Geoff Manaugh's debut book based on his blog bldgblog is first and foremost accessible. The writing found within is straightforward and sharp and inquisitive and damn beautiful. The style is so great. The BLDGBLOG book is about as close as you will get to sitting down with the guy for a chat. Immensely readable material coming from a field that is notorious for its bulky inaccessibility. Also just full of complex ideas and musings put forward elegantly and effortlessly. This is a must read book even for the loyal BLDGBLOG reader the book is just so beautiful and well put together that it will serve as a source book for ideas for years and years. Inspiring and entertaining the BLDGBLOG book is for anybody who loves design, architecture, the city, all things underground, and most of all for those looking to be surprised and delighted by Geoff ability to connect the dots - all of them. ( )

In case you're not familiar with the source material, BLDGBLOG is one of my favorite blogs out there. The tagline is Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures; in practice, this works out to be a mix of everything imaginable (and a fair amount of stuff that is barely so).
The organizing feature of this viewpoint is understanding the shape of the world as inescapably tied to its function, the aesthetic as more than just aesthetic. Manaugh asks us to consider the possibilities inherent in the sky, under the ground, and everywhere in between. Essays, interviews, and artwork serve as a stream-of-consciousness, allowing us to thread our way through Manaugh's dreams and nightmares of the world.
This sounds like a dry work of academic criticism, but it's the closest descendant I've found to Jorge Luis Borges' short fiction. Manaugh loves to spin off outlines of short-stories, pulling real drama and excitement out of what could be mere dry wisdom. He never forgets that - in the end - our surroundings are ultimately processed and received by us. Even his lifeless landscapes are viewed through the lens of humanity.
This might be what stops his stuff from being widely-cited within the formal field of architecture, but it makes his book into a series of adventures and one of my favorite recent reads. Very cool. ( )

Practically indescribable, this is amazing, fantastical, eclectic and beautiful book on .. hmm well on our relationship with the built environment. Perhaps he describes best himself: "Forget academic rigour. Never take the appropriate next step. Talk about Chinese urban design, the European space program and landscape of Alfred Hitchcock in the space of three sentences - because its fun and because the juxtapositions might take you somewhere."

Expanded from his blog but oh so much more, there are enough ideas here to keep a fantasy/sci-fi author happy forever. He takes interesting scientific articles, architecture projects, books and movies and lets his imagination go wild. Take some examples: There's a fascinating interview with the author Jeff Vandermeer on city building in stories and on the next page a fun aside on the architecture of email spam (yes they have 3D modelled keywords in spam). But it isn't just short bites there are longer themed chapters dealing with topics such as the underground or sound or the geological apocalyptic future. Rarely have I seen the end of the world looked at with such beauty as cities are ground down to the essential elements, rivers of liquid architecture "molten steel, swept by currents of gelatinous glass.. " London mixing with Paris mixing with Moscow. "What is the melting point of Manhattan?" he asks.

It's also a beautiful book in itself. It is lovingly designed as you would expect but it's also interspersed with gorgeous photographs from Dickensian ship breaking yards to lush futuristic landscapes. Its a book to flick through, to dip into or to ruthlessly devour. There is no need to have interest in architecture or geology, if you love ideas this is the book for you, if you get excited by speculative fiction this the place for you. It is joie de vivre writ large.

Now go get a taste of it at http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/. ( )