Thomas Weaver – författare

Gumshoe is new series of architectural books, introducing a new approach to the writing of architectural history. It returns the focus of architectural discourse back onto buildings, in a style and form that is original and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. It emulates the detective novel – a form of writing beloved by many, but also one that has enjoyed a parallel academic life in disciplines and by writers as diverse as psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), film (Sigfried Kracauer), and art history (Carlo Ginzburg) — but, significantly, not yet by architecture. Each volume will investigate a singular building as if it were a mystery waiting to be solved.Written by distinguished French architectural critic and historian Françoise Fromonot, the first case — The House of Doctor Koolhaas — is about the Villa dall’Ava, a private residence in Saint-Cloud, a suburb of Paris. Fromonot brilliantly unpicks, explains and interprets the very first building completed by Rem Koolhaas, who is universally regarded as the world’s most celebrated architect, and his Rotterdam-based firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Tommy and Mary desperately wanted to experience their fantasies, all the variations and extremes of sex, but the conventions and moralities of the time held them back. The war was coming relentlessly closer, threatening everything, but surely their lust was too strong for even that to hold them back?

Gumshoe is a new series of architectural books that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history. Emulating the detective novel, the focus is on actual buildings rather than on speculative designs and theories. The style and form is fresh and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. In Mysteries of a Communist Cave, the second book in the Gumshoe series, Lytle Shaw conducts an investigation of Oscar Niemeyer’s building for the French Communist Party’s (PCF) central committee in Paris.Designed in 1965, just as party theorists began to rethink many bedrock assumptions about representation, Oscar Niemeyer’s PCF building is a microcosm of the shifting political and architectural landscape of the 1960s. It is also a literal Marxist structure that can thus help us concretely picture just exactly what Structuralist Marxism might have been. Shaw draws out the PCF’s language and context one element at a time and puts the elegant curtain-wall building with its cave-like assembly hall into revelatory dialogue with interlocutors in film, philosophy, anthropology, and politics.Perhaps the ultimate mystery of the communist cave is that its owners have not more often and more powerfully presented their landmark building as the vivid source of imagery it could be for the kind of world the PCF might like to construct.

You Should Consider… brings together texts by American architecture critic Richard Ingersoll (1949–2021) from five decades, published in magazines such as Domus, Arquitectura Viva, and Lotus: critiques of key buildings and personalities, and reflections on topics and trends in architecture since the 1970s. The collection also offers a selection of his compelling editorials in the groundbreaking magazine Design Book Review, which he directed as editor-in-chief in the period 1983–98. Contributions by architectural historian Kenneth Frampton and architects John A. Loomis and Luis Fernández-Galliano place Ingersoll’s work in historical context.Ingersoll was one of the most eloquent and astute architectural critics of his generation. Although born and educated in California, and heavily influenced by Spiro Kostof, his mentor at the University of California, Berkeley, Ingersoll’s intellectual, cultural, and architectural outlook is essentially European, and more especially Italian, where he spent most of his working life. This European sensibility is expressed in many of the texts in this collection, in which he persistently writes about the need for diversity and equality, as well as a more sympathetic approach to the environment—decades before others realised the importance of these causes. Intelligence and clarity, astute analysis, vivid imagery and conciseness, as well as a subtle sense of humour, characterise Ingersoll’s captivating prose.

In Godzilla and the Temple of Atomic Catastrophes, the third volume in the Gumshoe series of “architectural detective stories,” architectural historian and critic Thomas Daniell investigates the mysteries of the Temple of Atomic Catastrophes, designed in 1955 by Japanese architect Seiichi Shirai (1905–83). Although never built, the memorial has become a touchstone in debates about monuments, tradition, and culture in Japan’s architectural world. Shirai’s temple design is one of the few architectural works to address the topic of nuclear power, while Japanese fiction, manga, visual arts, and photography largely avoid it. Shirai and his temple design are little known in the West, yet they represent an important and influential chapter in Japan’s architectural history. The 2011 Fukushima disaster once again made him, and the questions it raised, a central aspect of Japanese architectural discourse.Thomas Daniell examines events and developments in Japan spanning more than a century, from World War I to the triple disaster of 2011—the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. He explores Japanese tradition and the relationships between Japanese architecture, art, and critical theory within a broader historical context. Written in the style of a “roman noir,” his book offers an unconventional and entertaining search for the solution to this architectural mystery.