The BLDGBLOG Book [Paperback]

Geoff Manaugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0811866440 | ISBN-13: 978-0811866446

Read by millions since its launch in 2004, BLDGBLOG is the leading voice in speculation about architecture, landscape, and the built environment. Now The BLDGBLOG Book distills author Geoff Manaugh's unique vision, offering an enthusiastic, idea-filled guide to the future of architecture, with stunning images and exclusive new content. From underground exploration to the novels of J.G. Ballard, from artificial glaciers in the mountains of Pakistan to weather control in Olympic Beijing, The BLDGBLOG Book is "part conceptual travelogue, part manifesto, part sci-fi novel," according to Joseph Grima, executive director of New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture.

"BLDGBLOG is something new and substantially different from anything else I have seen," says Errol Morris, Director of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and the Academy Award-winning documentary Fog of War. "Secretly, I had always hoped it would become a book. Geoff Manaugh has provided the reader with an excursion into a new world—part digital fantasy, part reality at the intersection of art, architecture, landscape design, and pure ideas. Like the blog, the book is personal, idiosyncratic, and, best of all, incredibly interesting."

Editorial Reviews

Review

ERROL MORRIS
BLDGBLOG is something new and substantially different from anything else I have seen. Secretly, I had always hoped it would become a book. Geoff Manaugh has provided the reader with an excursion into a new world part digital fantasy, part reality at the intersection of art, architecture, landscape design, and pure ideas. It is personal, idiosyncratic, and, best of all, incredibly interesting.

JEFF GORDINIER, AUTHOR OF X SAVES THE WORLD AND EDITOR-AT-LARGE,
Every now and then you encounter a writer who is so culturally omnivorous and intellectually alert that he enables you to see the world in a whole new way. Consider yourself warned: Geoff Manaugh is that writer. If you re not careful, The BLDGBLOG Book will rewire your brain. How to describe it? Biosecurity, William Burroughs, ominous brown clouds, shards of architecture, sprinkles of experimental fiction, sedimentary layers of geology, photography, ornithology, meteorology let's just say it might be the first book wildly ambitious enough to tell us what the 21st century is about. Drop his name at cocktail parties now before everyone else starts doing it.

JOSEPH GRIMA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITE
Part conceptual travelogue, part sci-fi novel, part manifesto, The BLDGBLOG Book is above all a profoundly intelligent and inspiring wake-up call to architects, a plea to rediscover the power of imagination and interdisciplinary inquiry.

JUSTIN MCGUIRK, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, ICON
Reading BLDGBLOG is like pulling a wire from under the wallpaper and following it through a series of rooms you never knew you had. A road trip for the intellectually curious.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER, AUTHOR OF EVERYTHING THAT RISES: A BOOK OF CO
If mankind of the early 21st century finds itself brought up before some Supreme Galactic Court and forced to account for its dubious record, I can think of no better submission for the Defense than this extravagantly gifted and brimmingly generous volume of Mr. Manaugh s.

SARAH RICH, CO-FOUNDER, INHABITAT
A thousand years from now, looters will comb the rubble of ruined libraries in search of this book to study Manaugh's cubist love stories between humans and the cities they created.

About the Author

Geoff Manaugh is a senior editor at Dwell magazine and the founder and author of the popular Web site BLDGBLOG.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (June 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811866440
• ISBN-13: 978-0811866446
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 0.8 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #75,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The architecture of pleasure July 4, 2009

By Stephen Silberman

Format:Paperback

Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG is one of the most invigorating, subversive, visually engaging, and purely pleasurable outposts on the Net, and those qualities carry over into this beautifully written and designed book. The range of Manaugh's restless intellect is breathtaking, incorporating everything from urban design to climatology, music, astronomy, pop culture, and much more. Under the guise of writing a blog about architecture, Manaugh has crafted a tribute to the world-transforming power of imagination itself. Along the way, he wrestles with some of the most athletic and ambitious minds of our time, including the late novelist J.G. Ballard, classicist Mary Beard, architect Lebbeus Woods, and urban theorist Mike Davis, author of "City of Quartz" and "Planet of Slums."

It's hard not to laugh out loud when reading "The BLDGBLOG Book," because Manaugh's own imagination is so astonishingly fertile and nearly child-like in its refusal to abide in comfortably deadening assumptions. Like a prodigious three-year old armed with a flaneur's comprehensive street-level knowledge of the way things work, Manaugh relentlessly interrogates everything we take for granted about the environments we create. The overall effect is to open new vistas in what appeared solid and settled, as if you'd suddenly discovered a secret passageway to the unknown in your own cramped apartment -- one of Manaugh's pet obsessions.

For example, hearing about a collaboration between architects and sound engineers to create "sonic windows" in a house that bring the outside aural environment indoors, Manaugh imagines the resident of such a house -- built above a glacier -- nearly immobilized by awe and wonder. "Crystalline pressures of melting ice 3,000 feet below you suddenly break, sending cascades of sound shivering upward through the house's foundations," he writes, with a taut lyricism rarely found in books these days, much less on blogs. "Some days it's impossible to get out of bed, hypnotized by unearthly noises."

What is this kind of writing -- science fiction? Magical hyper-realism? Who cares? Manaugh has succeeded in creating his own genre and remaking the world on his own terms. To him, the oncoming parade of catastrophes of economy, population, and climate are arguments for striving ever more boldly to refashion the world in accord with our innermost desires.

One of the first people to recognize the author's young genius was Allen Ginsberg. Though Manaugh only elliptically refers to his teenage apprenticeship with the late author of "Howl" and other poems in this book, it's easy to see why Ginsberg was smitten. Manaugh is able to fuse abstract musing with concrete particulars in a way that is particularly suited to our historical moment, yet harkens back to the restless probing of reality embodied by Ginsberg's own poetic mentor, the pioneering 18th century multimedia poet William Blake. Even the modus operandi of this book -- the fervid "hyperlinking" between seemingly disparate realms of emotion, experience, and intellectual discipline -- feels appropriate for our densely networked, neurotically twittering era. But unlike other blog books, this volume will outlast our ever-accelerating Now, because it's so luminously written. It's easy to imagine a smart kid stumbling on scans of "The BLDGBLOG Book" in some pocket-sized Library of Congress on Mars 100 years from now and feeling energized to take up his or her own outrageous vocation.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A catalog of enthusiasm and imagination August 6, 2009

By Robin Sloan

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

There are a couple passage in Geoff Manaugh's intro to The BLDGBLOG Book that are worth noting here, because they frame the book in a way that's not necessarily obvious just looking at the title & description:

"In other words, forget academic rigor. Never take the appropriate next step. Talk about Chinese urban design, the European space program, the landscape in the films of Alfred Hitchcock in the span of three sentences -- because it's fun, and the juxtapositions might take you somewhere. Most importantly, follow your lines of interest."

And then:

"Finally, I want to reiterate that BLDGBLOG is fundamentally about following, and not being ashamed by, your own enthusiasms, whether or not they are rigorous and appropriate for the academic mores of the day, or even interesting for your family and friends."

So that gives you a hint: this is not just a book about architecture. It's really a book about enthusiasm and imagination. It reads like a catalog of excitement and wondering-what-if. And there's something in here for anyone with a curious mind.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars more than I expected, exactly what I wanted September 9, 2009

By Maayan Roman

Format:Paperback

This book does an excellent job of further developing ideas from the blog into a format appropriate for a book while still maintaining the feel of a blog. Great for a long train ride or as a coffee table book. It uses architecture as a lens for delving into related aspects of society and takes enjoyable turns into the stretches of imagination, science fiction, and fantasy, all while still making observations on society. Definitely recommended. You certainly do not need to read the blog to enjoy the book.