Alvar Aalto Architech. Volume 16

Jyväskylä University 1951-71

This latest addition to the Alvar Aalto Foundation’s ambitious series of books is the most impressive yet. Aalto’s design for the campus for Jyväskylä College of Education, in the small rural town where the architect grew up, is one of the first competitions the master Modernist won as an emerging power in the early 1950s. The campus, with its late-19th-century buildings, needed to be expanded and repaired; Aalto’s scheme shows his mastery of creating an openness that allowed abundant light and landscape to become part of the buildings. With a wealth of photos and renderings, including previously unpublished material such as the competition drawings, and unrealized projects by the Aalto office from the same era. Texts by Aalto scholars Päivi Lukkarinen and Mari Forsberg.

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Archetonic

Jacobo Micha Mizrahi

Miquel Adrià

No country has more exciting emerging architects than Mexico, and in Mexico’s vanguard is Jacobo Micha, and his firm Archetonic. This first comprehensive monograph of Micha’s residential work – condominiums in the stylish, upscale Condesa and Polanco districts of Mexico City – is stunningly designed and photographed. Condos are particularly demanding for the designer, says the introductory essay, because they must work as a kind of “urban acupuncture” in the densely built city, and appeal to “a rising middle class in search of a place with all the amenities and services necessary to live on a human, pedestrian scale in the metropolis.” Mission accomplished: the buildings – and spaces within them – are also beautiful, with light, shape and space that show off the prodigious talents of this designer.

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