Siegfried Giedion: Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development (1956/1958)

Collection of essays from 1937-1956 by an influential Prague-born and Switzerland-based historian and critic of architecture.

First published in German as vol. 18 of the Deutsche Enzyklopaedie under the title Architektur und Gemeinschaft by Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1956

Translated by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt
Publisher Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1958
221 pages

Review: Harold Ehrensperger (The Saturday Review).

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Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978/1994)

Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas’s celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle — “the culture of congestion” — and its architecture.

“Manhattan,” he writes, “is the 20th century’s Rosetta Stone … occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall).” Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York’s history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.

Originally published by Thames & Hudson, 1978
Publisher Monacelli Press, 1994
ISBN 1885254008, 9781885254009
317 pages

publisher
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Le Corbusier: When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People (1937–) [EN, ES]

“In his brilliant and incisive style, Le Corbusier examines the architecture and people of New York. He loves the people but finds the architecture haphazard and in need of planning. Through provocative prose and revealing drawings, he proposes a new, beautiful, vertical New York.” (from the back cover)

First published in French as Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches. Voyage au pays des timides, Plon, Paris, 1937.

English edition
Translated by Francis E. Hyslop, Jr.
First published by Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947
Publisher McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, 1964
243 pages

Review (Gaither Stewart, Southern Cross Review, 2003)

Google books (EN)

When the Cathedrals Were White (English, trans. Francis E. Hyslop, Jr., 1947/1964)
Cuando las catedrales eran blancas (Spanish, trans. Julio E. Payró, 2nd ed., 1948/1958)