obsolete before the end of the Trump administration.
ARCHITECTURE
Architecture Matters, by Aaron Betsky (Thames & Hudson; 144 pages; $16.95). There’s vivid elegance in this set of 50 interconnected essays by SFMOMA’s former curator of architecture and design. Now dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Betsky blends biography and polemics with shout-outs to such personal icons as Napa Valley’s Dominus Winery in making the case that “When architecture really works, it brings the everyday and the immeasurable together.”
Black: Architecture in Monochrome
(Phaidon; 224 pages; $49.95). The black building fad has done more harm than good to San Francisco and other cities — but every trend has a reason for being, as this surprisingly beguiling storm-hued monograph shows. In addition to sculptural dramas of recent vintage, there are medieval Scandinavian churches; towers including Raymond Hood’s sublime American Radiator Building from 1924, immortalized in a Georgia O’Keeffe painting; and such oddities as a soundproofed university building clad in vulcanized rubber.
Design for Good: A New Era of Architecture for Everyone, by John Cary (Island Press; 280 pages; $60 hardback, $30 paperback). “The central premise of the book is this: everyone deserves good design,” writes the author, known locally for his early work with San Francisco’s Public Architecture, and he makes the case with a study of how 18 humane triumphs in the U.S., Africa and Asia came to be. Among them is Oakland’s Lakeside Senior Apartments, designed by David Baker Architects. Motel California: A Pictorial History of the Motel in the Golden State, by Heather M. David (CalMod Books; 184 pages; $45). Not Las Vegas but still grand fun is this San Jose author’s love letter to a time before national hotel chains and regimented taste triumphed over the budget motels where overscaled neon signs beckoned mom and dad to relax while kids frolicked in the pool. She also includes some great survivors — one of which is Palo Alto’s timelessly whimsical Glass Slipper Inn.
100 Buildings: 1900-2000, by the Now Institute (Rizzoli; 304 pages; $25). In which 69 internationally regarded architects (including San Francisco’s Stanley Saitowitz) are asked to list their 100 most important 20th century structures. The responses were then tabulated and the winners given two pages each. There’s plenty to quibble with — 25 houses but no Jazz Age skyscrapers, and almost no Postmodernism? — but an irresistible provocation all the same. The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, by Stefan Al (MIT Press; 272 pages; $34.95). This wisecracking and wellillustrated design history of Sin City’s Main Street starts with 1941’s Hotel El Rancho — billed as “a remarkable desert oasis” pairing modern comforts and the Wild West — and lingers on the gloriously garish excess of the 1960s. It concludes in today’s Las Vegas, more upscale but still “the ultimate manifestation of a quintessentially American practice: marketing.”
What Is a Museum Now? Snøhetta and the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, by Snøhetta (Lars Müller; 288 pages; $49). An unusually ambitious monograph, this exploration of the reimagined SFMOMA starts with a perceptive foreword by Rebecca Solnit on the neighborhood’s shifting cultural map. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Justin Davidson brings an outsider’s eye, and the extensive photographs include crude, riveting shots of the working models that the architects used to shape their final vision of a building whose meanings, Davidson writes, “shift and evolve and rub against each other depending upon who’s standing where at what time of the day.”
What’s So Great About the Eiffel Tower? 70 Questions That Will Change the Way You Think About
Architecture, by Jonathan Glancey (Laurence King; 176 pages; $19.99). Deceptively accessible fun, as each chapter poses a blunt question like “The Car: Liberator of citizens or conqueror of cities?” Put them together and the result is a concise yet freewheeling survey of topics ranging from the Taj Mahal to Brutalism and Zaha Hadid, by one of England’s most smartly opinionated architecture critics.