In this article, originally published by Strelka Magazine, journalist and writer Stanislav Lvovskiy recommends ten forthcoming books (which will be published this year) on architecture and urbanism written by leading experts and scholars.

A person of prescience never renounces the pleasures (and, yes, perils) of forecasting, especially the realistic kind, and even more so after all the “bad news” of the past year. Without a doubt, the year to come has its own surprises in store. For those who still relish reading or, at the very least, find it useful, let’s now have a preview of the pleasures we can expect from the university presses in 2017.

Forensic Architecture

Weizman E., Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (MIT Press) – April 2017

Eyal Weizman is professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College (University of London), Director of the Centre for Research Architecture and Global Scholar at Princeton University, as well as the founder of the ERC-funded Forensic Architecture project, the book resulting from which, Before and After (co-authored with Ines Weizman) was published by Strelka Press in 2014.

His new book presents an in-depth description of the novel research methods developed by the Forensic Architecture collective to investigate human rights abuses, military conflicts and destruction through the unique lens of architecture. The book features insights into the history of Forensic Architecture’s methods, peculiarities of their practice, their underlying assumptions and perils, as well as a representative collection of relevant documents, maps and images. The subjects of Forensic Architecture vary from the architectural reconstruction of a secret detention centre in Syria to the detailed investigation of environmental violence in the Guatemalan highlands. For those more inclined to a synthetic rather than analytic approach, Jenny Donovan’s remarkable Designing to Heal: Planning and Urban Design Response to Disaster and Conflict may also prove to be a useful complementary reading.

Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of DetectabilityBuy fromamazon.com

Walking in Berlin

Hessel F., Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital (MIT Press) – March 2017

It’s hard to image a new book having something to add to our understanding of the flâneur, a figure (and concept) thoroughly studied by scholars coming from both urban studies and architecture, urban and cultural history. However, here it is: the first English translation of Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin, capturing the images, sounds and rhythms of the German capital through the years of the Weimar Republic, catching onto the tectonic transfigurations of German and European culture and politics. Hessel, known mostly for his connection to Walter Benjamin, with whom he produced the German translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is a thoughtful and sensitive observer of the city in his own right. Focusing on the theatres, clubs, cinemas and public spaces of the city, he contextualizes the Berlin of the 1920s, sharing with the reader tales of the past as well as his analysis of the links between the parts of the city, from the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, so meticulously that the 1929 book, after everything that has happened to Berlin since it was written and published, can still be sort of a guide for the present-day flâneur. Aside from the complete translation, this edition includes Walter Benjamin’s essay on Hessel’s book, which was written as a review of the original edition.

Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the CapitalBuy fromamazon.com

The Icon Project

Sklair L., The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization (Oxford University Press) – April 2017

Leslie Sklair, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is the author of numerous works on the role that iconic architecture plays in a globalised economy (and the globalised world as such). Here he offers his perspectives on a new form of architecture that has appeared in the course of the last decades in the world’s major cities: designed by several architectural stars or architectural firms, it is owned by them as well, and inevitably serves private interests by externalizing power in the form of buildings, renovation projects or even whole cities. This in turn, according to Sklair, helps to promote consumerist values, be it by the “buildings recognised as works of art in their own right” or by what he calls “typical icons,” which copy the unique ones. Though the ideological component of Sklair’s project may seem predominant in this work, The Icon Project proves to be more of a case of sober critical analysis of vanity-fueled global architectural practices.

The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist GlobalizationBuy fromamazon.com

Across Space and Time

Haughey P., Across Space and Time: Architecture and the Politics of Modernity (Transaction Publishers) – February 2017

The concept of modernity is at one and the same time one of the most widely used concepts in various contexts and one of the most problematic. We tend to think of this concept as recent and applicable mostly to the West, or in other words to the Anglo-Saxon and several other Western European countries. The architectural history of modernity is in turn, according to Patrick Haughey, the editor of this volume, “unstable” since we always have to rethink “how humanity and its interventions transform space over time. We inhabit the buildings, but our beliefs, languages, politics, social structures, and environmental influences are subject to permanent change.”

What makes it possible for architectural history to exist as an optical device that can be used to explore the world are the remnants and physical traces we leave in the environment. Across Space and Time brings together scholars of art and architectural history to in a collective effort to see architecture through the lens of modernity as defined in different parts of the world. The resulting book provides strong architectural and cultural evidence for the claim of modernity being a far more powerful concept in terms of geography and time, in no way limited to the “Wext” of just a few (albeit politically, economically, and culturally influential) countries. Undergoing various transformations in the course of its expansion across the globe, modernity “has been negotiated through architecture, urban planning, design pedagogies, preservation, and art history in diverse locations around the world.”

Each chapter focuses on a particular case of such negotiation, from Robert Cowherd’s Identity Tectonics, which explores the story of two Dutch architects who met in 1923 in the Dutch metropole of Bandung, Java (contemporary Indonesia) to Jeremy Bentham’s Russian journey, during which the idea of his famous Panopticon was arguably conceived, and further to the study of competing discourses on urban modernity in 1960s Slovenia, Yugoslavia by Veronica E. Alpenc. Across space and Time is a contribution to the contemporary social critique of architecture as well as to the process of rethinking the theoretical frames and methodologies of architectural history.

Across Space and Time: Architecture and the Politics of ModernityBuy fromamazon.com

What Happened to My Buildings?

De Haan H., Keesom J., What Happened to My Buildings: Learning from 30 Years of Architecture with Marlies Rohm (NAi010 Publishers) – February, 2017

Architecture and time are condemned to a relationship that is at the very least complicated. However, this complicity is generally seen as somehow theoretical: it is something discussed by John Dewey, Yuri Lotman or other scholars. The one who is going to dedicate his or her life to architecture has to address these issues—usually once, usually during the early career stages—simply because one has to address them. Once we’ve elaborated our stance on architecture and time, we rarely rethink it, precisely because of its philosophical, theoretical nature.

But what do you do when you realise your craft has changed so dramatically that you are not sure anymore if your buildings are good or bad? When Dutch architect Marlies Rohmer found himself in this very situation, he bought a van and went for a trip—well, let’s say along memory lane—to reexamine 25 buildings he had created as an architect. Re-examination is probably an understatement here since Rohmer did a great deal of work talking with commissioners, residents and users, systematising and analysing information and making sense of the resulting insights. Hilde de Haan and Jolanda Keesom then wrote a book, a “sometimes moving, often hilarious and always informative exploration of what really counts in architecture.”

In short, they put the lessons learned by Marlies Rohmer into the broad contexts of urban life and city planning. Rohmer’s study cases provoke “questions of cause and effect, of control and contingency:” do an architect’s individual design choices matter and to what extent? Do the building’s users continue to construct it after the architect leaves, and if yes, then how? What about the significance of rules and regulations? And last but not least, what is the nature of the relationship between architecture and time at the relatively small scale of a human life, especially if this human happens to be an architect?

What Happened to My Buildings: Learning from 30 Years of Architecture with Marlies RohmerBuy from