This instalment of ‘Archives’ features Mexican architect Mauricio Rocha. Born into a family that enabled him to look at the world through different disciplines, he attended one of the most politically progressive schools and has spent his entire life in the company of photographers, sculptors, musicians, artists, and architects. This upbringing is reflected in Rocha’s work today, from his early association with Gabriel Orozco to his later interest in Gordon Matta-Clark. This volume presents a total of eleven works completed between 2009 and 2023, including the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City, the Fábrica de San Pedro Cultural Center in Michoacán, and the School of Plastic Arts in Oaxaca. 396 p, ills colour & bw, 17x24 cm, pb, Spanish/Portuguese/English

A search for nearby nature and wildness After years of expeditions all over the world, adventurer Alastair Humphreys spends a year exploring the detailed local map around his home. Can this unassuming landscape, marked by the glow of city lights and the hum of busy roads, hold any surprises for the world traveller or satisfy his wanderlust? Could a single map provide a lifetime of exploration? Discovering more about the natural world than in all his years in remote environments, he learns the value of truly getting to know his neighbourhood. An ode to slowing down, Local is a celebration of curiosity and time spent outdoors, as well as a rallying cry to protect the wild places on our doorstep. Eye Books, 2024. Paperback, 368pp., 8.25 x 5.5

Edited by Jane Withers Studio, Social Sauna – Bathing and Wellbeing presents a new perspective on global sauna culture, ritual and design. By defining the sauna’s essence and exploring how this practice is evolving for the 21st century, the authors reveal how sauna is a deeply social practice that can offer renewed benefits for health, wellbeing, and community. Social Sauna explores sauna culture from ancient global traditions of steam bathing through to modern experimental sauna practices. The publication reveals the important role that design plays in creating spaces that contribute to wellbeing. With examples such as the Bathing Culture sauna in Gothenburg by architects raumlabor, the Agora sauna created for the nomadic SALT festival and Steam of Life by JKMM Architects for Burning Man Festival. Creatives such as Bauhaus Sauna Society observe sauna traditions and stage sauna lectures and workshops, developing their own rituals with a deep respect for the vernacular spirit. Therme Group/ Jane Withers Studio, Softcover, 160 x 230 mm, 126pp

Emilio Tuñón and Carlos Martínez de Albornoz have been working together since 2004, when the latter joined the practice of Mansilla + Tuñón. This monographic issue concentrates on their evolution, featuring numerous recent projects across a diverse range of typologies, from museums and concert halls to a health science facility, a winery, and houses, plus a conversation with the Madrid-based architects and illuminating essays. 360 p, ills colour & bw, 25 x 34 cm, pb, Spanish/English

Campo di Marte was devised in March 2020, at a time when Nathalie Du Pasquier was not painting. After cutting out photos of paintings produced between the 1980s and 2020, the French artist then placed them in a sequence as if they were a series of typefaces, focusing solely on their formal qualities and the scope for interpretation offered by their assembly. What comes out is an enchanting game of nonsense, an everyday surrealism in which the images make up sentences of sorts, interwoven with various elements taken from the world of books: titles, poems or mere calculations – times when the artist was lost for words. Campo di Marte will also be the name of an exhibition, curated by Luca Lo Pinto, due to be held at the MACRO in Rome at the end of 2020. As Du Pasquier states: "The book was supposed to come out at the same time as the exhibition opening. That won't be the case, but it doesn't matter as they really are two separate things. This paperback is not a catalogue at all: it's something you can browse through even while sitting on the underground." 144 p, ills colour & bw, 21 x 29 cm, pb, Italian/English

Massimo Gardone with Alessandra Muran has produced a volume that is many things: a living and vivid herbarium of nature's colors with elements collected and photographed while still fresh, but also an evocative photo book capable of enhancing with the eye of the graphic artist the colors and "pantone" of petals, leaves, branches and other elements of nature. The texts accompanying this research are an essay by Francesco Messina and reflections by landscape designer Matteo Lacivita who starts from the naturalistic observation of colors to also talk about painting, music and other art forms that color really cannot do without. 128 p, ills colour & bw, 22 x 32 cm, hb, Italian/English

145 pp, paper, full color, Princeton Architectural Press Subtitled Studies in Proportion and Composition. One of the very best titles to come from the Press, a brillaint study of the relationship of mathematics and beauty, of art and geometry. Vellum overlay pages, from fish to Mies, from Max Bill to Volkswagen, a study of form and detail. There should not be a bookshop nor design student who does not have this title. It is precisely good.

(more copies are enroute) From the publisher, TOTO, a book first published in 2002, now has returned. Saito has brilliantly photographed every element of the Barragan house, inside and out. 238pp, full color. "Serenity is the great antidote against anguish and fear" Luis Barragan, from his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech, 1980 Includes Casa Barragan, Case Prieto, Casa Galvez, San Cristobal, Casa Gilardi

Toshio Shibata’s large-format contemporary landscapes are distinguished by their haunting beauty, graceful composition, and meticulous detail. Using long exposures, and eliminating any references to people, horizons, or identifying geographic reference points, Shibata captures structures such as dams, bridges, reservoirs, and roads as they interact with their natural settings—mountainsides, rivers, and forests and fields. The results are highlighted by painterly composition; filled with patterns, lines, and fluid action; and unmistakably Japanese in their aesthetic. Curated and with commentary by Phillip Prodger, one of the most erudite and critical voices in contemporary photography, this book will appeal both to fans of Shibata’s work as well as an audience that has yet to discover his remarkable oeuvre. Prestel, 2024. Hardcover, 200 pages, 9.6 x 11.6 in

Studio Mumbai, founded by Indian architect Bijoy Jain (born 1965), is composed of architects and craftsmen who design and build each project themselves using local resources. From December 2023 to April 2024, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain welcomed Jain and his studio to design an exhibition space. Inspired by the rhythm of breathing, Jain creates structures of bamboo, brick and stone, forming a meditative landscape ripe for contemplation in dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s original building. Sculptures, objects and furniture interact with artworks by Hu Liu and Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye, whom Jain invited to collaborate with him. Published in conjunction with the exhibition, the catalog, conceived as a “work in progress” of the finished space, invites readers to discover Jain’s aesthetics and philosophy. The extensively illustrated book includes Jain’s drawings, photographs of his studio and current projects. Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain, 2024. Hardcover, 11.5 x 14.25 inches.

In 1958, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson bought a derelict cottage on the Fonthill Estate in Wiltshire, southwest England. Over the next four years they transformed it into a country home for their young family and an extended experiment in the methods and materials that would shape their practice; a pavilion drawing on the tradition of the English folly, known as Upper Lawn or the Solar Pavilion. Retaining the cottage’s original stone walls and one of its chimneys, the Smithsons built what they described as ‘a simple climate house’: two open floors looking over the hills and valleys of Fonthill, where life could be lived simply and in consonance with the fluctuations of weather and seasons. The innovations developed in this private and modest home would feed into large-scale projects, such as Robin Hood Gardens housing estate, for which the Smithsons would become renowned. This publication explores the rich story of Upper Lawn’s construction and inhabitation by revisiting the small book Alison Smithson created with architect Enric Miralles in 1986. Here, the book’s contents, including diary entries, photographs, drawings, and references, are republished in full in a new design, expanded by extensive new materials from the Smithson archive. Together, these documents describe the building’s lived life, picturing it as a ledger of wear and use, a means of private and professional exploration, and a lens onto the passage of time inside and outside its walls. MACK, 2023. Softcover, 144 pages, 30 x 21 cm

A beautifully illustrated history of the many inventive, poetic, and alluring ways in which color swatches have been selected and staged. Princeton University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 284 pages, 9.75 x 11.25 inches

Never before had the garden to fulfil so many demands as it does today. It is a refuge from digitalised life and acts as a bridge to nature. As a man-made place where plants grow, it is cultivated and untamable at the same time. While for centuries the gardener's ambition was to control and subjugate nature, today it serves more as a place for retreat, a possible surrogate for wilderness, a habitat for animals or it fulfils the dream of self-sufficiency. In this book, landscape architects, sociologists, architects, artists, philosophers and historians illuminate different aspects of the garden in the Anthropocene in six chapters: the garden as a place of community, garden as art, garden as a place of enchantment and rapture, opening up questions of what garden as a model could stand for. Birkhauser, 2023. Hardcover, 320 pages, 17 x 24 cm

Includes TATE and the Barbican. A brilliant second volume, 2000-2012 as the firm collects the momentum of some of the most important projects in Europe.

Pages:232Language:English17 × 24 cm62 Illustrations159 Coloured Illustrations, Ron Henderson A cocktail event of the very best trees, served by the very best landscape designers, incl Laurie Olin and Shannon Nichol. Why they loved their tree, where it was best, its botanics, its nature, its myth.

142pp, 8 1/4 x 5 1/2" illustrations by Colleen Miller "There is a tradition of shopkeeping, a tradition of codes, etiquette, and customs. For the most part, it is an oral history, passed along person to person. You learn to be a retailer, not by going to college, but by going to work. You learn from people who have learned how to run a shop." The fourth book from Peter Miller, this one a manual, of sorts, to the task and art of shopkeeping. SHOPKEEPING can be pre-ordered now. It will be shipped to you the moment it is available this spring, May 7th, 2024.

Hardcover, 8.75 x 12 in. / 176 pgs / 110 color. Printed on paper made from Japanese shrubs, this fabulous work of book art documents Ann Hamilton’s fascination with tactility. "SENSE is a cloth's hand, its drape and fall, the density and structure of the weave, the twist and ply of the yarn, the fineness of the thread, the animal, plant or human-made fiber from which it was made. While its color and surface may catch our eye, we can only know a cloth's weight, its texture and warmth,by touch." Ann Hamilton

240 pp, full color, celebrating the shops of the Big Apple, right at their front. Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, lounge, meats, pizza, donuts, fruit, fish, dogs, flowers, bread, tea, coffee, cheesecake

If there is no doubt that ‘size matters’, and that scale is one of the main factors in architecture, it is also true that the propositional interest of a building is independent from its size. To support this argument, the sixteen houses selected here represent the very different strategies and dimensions that can address domestic space. With size as organising element, the issue starts with a minimum shelter of less than 30 square meters in southern Australia, and includes examples that range from careful interventions on heritage to daring typological experiments, ending at the Chilean Andes with a large house-studio of over 2,000 square meters.