It is a great honor for the Louisiana Museum to feature one architect. Their exhibits are so good, you could go not knowing and know that it would powerfully affect. Tatiana Bilbao is a next generation architect - as Jacques Herzog writes, they collaborate much more than they compete. This is the first full monograph of the Bilbao work, from the early houses and social housing in Mexico City to the more elaborate mountain houses above Monterrey. They draw in her office, first they draw and work collages to what they hope for. It is a wonderful monograph of work - there is a photo of Tatiana holding rope, laying out the spaces of a new neighborhood on the edge of Mexico City. It is appropriately, and correctly titled, Walk the Line. Full color, essays by Hilary Sample, Ruben Gallo, a conversation in Basel with Jacques Herzog and Tatiana Bilbao.

Vitra Design Museum

Arquitectura Viva, Luis Fernandez-Galiano ed.

Arquitectura Viva, Luis Fernandez-Galiano ed.

Features four Valerio Olgiati projects, from Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Bahrain. Always hard to see new things for Olgiati, at least this is a start. Also, some Nieto Sobejano.

It is a brilliantly unromantic book of five places - London, Lagos, Guangzhou, Houston and Dubai - that opens with the author growing up in the London 1990s. Then off she goes, to some of the most difficult cities in modern history. She was born from the Dutch complex of water and harbor and culture - and she is drawn to the hardest such versions. Full color photos are the trees to the book, and she writes a path through them.

The newest projects, from the elegant Japanese architect Kuma. Who else gets the commission for the base camp of Mont Blanc and the Public Japanese Gardens of Portland. Full high gloss color of the eight works and eight projects of the period

We have had moments, years even, with no good title on Gio Ponti. Now. at the MAXXI in Rome, a brilliant exhibit, a brilliant catalog of an architect " enamored of civilization." What a treat, a long table of a feast of Ponti, the buildings, the drawings, the interiors, the furniture, all of it in colors and specifics and detail. It is the catalog you get when so many are enamored of you. It is civilization.

A very good cookbook, a triumph of the unmeasured teaspoon. $17 retail + $6 ship and handle = $23

A fine book from Harvard University Press, detailing from many cultures the long histories of navigation. And the subsequent weakening of powers as cities and electronics subvert the instincts. 544 pages,6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches 171 halftones, 54 line illustrations, 3 tables

People speak of their cat - but in Europe, they may even develop details of architecture, involving the life of the cat. Here, the lengths and speicifics of cat culture in Bern, Switzerland, and the small specific highways of their cats. $56.00 + 4 shipping

The very careful, elegant and favored study of the Teahouse, from 15th Century Japanese origin to present day. Folded pages, full color photography and plan details From Verlag Niggli, authored by Wolfgang Fehrer