New Books in Architecture

Planning Library Spaces: A Practical Guide for Library Building Projects (Bloomsbury, 2025)
is a book designed for librarians, trustees, local government
officials, architects, and interior designers who are designing or
planning to build, renovate, or reconfigure library spaces. Most
librarians embark upon a library building project with little experience
in space planning, architecture, or construction. Written by a
registered architect and professional librarian, this is a guidebook for
librarians embarking on a library building project. It includes a brief
history of library facilities, placing them in the context of public
buildings. An introduction to library planning principles and a
discussion of library design concepts and trends are presented,
including the impact of the 2020 pandemic on library design. Sections on
working with architects, building design/construction terminology and
the basics of reading architectural drawings provide insight into
unfamiliar jargon and visual communication. Extensive illustrations and
photographs show examples of library layouts and furniture and
equipment, and the final chapter addresses the challenges inherent in a
major building project. As library services change, buildings must adapt
to accommodate and provide these new innovations. Buildings are living
things, and this book will offer guidance to those embarking on a
project of any scale or size.

Guest: Lauren Stara is a registered architect and a
librarian, specializing in library building design. Her past library
experience includes everything from front desk clerk to director. As a
Library Building Specialist for the Massachusetts Board of Library
Commissioners, Lauren administers grant funds and provides technical
assistance and advice from initial planning through construction of
public library projects. She writes, consults, and speaks on library
design, service design, and future trends in libraries and is coauthor
of Responding to Rapid Change in Libraries: A User Experience Approach (2020).

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program &
Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at
Delaware County Community College.
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We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested
reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher
principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what
springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities:
cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly
mowed quads.

The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard
University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at
the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each
chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk,
paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate
connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its
evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of
Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in
otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at
postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows
how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on
generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture.
Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social
space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before
worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial
intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor
would become more important than research and education, that the allure
of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline.

A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that,
even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable.
The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone,
brick, and steel are here to stay.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On
(Brill, 2026) is the first comprehensive English-language examination
of the Dōjunkai Foundation (1924-2024). Compiled and edited by Dr. Marco
Pompili through interviews and studies, it is a must-read for anyone
interested in modern Japanese architecture. The Dōjunkai Apartments
(1924-1934), the Foundation's best-known work, introduced apartment
living to Japan in response to crucial historical and social challenges
such as urban reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1923
and the emergence of new working and middle classes. The book's texts,
by prominent scholars and architects, as well as a series of original
drawings and photographs from the period, bring the work of the Dōjunkai
Foundation back to life 100 years after its founding. While the
Dōjunkai Apartments have unfortunately been lost in the rapid changes
and greedy redevelopment typical of Japanese metropolises, this book
seeks to contribute to the preservation of their memory and their
significance.
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A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves.

Americans
spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds
of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and
maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely
and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al
deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and
environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through
the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself.

From
tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to
soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes
readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human
habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong
Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our
choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender
roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane
elements―like door-knockers
and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material
choices have remade the planet’s surface. He also confronts the darker
side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our
architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic
dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and
worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he
examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed
homes and space architecture built by robots.

Drawing from personal experiences
across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our
choices in housing continue to influence everything from social
relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing
that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more
sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the
coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity’s defining challenge into our greatest opportunity.

HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932
(Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the
architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s,
examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades,
with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that
these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s identity as
the programmes and people that they housed. Borrowing from the
architectural writer Christopher Hussey’s characterisation of
Broadcasting House as a ‘palace of the ether’ Dr. Darling asks how the
immaterial medium of the broadcast was given material and spatial form
by the BBC, and the engineers, architects and designers whom they commissioned.

The
book traces the development of the BBC both technologically and
organisationally, and the changing demands it had of the spaces which
accommodated it. It shows how associational networks and personal
affiliations affected who was commissioned to work on what became
Broadcasting House and offers a detailed account of the work of Val
Myer, who designed the exterior and shell of the new building, and the
team of architects who designed the studio interiors (Serge Chermayeff,
Wells Coates, Edward Maufe, Raymond McGrath and Dorothy Warren). In
documenting the design of Broadcasting House, and the responses to it, Palace of the Ether offers new insights into British architectural culture at a pivotal moment in the profession’s history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture