This past week, the UN confirmed that the planet’s global temperature is now set to pass the Paris Accord’s target of 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next few years. Except for a short plateau during the 2020 COVID pandemic, the world’s global warming has continued unchecked, and perhaps even worsened in the last few years due to a new wave of denialism and inaction.

From this daunting place, this new book, 75 Architects for a Sustainable World, emerges — and is needed more than ever, as the author notes in the book’s opening pages. Given the fact that building construction and its ancillary economic activities continue to contribute to 40% of global warming, the desperation and hopelessness Agata says she first felt in writing the book (and perhaps the reason why she stopped at 75) slowly transformed into one of inspiration and optimism, given the caliber of architects and designers within the book and their amazing work.

Having written about architecture and sustainability for the past two decades, since the advent of LEED and the release of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, I share Agata’s frustration that we are living the reality of Franny Armstrong’s poignant 2009 film, The Age of Stupid. But in all fairness to architects and architecture, these are not the only 75 firms practicing their trade with a sustainable mindset. As Patricia Patkau told my graduate class at UBC SALA back in those hopeful, early days, sustainability is bred in the bones of architecture, part of an architect’s means and methods for enabling us to design buildings.

Just as much as we weigh material options for fire safety, occupant health, cost, and aesthetics for a new project, so do we assess how and where the material is manufactured, what new technologies are being implemented for its production, the impacts it will have environmentally both due to its extraction and within its new building footprint, along with larger issues of urban demographics and material circularity—all the while weighing and monitoring our existing building stock. These topics, as it happens, provide the framework for 75 Architects, divided into five sections (with some architects appearing in more than one section).

In the book’s opening salvo, Sustainable Materials, Agata highlights the use of old-school materials like timber, rammed earth, paper, and cork, featuring architects whose projects work with local sources to minimize transportation impacts, along with recent innovations using renewable materials which can be 3D printed in situ. Shigeru Ban makes an early, and obvious, appearance in the book, notable for his exploration of lightweight, renewable materials, alongside one of Mario Cucinella‘s 3D-printed structures, which also graces the cover of the book. But it is the amazing work of Anna Herniger that steals the early spotlight, who—while not as well known as several others featured here—has perhaps had one of the biggest global impacts over her career, contributing to several sustainable structures in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

The book’s next section, The New Dimension of Innovation, looks at sustainability more holistically, focusing on larger economies of scale beyond the single building to understand the systems influencing architecture and design. It is therefore no surprise to see a project currently underway for a new Google campus by BIG and Heatherwick, whose ambition is to be 100% carbon-free operationally by 2030. Small-scale impacts on land use and development are also here, whether it is the single-family dwellings in Pekka Littow‘s micro-units or at the neighbourhood scale as seen in Space&Matter‘s waterfront development in Amsterdam. At the scale of the cultural building, Studio Gang makes an appearance for their innovative Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation.

In the next two sections, Architecture, Greenery, & Landscape and Reinventing by Converting, Agata spends some time looking at architecture’s two ancillary sustainable pursuits: landscape design and building preservation. In the former, we see evidence of several innovative landscape strategies for reducing the heat island effect and rainwater management, while in the latter section, a reminder that sometimes the most sustainable building is no building at all. Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto is here in the landscape section featuring his House of Hungarian Music in Budapest. In the conservation section, Agata includes a broad selection of innovative re-use, with PAU‘s repurposing of an old Domino sugar factory into a new, vibrant waterfront hub in Brooklyn being a standout (and whose Principal, Vishaan Chakrabarti, was also the subject of a 2025 Spacing review).

For the book’s final section, Visions for the Future, Agata has selected a rich crosscut of designers and firms, from the Sunflower Houses of sole-practitioner Koichi Takada alongside the behemoth SOM with their latest carbon-neutral residential high-rise. Also here are cultural innovations by Benedetta Tagliabue and Chipperfield Architects, with the former represented by her Bamboo Cultural Experience Centre in Sichuan, and the latter by his work renovating such important architectural icons as the New National Gallery in Berlin and National Archaeological Museum in Athens. These latter two projects show the different ways our current practitioners can meaningfully and positively impact our ecological footprint, providing for the inspiration and optimism alluded to in the book’s opening pages, as noted by Agata along with Charles Wu of Polysmiths.

The book is a must-read for architects, designers, and students. Particularly for the practitioners and educators who will adversely impact the next generation if they choose to carry on with their heads in the sand. For as the book’s author notes:

Writing this book was an exceptional adventure and an opportunity to immerse myself in the ingenious philosophies and architecture of tomorrow. My first impression upon becoming aware of the impact of the industry and its global scale was devastating. However, my research with architects and learning more about the newest projects have brought promising hope.

With this book, it is clear the next move is ours—we can choose to be Nero and play our fiddle while civilization burns, or we can be Marcus Aurelius and find within ourselves what is most noble: that which represents the best of our humanity needed to overcome this global problem. As Charles Wu notes in his opening remarks, humanity has demonstrated it can come together to overcome a global pandemic, so there is hope we can do the same for climate change.

And as is clear from the contents of 75 Architects for a Sustainable World, though we may be the cause of the problem, the projects here are more than a testament that with hard work and innovation we can also be the purveyors of the solution.

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For more information, go to Prestel Verlag.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

The post Book Review: 75 Architects for a Sustainable World appeared first on Spacing National.

In this episode, we talk about the physical and systemic barriers facing people living with a disability who are trying to access housing in Canada.

University of British Columbia Adjunct Professor Colin Phillips and Balanced Supply of Housing Research Manager Alina McKay co-authored the report “The Right to Accessible Housing: Identifying Needs and Building the Right Supply.” In it, they document the many challenges people with disabilities face finding and securing safe and appropriate housing.

As McKay says, the right to housing for people with accessibility needs is often ignored from the first interaction:

When we think the housing journey, we can really think about where discrimination might happen, and the first place it happens is when folks with disabilities… is looking for housing and there’s a for-rent sign posted, someone approaches the landlord, ‘I’d like to rent this unit,’ and the first thing they hear back is, ‘Oh, sorry, it’s not available.’ Because of that first encounter, often that landlord sees someone with a disability and will make the decision. It’s discriminating against that person… and we’ve heard from participants that that happened a lot.

How do we ensure people with accessibility needs have safe, suitable, affordable housing?

Listen here for The Overhead:

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“Although this book includes works from all phases of Kahn’s career, it is neither a “complete works” nor a monographic survey. To maximize the area dedicated to Kahn’s iterative and exploratory drawings means to minimize those photographs and print-ready images that are the conventional means of presenting architecture. The text, too, by focusing on drawing and representation, omit much contextual information that belongs in more general project descriptions. And yet architectural drawings such as those reproduced here work best in the space between what we see and what we know. Those readers who know Kahn’s work well will hopefully recognize in this lack of photos and conventional descriptions an invitation: to dwell in that space between seeing and knowing, and so to participate more intimately with Kahn and his associates in their acts of creation.

• From the Preface

Edited by Michael Merrill, Lars Müller Publishers (2024)

Rare are books that have distilled a subject to its essence, allowing an auteur the ability to curate a reading of a particular idiom, as is the case in this book on architect and educator Louis Kahn. For an architect who passed away in 1971, his legacy continues to inspire architectural students and practitioners alike, and editor Mike Merrill has done a masterful job of providing us with a view of the great architect through his hand drawings, with reproductions of many yellow trace doodles along with formative sketches from his travels.

As noted early in the book, those who know him less (and shame on you!) should have a monograph with the photos of the many works featured here close at hand, but the learned crowd will revel through the details of his work as they appear in a new and wonderful way.

Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing offers a compelling exploration of the relationship between drawing and architectural thought in the work of the celebrated architect Louis Kahn. Rather than presenting drawings merely as preparatory sketches for completed buildings, the book argues that drawing was central to Kahn’s creative process and intellectual development.

Through a rich collection of sketches, travel drawings, architectural studies, and project documents, the publication reveals how Kahn used drawing as a means of inquiry, reflection, and discovery. For architects, students, and scholars interested in design methodology, the book provides invaluable insight into one of the twentieth century’s most influential architectural minds.

The book’s central premise is that drawing was not simply a technical tool for Kahn but an essential way of seeing and understanding the world. Throughout his career, Kahn filled notebooks with observations of landscapes, ruins, urban spaces, and architectural details. These drawings were not intended as polished artworks; instead, they functioned as explorations of form, light, proportion, and spatial relationships.

The authors demonstrate that Kahn’s sketches were instrumental in shaping his architectural philosophy and that many of the ideas found in his most celebrated buildings can be traced back to his drawing practice.

The book itself is cloth-bound and hard-covered, and at 512-pages, 12″ x 9.5″ and two inches thick, it provides for the large-format reproduction of his drawings, in which one can pore over all of Kahn’s glorious details.

The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Kahn’s drawings, ranging from quick observational sketches to carefully developed studies. These images allow readers to witness the architect’s thought process directly. Unlike conventional architectural monographs that focus primarily on finished buildings, The Importance of a Drawing emphasizes the creative journey that precedes construction.

The drawings reveal moments of experimentation, uncertainty, and discovery, reminding readers that architecture is fundamentally a process of investigation rather than a straightforward path from concept to completion.

The organization of the book contributes significantly to its effectiveness—rather than presenting drawings chronologically alone, the editors group them thematically, allowing readers to understand recurring concerns in Kahn’s work. Themes such as light, monumentality, geometry, and the relationship between nature and architecture emerge repeatedly throughout the volume.

This approach highlights the consistency of Kahn’s intellectual interests while also demonstrating how his ideas evolved. Readers will gain a deeper appreciation of the continuity between his early sketches and later architectural masterpieces.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is its treatment of Kahn’s travel drawings. During his journeys through Europe, Egypt, and other regions, Kahn produced numerous sketches of ancient ruins, historic cities, and monumental structures. These drawings reveal his profound fascination with timeless forms and enduring architectural principles.

Rather than merely documenting what he saw, Kahn interpreted these places through drawing, analyzing their spatial qualities and emotional impact. The book effectively illustrates how these experiences influenced projects such as the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the National Assembly Building. Readers can clearly trace connections between the architect’s observations of historical architecture and his own innovative designs.

As we are all currently navigating the undiscovered country of AI, perhaps the book’s most important contribution is its challenge to contemporary assumptions about architectural practice. In an age dominated by machine learning, digital modeling, and computer-generated imagery, Kahn’s drawings serve as a reminder of the value of hand drawing as a mode of thinking. The book argues convincingly that drawing enables a unique form of engagement with space and form that digital tools cannot entirely replace.

Kahn’s sketches demonstrate how the physical act of drawing encourages observation, contemplation, and experimentation. For architecture students accustomed to working primarily on computers, this message is particularly relevant and thought-provoking.

In addition to his drawings, the accompanying essays written by architectural historians, critics, and scholars provide valuable context for understanding Kahn’s work. These texts explore the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of his drawings. Rather than simply describing the images, the essays analyze how drawing functioned within Kahn’s broader design process. They discuss his belief that architecture should express fundamental human values and explore how drawing helped him search for what he called the “beginnings” of a project. These scholarly contributions enrich the visual material and help readers understand why drawing occupied such a central place in Kahn’s practice.

The book also raises broader questions about creativity and design. By examining Kahn’s drawings, readers are encouraged to consider how ideas emerge and evolve. The sketches reveal that innovation often results from sustained observation and reflection rather than sudden inspiration, demonstrating how, in Kahn’s work, a drawing can function as a dialogue between the designer and the world, allowing complex ideas to develop gradually over time.

Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing succeeds as it reconfirms for the Kahn cognoscenti the importance of drawing to the architectural act, while for those new to his work, it will illuminate the importance of this essential but often overlooked aspect of architectural practice—revealing drawing not as a secondary activity but as a fundamental mode of thinking.

Through its extensive visual documentation, insightful essays, and thoughtful organization, the book provides a nuanced understanding of how Kahn developed his architectural vision, deepening our appreciation for both his buildings and his creative process.

Overall, Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing offers an outstanding contribution to architectural scholarship and visual culture, reconfirming for those who know his work well that drawing was at the heart of his approach to architecture and offering readers a rare opportunity to engage directly with his creative thinking.

Richly illustrated and intellectually stimulating, the book will appeal to architects, students, historians, and artists alike in the relationship between observation, imagination, and design. More than a study of one architect’s drawings, it is a powerful argument for the enduring importance of drawing as a tool for understanding and shaping the world.

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For more information on Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing, go to the Lars Müller website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

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We’ve spoken a lot about community land trusts in this series, and it’s been gaining momentum in cities and towns all over Canada. But there are some policy choices that are stalling some land trust projects. Here we bring you two cases from Vancouver, and how these barriers can be removed.

First, we speak to Djaka Blais, executive director of the Hogan’s Alley Society. There is a municipal plan in place to rehabilitate an historically Black community, which was ruined years ago when viaducts were built over top of it for an expressway that was never completed, but the plan can’t move ahead while those unused viaducts still stand:

We want to see municipal, provincial, and federal governments prioritizing moving forward with this plan, which includes the removal of the viaducts, to really be able to deliver on the commitments that were made in this municipal policy, speaking to cultural redress and reconciliation.

And we speak to Andy Bond, executive director of the Downtown East Side Community Land Trust, speaks about his organizations success in acquiring property for affordable housing in this low-income neighbourhood. But the City has also changed zoning in the area that previously mandated 60% non-market housing:

Concerns for us is the possibility of  land values being driven up because of this… the time that we’re in right now with market conditions, I don’t think there’s a rush to buy buildings… but, down the road, it could be problematic in terms of raising land value through speculation.

How can policy changes help community land trusts move forward?

Listen here for The Overhead:

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Author: Gregory Dreicer (MIT Press, 2026)

We tend to think of infrastructure as something we build. Concrete, steel, timber—assembled into roads, towers, and bridges that quietly organize our lives. But what if infrastructure is not only physical? What if it is also narrative—constructed, repeated, and reinforced until it becomes indistinguishable from fact?

Gregory Dreicer’s American Bridge: Reinventing Building, Making History begins from this unsettling premise. It is not, despite appearances, a book about bridges. Or rather, it is a book about bridges in the same way that a mirror is about reflection. The object is there, but what matters is what it reveals.

At the centre of Dreicer’s account is the nineteenth-century lattice bridge, patented by Ithiel Town in 1820—a structure composed of small, repeatable parts assembled into a seemingly improbable whole. Histories of engineering have long treated such innovations as steps in a linear progression: wood to iron, craft to industry, simplicity to complexity. But Dreicer refuses this narrative. He asks a more difficult question: not how bridges evolved, but how we came to believe that they did.

The answer, he argues, lies in what he calls “evolutionism”—a storytelling device that arranges technologies into neat, forward-moving sequences, imbuing them with inevitability and direction. These stories feel scientific, even objective, but they are anything but. They are narratives that prioritize continuity over rupture, nation over network, and progress over ambiguity. In doing so, they obscure the messy, collaborative, and often contradictory processes through which technologies actually emerge.

This is where American Bridge becomes something more than a history of technology. It becomes a critique of how knowledge itself is constructed. Dreicer shows how historians, engineers, and institutions have collectively reinforced these narratives—often unintentionally—by privileging visible artifacts over invisible processes. The bridge, as an object, becomes easier to document than the systems of labour, organization, and exchange that produced it. The result is a historical record that is materially rich but conceptually thin.

The lattice bridge disrupts this record. Its significance lies not in its form, but in its logic. It reimagines building as a process of assembly rather than craft, distributing labour across standardized parts and reducing dependence on specialized skill. In this sense, it anticipates industrialization—not through the factory, but through the construction site. Dreicer goes so far as to suggest that this transformation rivals the Ford Model T in its impact, though it has been largely forgotten in canonical accounts of industrial history.

But if the lattice bridge is so consequential, why has it remained peripheral?

Dreicer’s answer is as provocative as it is convincing, because it does not fit the story we prefer to tell. It is neither heroic nor singular. It does not belong to a single inventor or nation. It resists authorship. And perhaps most importantly, it foregrounds process—something far more difficult to narrate than object.

This critique extends beyond evolutionism to nationalism. The very term “American bridge,” Dreicer notes, is less a technical classification than a narrative construction—one that assigns identity to an artifact in order to stabilize its meaning. Yet the history he reconstructs reveals a far more fluid reality: one of transnational exchanges, itinerant engineers, and shared techniques that defy clear boundaries. “Places don’t invent,” he reminds us. “People do.”

For readers attuned to contemporary debates in planning and urbanism, these arguments will feel uncomfortably familiar. We continue to rely on simplified narratives—of supply and demand, growth and progress, innovation and inevitability—to explain complex systems. These narratives do not merely describe reality; they shape it. They determine what counts as evidence, what remains invisible, and what forms of intervention are considered possible.

In this sense, American Bridge resonates far beyond its historical scope. It offers a way of thinking about infrastructure not as a fixed system, but as an ongoing negotiation between material and meaning. The bridges we build, Dreicer suggests, are inseparable from the stories we tell about them. Both function most effectively when they remain unseen. Both become visible only when they fail.

If there is a limitation to the book, it lies in its distance from the present. Dreicer stops short of fully connecting his analysis to contemporary conditions, leaving readers to draw their own parallels. Yet this absence may also be its strength. By resisting the temptation to prescribe, the book maintains a critical openness that invites reflection rather than resolution.

That openness is not always easy to navigate. American Bridge is dense… at times demanding and unapologetically theoretical. It asks its reader to question not only what they know, but how they know it. For those expecting a conventional history of engineering, this may prove disorienting. For others, it is precisely the point.

Like the bridges it examines, the book operates as a kind of crossing—between disciplines, between narratives, between ways of seeing. It asks us to reconsider what lies beneath the structures we take for granted, and to recognize that the most consequential infrastructures are often the ones we cannot see.

The question Dreicer ultimately poses is a simple one: can we change the story?

It is a question that extends well beyond bridges—and one that feels increasingly difficult to ignore.

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For more information about American Bridge, visit the MIT Press website.

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Erick Villagomez is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

The post Book Review – American Bridge: Reinventing Building, Making History appeared first on Spacing National.

The Balanced Supply of Housing research node was formed to imagine real, working solutions to the housing crisis in Canada. But the first step to solving a problem is understanding it.

We’ve covered many issues with this special series, but the issue we keep returning to is security of tenure (or lack thereof). The BSH has completed various studies into evictions since its inception — why they happen, how, who they impact, and the outcomes — and now they’ve brought all their evidence, data, and recommendations together into a free book for anyone to access.

University of British Columbia Professor Alexandra Flynn and BSH Research Manager Alina McKay return to The Overhead to tell us about the evictions book, a digital tool for comparing tenants’ rights from province to province, and breaking the taboo of talking about evictions.

Here’s Alex:

The majority of evictions are happening through no fault of the tenant… And yet it’s true: it does seem extremely taboo. If you’ve been somebody who’s been subject to eviction, it’s like you’ve robbed a bank, you’ve done something wrong, when it’s a failure of policy. And it’s especially acute because there is so much tied to having a good income and being able to be housed it’s like, if you’re not, you have failed.

What do we know about evictions in Canada?

Listen here for The Overhead:

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“To redesign the environment we really have to redesign our whole value system – question the sacred cows – and ask ourselves what we really want, what has priority. For each project in my office we define our goals and set up a priority system. As we work with the client and begin to absorb the pressures to compromise we have a yardstick to measure our changing course. This makes it possible to intelligently evaluate the pressure in terms of our goals and decide whether or not to accept the change and if not, having completely identified the pressure we can at least attempt to reason with it. In practice, we find the system forces a greater depth of involvement between architect and client in the programming and the whole design process ultimately leading to the solving of more aspects of a project than is usually possible.”

• Frank Gehry, from Chapter Nine, ‘Easing the Edges‘

Written by Paul Goldberger, Knopf Publishing (2017)

With Frank Gehry having passed away in December, in memoriam I undertook reading Paul Goldberger’s massive opus on the late architect. Representing some five years of research by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Goldberger must be commended for succinctly capturing both the man and his work in its detail-laced 450+ pages. Providing an inside look at the deal-making behind some of our age’s most famous buildings, and populated with several smaller black and white photos of his personal life, the book’s only shortcoming is its all-too-brief colour insert—providing the requisite images of the Guggenheim in Bilbao. the Disney Concert Hall in his hometown Los Angeles, and one of his last projects, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, along with a picture of himself aboard his sailboat, Foggy.

Many architects may already be familiar with some of his early history, including his childhood in Toronto. Goldberg devotes several early chapters to this period, recounting his father’s struggles to maintain steady employment at the same time his mother was taking him to the Art Gallery of Ontario and to hear the symphony at Massey Hall, opening his eyes to both culture and art.

Along with working as a young boy in his grandparent’s hardware store, Goldberger describes Gehry’s early architectural education, including his introduction to the Los Angeles-based teachers and practitioners who would shape his thinking and provide ongoing mentorship. Most importantly, he describes Gehry’s immersion into the LA art scene and the enduring friendships with artists that would influence his work throughout his career.

Half the book is devoted to his early career, including his time working for a large commercial firm specializing in shopping mall design, where the two senior partners embodied the poles he navigated between throughout his career—one the business-minded dealmaker, the other driven by architectural form-making. If Goldberger has one central task here, it is demonstrating Gehry’s working philosophy—revealing how his buildings were not simply formal flights of fancy, but the result of a rigourous method, one that demanded active participation of the client.

The narrative arc of the book mirrors his professional career, with the pivotal moment being the unveiling of his redesigned Santa Monica home in 1978. Literally breaking the box of the stereotypical suburban home—using cheap materials like chain link and plywood—it ushered in a decade of important milestones, including the Pritzker Prize in 1989, shortly after winning the competition to design the Disney Concert Hall.

The book does not shy away from the challenges Gehry faced over the years, describing both personal and professional setbacks, including the delay of the much coveted LA concert hall through the 1990s, with its complexity to construct becoming one of its main criticisms (with another architect selected as Architect of Record, much to Gehry’s dismay).

Of course, the end of the 1990s brought his crowning achievement in Bilbao (1997), which demonstrated—to the Disney board and the world—that using sophisticated computer software (in his case CATIA) one could translate the architect’s vision into built form for the now unbelievable cost of $100M USD. This breakthrough enabled the concert hall project to resume—and despite having started before Bilbao—it was completed and opened in 2004 to great civic and critical fanfare. Goldberger adeptly captures all the wheeling and dealings between the architect, various clients, and civic authorities for both projects—storytelling that alone justifies the book’s price of admission.

Among many stories and anecdotes, a few stood out, particularly from Gehry’s early foray into architecture in schools in the late sixties, where he and his sister Doreen—herself a teacher and sociologist—worked for one term with a fifth grade class to design a new city. As Goldberger notes, a short film documenting the event may still exist and perhaps could now see the light of day. Another nugget the book daylights is the moment when Gehry shelved his Easy Edges cardboard furniture line—despite its potential to be a huge commercial success—for fear of becoming known as a furniture designer rather than an architect.

Having written about architecture for decades—and counting among his contemporaries such greats as Herbert Muschamp and the late, great Ada Louise Huxtable—Goldberger reflects in the afterword on the challenges of becoming a biographer for this book, a fundamentally different beast from writing about buildings alone. In addition to the several biographers he acknowledges as inspiration for Building Art, he surely owes a debt to Brendan Gill’s Many Masks (1987) about the other Frank, and whose author had a personal friendship with his subject. With Goldberg and Gehry, one senses a comparable camaraderie: a relationship formed before Gehry became a household name, lending the narrative a light, conversational tone, reminiscent of the easy banter Gehry shared with his friend Sydney Pollack in the 2006 film Sketches of Frank Gehry.

Published in 2017, the book’s final hundred pages candidly discuss Gehry’s status as a brand, questioning whether his firm could survive without him, with discussion of a partner’s attempt to buy him out—an offer Gehry declined. Several Gehry Partners projects were surely still underway at the time of his passing in December—and the office will most certainly carry on without him to finish those projects—including the high profile Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.

With Building Art closing out at the occasion of the architect’s 85th birthday—a lavish 400-person affair in the great hall of the Bilbao Guggenheim—one can imagine given his good health at that time he would’ve continued to work right up to his final days. For as the book makes clear, the work was all-encompassing and central to his life—alongside his wife Berta, his friends, and his family.

For Gehry, professional success mattered deeply but so too did living well—and in both respects, he seems to have succeeded.

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For more information on Building Art, go to the publisher’s website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.

The post Book Review: Building Art – The Life and Work of Frank Gehry appeared first on Spacing National.

In Ontario, we have rent control on buildings occupied before November 15, 2018. That means the landlords for these buildings can only raise rents for current tenants once a year at a percentage or “guideline” set by the Province. If they want to raise the rent higher, they have to apply for an Above Guideline Increase (AGI), and their stated reasons have to meet certain criteria such as paying for expensive improvements to the building or hiring security.

But researchers have been studying these increases to how and where they’re applied, who is affected, if they’re being used appropriately.

Two of the researchers studying AGIs are University of Toronto Scarborough Professor Julie Mah and University of Waterloo Associate Professor Martine August. They worry these above guideline increases are being used by landlords as an extra revenue tool or even a means to push tenants out. Here’s Martine:

For tenants in these buildings, the landlords are doing things like trying to push people out with more eviction filings, effectively maybe pushing them out through economic eviction as prices are getting higher, making life very unpleasant through very disruptive renovations, while at the same time they’re own individual units are going left and neglected, and then also achieving higher rents through vacancy when people do leave. So it’s kind of lots of different things going on, lots of strategies being used, and lots of loopholes to rent control being exploited in ways that harm tenants and benefit landlords.

To find out how these AGIs affect tenants, we spoke to Douglas Kwan, director of advocacy and legal services at Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. He questions whether AGIs are even necessary in many cases, when the landlords make more than enough from current rents:

It’s really a scheme that is open to abuse because there’s no measure in terms of forcing landlords to justify that type of passing down of the cost is necessary. There’s no analysis in terms of what’s the overall income that they’re generating, rate of return of investment on these buildings to justify passing it down to tenants. And so that’s why tenants are angry. Because they know and see that landlords are earning quite a significant amount of income from their buildings. Why can’t they use that income to pay for the necessary repairs that they’re responsible for?

Are rules around rent increases being exploited for profit?

Listen here for The Overhead:

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When Reinier de Graaf published Four Walls and a Roof in 2017, it stood out for its rare willingness to expose architecture’s contradictions from within the profession itself. Architecture appeared there as a strange, conflicted discipline: simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, technically modest yet culturally overburdened, deeply implicated in global systems it neither controlled nor fully understood. The book did not propose solutions so much as illuminate fault lines—an act of exposure that felt both necessary and, at the time, sufficient.

Five years later, de Graaf’s architect, verb—with its chapter on Vancouver, republished with permission in Spacing Vancouver—demonstrated how easily architecture’s language of care, livability, and design excellence could be mobilized to legitimize deeper structural forces. In Vancouver, livability emerged less as a social achievement than as a brand: a symbolic asset deployed to reconcile inequality, speculation, and environmental stress with a reassuring image of urban success. Architecture did not drive these dynamics, but it helped render them palatable.

Architecture Against Architecture marks a decisive shift from those earlier modes of critique. In the book’s Preface, de Graaf offers a revealing self-assessment of his previous work. Four Walls and a Roof, he writes, dismantled myths cultivated by architects themselves, while architect, verb. took aim at myths cultivated about architects. Both were provocations rather than prescriptions. Writing, he insists, “isn’t necessarily propositional; in fact, the best writing isn’t.”

And yet, the Preface closes with an unmistakable escalation. “No debunking of myths this time,” de Graaf declares. This book, he writes, confronts “uncomfortable realities” that, if left unaddressed, will inevitably get the better of the profession. It is, explicitly, “a manifesto for the future of architecture.”

That tension—between a long-standing refusal of solutions and the adoption of manifesto form—animates the entire book.

Structured as a two-part manifesto, Architecture Against Architecture addresses, first, the organization of architectural practice itself, and second, the discipline’s relationship to the wider world. Part I, “Architects,” is an unflinching examination of how architecture is produced: the persistence of figureheads and founders, the feudal logic of authorship, the concentration of symbolic capital in individual names, and the widening gulf between those who design and those who own the means of production.

De Graaf’s discussion of celebrity architects, labour exploitation, and unionization is not framed as moral failure but as structural inevitability within a profession that continues to mistake reverence for relevance.

The now-familiar scandals surrounding high-profile figures are treated not as aberrations but as symptoms. A discipline that insists on branding collective labour as individual genius, de Graaf suggests, should not be surprised when power concentrates, accountability dissolves, and abuse follows. The call to “end the focus on figureheads” is less a cultural critique than a survival strategy.

Part II, “Architecture,” widens the lens. Here, de Graaf argues that architecture’s traditional preoccupations—form, authorship, permanence, even beauty—have become increasingly detached from the realities that now define the built environment: climate breakdown, political instability, inequality, and technological acceleration. The provocation to “stop building” is not a literal injunction but a challenge to architecture’s default assumption that construction itself constitutes social contribution. What the world requires, de Graaf insists, is not more architecture, but fewer illusions about what architecture can meaningfully deliver.

Across both sections runs a consistent claim: architecture depends on the world far more than the world depends on architecture. The discipline’s failure lies not in its marginality, but in its refusal to accept it.

Taken on its own terms, Architecture Against Architecture is at its strongest when it abandons nostalgia for professional authority altogether. De Graaf is unsparing about architecture’s impotence in the face of climate change, its complicity in housing speculation, and its habit of mistaking symbolic gestures for political effect. The book’s clarity derives from its refusal to console: there is no return to ethical purity, no redesigned toolkit that will restore architecture’s moral standing.

At the same time, the manifesto form introduces an interesting, unresolved tension. Historically, manifestos announce collective direction, shared purpose, and future action. De Graaf’s manifesto does something stranger—and arguably more real. It names the end of architecture’s self-mythologizing, but it remains deliberately ambiguous about what follows.

Is “architecture against architecture” a strategy for transformation, or a call for withdrawal? Does the future of architecture lie in institutional reform, in diminished ambition, or in ceding ground altogether to other forms of expertise and governance?

As mentioned, de Graaf has already disavowed the expectation that critique must culminate in solutions. The absence of a program is not an oversight but a position. By invoking the manifesto, the book invites a question it cannot entirely evade: whether refusal alone can constitute action, or whether it merely sharpens the terms of an impasse.

Important food for thought.

The significance of Architecture Against Architecture extends beyond the discipline it addresses. The book reads as an anatomy of professional authority under late modern conditions, tracing how expertise persists even as its capacity to shape outcomes diminishes. In this sense, architecture appears less as an exception than as an early warning. Other fields—planning, academia, policy, even governance itself—may recognize similar patterns: symbolic influence without control, procedural power without democratic legitimacy, and a growing reliance on image to compensate for structural inertia.

De Graaf’s intervention matters because it refuses to defend the profession against these conditions. Instead, it asks whether architecture’s continued insistence on relevance may be the problem itself.

To be clear, Architecture Against Architecture is not a hopeful book…it is an unusually lucid one. Its ambition lies not in charting a new future, but in insisting that the old one is no longer tenable. Whether the profession can endure the level of introspection the book demands remains an open question. What de Graaf makes clear is that the time for debunking myths has passed. What remains is the harder task of deciding what, if anything, architecture is willing to give up to persist at all.

That this question is posed from within one of the world’s most influential architectural practices only sharpens its force. The manifesto does not arrive from the margins. It comes from the center—and it is addressed, uncomfortably, to everyone still standing there. As such, Architecture Against Architecture stands as a must-read for architects willing to confront not just their image, but the costs of continuing to defend it.

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To learn more about Architecture Against Architecture, visit the Verso website.

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Erick Villagomez is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

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