Instead of digesting a new book or diving into a novel, something others do often but I do rarely, I spent my holiday break reading a five-year-old book about a trio of intertwined topics I'm particularly fond of: drawings, exhibitions, and New York City. Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970-1990 by Jordan Kauffman, published by The MIT Press, 2018 (Amazon / AbeBooks) As the book's subtitle indicates, Drawing Architecture covers a two-decade period — the 1970s and 80s — when architectural drawings produced by contemporary architects increased in popularity: with architects, with museums, and with the wider art market. These decades, especially the 70s, are known for its so-called "Paper Architecture," which arose due to architects encountering a glut of commissions and offsetting it through theorizing and exploring ideas on paper. Although Jordan Kauffman, a researcher at MIT when he wrote the book and now an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham, does not restrict himself to New York City, much of the book takes place there, given the city's role as the epicenter of the art market, the numerous art galleries holding exhibitions of architectural drawings, and the willingness of local architects to promote themselves through those galleries. These display spaces included Judith York Newman's Spaced: Gallery of Architecture, the Leo Castelli Gallery, and the Max Protetch Gallery. There were also a number of museums and other institutions in and beyond NYC — CCA, DAM, MoMA, Getty — that increased their holdings of architectural drawings, in turn increasing value of such drawings until around 1990. Then, as architects found themselves with more projects and computers entered the realm of architectural drawing, the two-decade trend came to an end. I missed Kauffman's book when it was released in 2018, though I have to disagree with George Baird's review published in Architectural Record at that time. He finds the thorough documentation and explanation of this important moment in recent history "not completely satisfactory," due to the inability to grasp the individual drawings in the numerous photographs of gallery shows reproduced in black and white, as in the one below. Baird did appreciate the reproductions of individual drawings that are almost as numerous as the gallery photographs, but not enough to give the book a ringing endorsement. I'd counter that, since the book is about the galleries and institutions marketing and collecting the drawings rather than the drawings themselves, the illustrations selected for the book are ideal. They capture the seminal shows that led to the phenomenon that is the subject of Kauffman's book; without them, readers would be frustrated and have to rely on the author's extensive descriptions of the displays — descriptions that are important for the historical record but stultifying for narrative flow. (Kauffman also separately lists each piece in each seminal show, complete with values ascribed to the individual drawings.) Another review, by Paul Emmons at EAHN, is more gracious toward the book, calling it "a primary resource on the history of the commodification of architectural drawing." Installation view of "Architecture I" exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1977 (Image source) Being a scourer of used bookstores and having a strong interest in the period explored by Kauffman, many of the museum exhibitions and gallery shows described in the book as "seminal" were known to me before I cracked it open last month. For example, the three "Architecture" shows held at Leo Castelli Gallery every three years between 1977 and 1983 were each accompanied by catalogs: the first one is short, unpaginated and stapled, but the second and third were published by Rizzoli, the publisher of choice for American postmodern architecture in the 1980s. Even though I'm familiar with these shows — and others, including Arthur Drexler's The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts (MoMA, 1975) and The Drawings of Antonio Gaudi by George R. Collins (The Drawing Center, 1977) — through their printed companions, Kauffman is able to elucidate considerably more information about the exhibitions themselves as well as how they relate to the publications. Architecture I, the catalog, would lead us now to assume that just a few drawings were in Architecture I, the exhibition, for each of the seven included architects (Raimund Abraham, Emilio Ambasz, Richard Meier, Walter Pichler, Aldo Rossi, James Stirling, Venturi and Rauch), but Kauffman reveals how misleading this assumption is, by describing the circumstances of the show, illustrating it through gallery shots like the one above, and exhaustively documenting what was on display. In this sense, Emmons' description of the book as "a primary resource" is spot-on. Covers of catalogs for three "Architecture" series exhibitions — "Architecture I," "Houses for Sale," "Follies" — held at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977, 1980, and 1983, respectively While I found it rewarding to learn more about these and other exhibitions I had previous awareness of, Drawing on Architecture was not short on revealing new information to me. Take, for instance, Spaced, the gallery run by Judith York Newman, a name considerably less familiar all these years later than Castelli, Protetch, and the like. The first iteration of Spaced was located on the Upper West Side between 1975 and 1983, making it the first gallery in the city to display architectural drawings and therefore leading the way toward other art galleries doing the same. Although Newman was integral to the reception of architectural drawings in the period, as were Martha Beck, Barbara Jakobsen (aka B.J. Archer), and Pierre Apraxine, their names border on the forgotten, at least relative to the more famous gallerists mentioned above as well as Phyllis Lambert (CCA), Heinrich Klotz (DAM), and Kristin Feireiss (Aedes) outside of NYC. Drawing on Architecture therefore serves, in its focus, to give them much-deserved attention. The shift of architectural drawings toward art and as architecture in and of themselves can also be found in Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, the exhibition and companion publication from 2015 about the drawings collected by Boyarsky when he was head of the AA in London. Although Boyarsky's two-decade directorship overlapped almost exactly with Kauffman's book, he is only touched on briefly. Instead, we learn a good deal about fellow Londoner Ben Weinreb, "the most eminent antiquarian bookseller of architectural books, prints, and drawings," per Kauffman. Not only did he buy and sell drawings (many of them to Lambert at the CCA), making him relevant to Drawing on Architecture, he produced 58 catalogs over the course of four decades: catalogs that "set new standards for cataloging and connoisseurship," in Kauffman's words. The value of Drawing on Architecture is in discovering about Weinreb and other lesser-known players, carried out through exhaustive research and scholarship, but it is also found in the vivid portrait of 1970s/80s New York, when the architecture and art scenes overlapped and converged, unlike any times before then or since.

The recent publication of two books prompted me to ponder the future of cities and do a write-up of them together: Implementing Urban Design: Green, Civic, and Community Strategies by Jonathan Barnett, published by Routledge, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles edited by James Sanders, published by Rizzoli Electa, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Implementing Urban Design is the latest of many books about urban design and planning by Jonathan Barnett, whose career and CV span around fifty years. Over that time he has served as an architect, planner, educator, and an advisor to cities in and beyond the US, including Charleston, South Carolina, Omaha, and New York City, where he was Director of Urban Design in the Department of City Planning. When I received Implementing Urban Design, one of the first things I did was scour my bookshelves for other books by Barnett (something I do with most other reviews). There I found his first book, Urban Design as Public Policy: Practical Methods for Improving Cities, published in 1974. It, his first book, summarized his efforts in that role at NYC Planning, presenting the working methods behind the projects he worked on and doing it in ways that other urban designers in other places could learn from them. Just as Barnett's first book was "concerned with techniques of dealing with a number of significant urban and environmental problems which are found in existing cities, or are created when new areas are developed," his latest book focuses on the "complicated interactive process" that is required to move urban designs from their conceptual phases to completion. "What happens in between," in other words, is the subject of Implementing Urban Design, illustrated in ten chapters with case studies drawn from Barnett's experience as an urban design consultant. New York City is here, in chapter 3, "Designing Cities Without Designing Buildings," an echo of a chapter of the same name in the 1974 book. The chapter in the earlier book includes, among other projects, the Lincoln Square Special Zoning District, created in the wake of construction of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and developers rushing to build near it. A requirement to build to the sidewalk (to a height of at least 85') and including arcades for the buildings on the east side of Broadway were the most dramatic components of the special district. Too early to see its impact in 1974, Implementing Urban Design shows the area nearly fifty years later, with a hodgepodge of towers on podiums along Broadway but a street wall that is fairly cohesive. Although the arcade requirement was eventually eliminated from the special district (they're now "permitted" rather than required, such that recent projects like Robert A. M. Stern's 15 Central Park West don't have one), the bulk of the requirements are there, working to maintain that certain design aspects of Broadway north of Columbus Circle extend into the future. The same chapter in the new book also touches on the office campus of PPG in Pittsburgh and a streetscape handbook for Norfolk, Virginia, but other chapters often delve deeper into individual projects in individual cities. For example, chapter nine, "Mobilizing Support to Redesign an Entire City," presents Barnett's process in the fairly massive creation of a master plan for Omaha, Nebraska (the cover depicts a visualization from the plan). Another chapter, "Changing Regulations to Prevent Suburban Sprawl," documents his work with Wildwood, a town west of St. Louis that incorporated in 1995 and wanted to develop a new zoning ordinance that would be appropriate to the area and veer from the suburban norm. My wife being from St. Louis, a city I've in turn visited numerous times, attracted me to this chapter, whose theme — preventing urban sprawl — is of undeniable importance. Barnett walks through the process in detail, from initial contact and developing a team, to research, concepts, writing the master plan and development regulations, and devising a specific plan for the Town Center. The last is now just partially built out, about 25 years after Barnett was brought in. But if we learned anything from the Lincoln Square example, urban designs can take upwards of fifty years until they are "complete." Spread from Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles If the visuals in Implementing Urban Design are, to put it inelegantly, less than sexy, the opposite is true of Renewing the Dream, which was edited by James Sanders, author of Celluloid Skyline, and produced in association with Woods Bagot, the Australian firm that now boasts 17 offices around the world. The "freshest member" of the global studio, founded in 2020, is in Los Angeles, where numerous projects to date have focused on transportation, including a concourse at LAX and a proposal for turning gas stations in Los Angeles into EV charging stations with cultural components like drive-in theaters. The beautifully produced coffee table book is full of striking visuals by Woods Bagot and from the worlds of art, photography, and cinema. Even though Renewing the Dream presents a number of projects by the LA studio of Woods Bagot, including the ReCharge LA Prototype EV Station, I wouldn't call the book a monograph. Consisting of a half-dozen essays and two interviews alongside case studies of Woods Bagot projects — all geared around the theme of the "mobility revolution" in Los Angeles — the book's genre is indefinable: it is a hybrid that Sanders describes in the introduction as a "kaleidoscopic portrait" of LA, with "an unusually wide-ranging mix of content—research and data studies, urban design and public art projects, cultural and historical overviews, surveys of current and future technologies." ReCharge LA Prototype EV Station by Matt Ducharme and Woods Bagot Los Angeles Studio The book's wide-ranging content is predicated on what Sanders and Woods Bagot call LA 3.0, a new Los Angeles in the making, following LA 2.0, the freeway and tract-housing landscape of the mid-20th century, and, before that, LA 1.0, the streetcar and boulevard paradigm before WWII. Some of the in-progress LA 3.0 is mandated — extending the subway by 2028, the year of the LA Olympics, and the outlaw of gas cars and trucks for sale by 2035, accelerating the rise of EVs — but much of it comes from wider developments that aren't necessarily rooted in LA but have taken hold there, notably the climate emergency (think the Getty Fire in 2019) and digital technologies like Uber, which eliminate the need for personal cars on, for instance, nights out with friends. Los Angeles may seem like the most unlikely place for a book devoted to a mobility revolution, but my personal experience with LA gave me the opposite impression. My only trip to the city was around twenty years ago, when I spent two weeks there working on a competition with a short deadline. I stayed at the Biltmore in downtown, with a view of Pershing Square out my window. My morning commute was walking across the street to U.S. Bank Tower.; my evening commute, 12 or 16 hours later, was the opposite. No car, no driving — a very un-LA experience of LA. But on weekends I walked around DTLA, took buses to the Getty Center and Santa Monica, and rode the subway to West Hollywood. Although I was a tourist, my experience showed me it was possible to navigate a good deal of LA without a car. An expanded subway network, more frequent buses, urban design focused on walkability and bicycling — it wasn't hard to consider these and other efforts having dramatic changes on the car-centric nature of Los Angeles. Yet, the wide-ranging mix of content in Rebuilding the Dream reveals that the biggest impact of mobility advances on the city — any American city, really, not just LA — is found in parking. If changes in laws, increased public transit, technology advances, and other things lead Americans and Angelenos to have fewer cars, drive less, and use ride-sharing and take public transit more, then the many square miles of surface parking lots can be given over to spaces for people, not cars: densifying (sub)urban areas and providing housing and other much-needed functions. So, in addition to the ReCharge LA project, the book includes MORE LA, Wood Bagot's study for infilling lots previously used for surface parking, and Sanders' own California Court project, a denser version of the city's beloved bungalow courtyards apartments from a century ago. The last, documented in the 1982 book Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles, is one of a few-dozen books in the bibliography whose quotes and influence pepper Rebuilding the Dream. The older book and newer proposal illustrate that, while certain elements of the mobility revolution are linear and future-oriented, some of them are historical and cyclical. The answers to tomorrow's sustainable Los Angeles, in other words, are found as much in the city's existing built environment as they are in technologies and designs still to come.

Blue Dream is a house designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for Julia "Julie" Reyes Taubman and her husband Robert "Bobby" Taubman. The house, located in East Hampton, on the South Fork of Long Island, was completed in 2017, nearly 30 years after the architects were commissioned to design their first house on Long Island, the Slow House. A book devoted to Blue Dream, written by Paul Goldberger, was released last month by DelMonico Books. Blue Dream and the Legacy of Modernism in the Hamptons: A House by Diller Scofidio + Renfro by Paul Goldberger, photography by Iwan Baan, published by DelMonico Books, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) Like other architects educated in the United States in the early 1990s, the architecture of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio was an inspiration to me. Diller + Scofidio had built very little then, but their beautiful drawings and means of presenting them exhibited a clear desire to build. The only constructing they did then was temporary, almost exclusively in theaters and galleries. Even without a building to their name, their first monograph, Flesh: Architectural Probes, was published in 1994 (the butt cheeks on the front and back covers and butt-crack binding set it apart from every other architecture book). A standout project, coming near at the end of the monograph, is the Slow House, which had already brought D+R attention when it won a P/A Award and graced the cover of Progressive Architecture's January 1991 issue (PDF link).  Model of Slow House from DS+R website. The Slow House arcs and expands in plan from a single front door to a two-story picture window facing the water (locals referred to it as a banana). Of relevance here is the house's site in North Haven, Long Island, and the view through the picture window of Long Island Sound. The view's importance is accentuated by a second chimney, opposite a functioning chimney, that would have held a video camera framing the water view for the owners to look at while in the house or back in Manhattan. Page 229 in Flesh shows a photograph of the Slow House taking shape, the formwork for its foundation walls and columns ready to be filled with concrete. Alas, that photo captured the furthest extent of construction: the house was a victim of insufficient assets and the early 90s recession, never to be completed. L: Slow House drawing in the collection of MoMA. R: Slow House under construction in 1991. I never knew exactly why the Slow House wasn't completed, but Paul Goldberger reveals some of the story in Blue Dream, writing that "the house was to be funded by the sale of two Cy Twombly drawings." The collapse of the art market kept that from happening, but the importance of Slow House can be found in the Museum of Modern Art's acquisition of the project's drawings and models for its permanent collection. The most iconic piece is a floor plan and series of building sections drawn on a transparent sheet over wood with what appears to be a schmear of joint compound. Moving from the view in the rearview mirror to the view through the picture window, the sections radiate from the floor plan, in a sequence that is logical yet confounding, given how the sections overlap as they increase in height. Most remarkable is the way the drawing implements remain part of the presentation, and how the compass armature is a custom creation, what I see as a clear extension of Diller's education and Scofidio's teaching at Cooper Union. Needless to say, I was chuffed to see the drawing in person back in 2013, when Pedro Gadanho pulled it out of the MoMA archives for Cut 'n' Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City. Goldberger mentions Slow House in a chapter of Blue Dream that finds Julie and Bobby considering Diller Scofidio + Renfro for their East Hampton house. Charles Renfro, who joined Diller + Scofidio in 1997 and became a name partner in 2004, recounts to Goldberger their initial meeting with Julie at their office, in 2010, when they showed her Slow House "and our small residential oeuvre of mostly unbuilt houses." While hearing "unbuilt" would push most clients to look for another architect, Julie was not a typical client. A few years before the meeting, the Taubmans held an invited design competition, with Thomas Phifer standing out above Shigeru Ban, whose design was "remarkable" but impractical and "more suited to a house in the tropics," and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, whose design was "more restrained and perhaps less daring than what [Julie] wanted." Phifer sensed that Julie wanted something more sculptural than his first scheme, with three linear pavilions connected by glass-enclosed walkways, so over time it morphed into striking sail-like forms appropriate to its site on the dunes facing the Atlantic. But designing and building a house, architecturally daring or not, is as much about personal relationships as it is about architectural design. Phifer and Julie Taubman "had not connected as closely as [Phifer] wanted his clients to connect," Goldberger explains, and "the immaculate quality of Phifer's architecture was never the right match for Julie's taste." Blue Dream as captured by Iwan Baan. Who was the right architect for Julie's tastes? It was Charles Renfro, who "seemed to connect easily with Julie Taubman in a way that Phifer had not," Goldberger writes. Another reason DS+R got the job was their ability to connect with the precedents Julie was drawn to, namely the houses of John Lautner, Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, and Jacques Couëlle, as well as Frederick Kiesler's iconic, site-less, unbuilt Endless House (also in MoMA's collection). The cave-like qualities of the houses designed by Couëlle and Kiesler appear to have inspired Renfro the most, as Julie selected the "Ravioli" scheme from the four initial concepts the studio generated after their meeting. The others were the "Mobius," the "Roof," and the "Dunes." Any of them would have led to statement house dramatically different from the Hamptons norm, but continuing on the path started by the Ravioli scheme led to the built Blue Dream, a sculptural house unlike another DS+R project, yet one that is hard to see coming from another contemporary architect. Spread from Blue Dream in "Where Modernism Flourished" chapter. By the time we read about the Taubmans selecting DS+R for the commission, we have absorbed much of the house through the numerous full-bleed color photographs by Iwan Baan that sit between early chapters about the Taubman's background and wishes, about the history of modernism on Long Island (this chapter echoes Goldberger's essay in Houses of the Hamptons from 1986), and about the aborted project with Phifer. The chapters that follow move forward in time, tracing the development of its formal design; documenting the efforts to engineer the design and turn it into an actual building; presenting the interior contributions that turned the house into a Gesamtkunstwerk; and revealing the personal issues that make the house as melancholy as it is exuberant. The book has a clear narrative sweep, one that is aided by the coffee table format, with its large paper size, large photos, and the easy integration of images with Goldberger's text. The format, I feel, is appropriate to the house and its circumstances. Even if you're not a fan of Blue Dream (I'm still partial to the Slow House), it's hard not to get pulled along on the ride of its realization as recounted in these pages. The view from the picture window at Blue Dream, photographed by Iwan Baan.

Like most human beings, I can be contradictory at times. One area where this manifests is architectural surveys: books that usually collect buildings of a certain typology, but also ones spanning a particular timeframe or through some other theme. I've written a few of them myself, so I don't inherently hate them. But I tend to pass on them when it comes to new books, which most likely boils down to the fact I'm not a practicing architect and therefore don't need to look at, say, a roundup of libraries when I'm designing one. Yet, when it comes to old surveys — as in my latest #archidosereads — I have a hard time saying no to them after spotting them in used bookstores. I think part of their appeal is the way they capture the character of a certain time, and often, with the occasional geographical focus of surveys, a particular place in time. Being seen decades after they were made, the best ones manage to transport me back to a certain place in time — something I find irresistible, even if subconsciously, before putting it down in words here. A book need not be old to do such a thing, so this week and next week I'm featuring books that manage to capture certain places at certain times. The six books aren't all surveys, but the majority of them do fall into that subcategory of architectural books. Following the three US-central books here, next week's installment will head to Europe and Asia. Detroit Modern: 1935–1985 by Peter Forguson, photography by Amy Claeys, published by Visual Profile Books, November 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple: A Good Time Place Reborn by Pat Cannon, photography by James Caulfield, published by Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, December 2022 (Amazon / Bookshop) A. A. Fischer's St. Louis Streetscapes by Nancy Moore Hamilton, published by Missouri Historical Society, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop) In its geography and name, Detroit Modern sounds like a sequel to Michigan Modern: An Architectural Legacy, the 2018 book written by preservationist Brian D. Conway with photographs by James Haefner, also published by Visual Profile Books. But they are two different beasts, given that the earlier book was the product of the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office, which received a grant from the National Park Service for the project, while the nearly one-year-old Detroit Modern was written by Peter Forguson, a landscape designer and landscaping contractor who has worked on the grounds of some of the 70 houses collected in his book. Forguson's book, in turn, is a labor of love, one that draws attention to an overlooked geographical subset of mid-20th-century modern residential architecture, something Michigan Modern similarly did for a wider array of building typologies on a larger geographical scale. The 70 houses spanning 50 years were designed by names both familiar and lesser known: from Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Minoru Yamasaki, Edward Durell Stone, and Gunnar Birkets among the former, to Irving Tobocman, Don Paul Young, Louis DesRosiers, and Robert L. Ziegelman in the latter. While those last four names, among numerous others in the book, are new to me, they may be fairly well-known names in the larger Detroit area (the book is more Grosse Pointe Farms and Bloomfield Hills that Detroit proper, it should be noted), given that they designed roughly 20 of the book's 70 houses. This book will no doubt appeal to locals interested in mid-20th-century houses, but it should also appeal to people living outside the Detroit area who like the same. It should be pointed out that although photographer Amy Claeys is billed as photographer, many of the houses feature photographs by others, including Haefner and occasional period photographs by the great Balthazar Korab. As such, the book doesn't have the visual consistency of Michigan Modern (it's also lacking in floor plans, valuable elements in any good book on residential architecture), but the book's ability to capture the high-quality architecture created in a place over a fairly long time period makes it a valuable document. The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, unlike the houses of suburban Detroit, don't need to worry about being overlooked. There are more than 400 extant buildings designed by Wright, and although only a small number of them are considered masterpieces, that number is higher than most — save perhaps Le Corbusier. One way of quantifying greatness is via UNESCO, which put 17 Corbu sites on its 2016 list but only eight Wright buildings on a similar list a few years later. One of those eight is Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, the Chicago suburb home to Wright at the time; ground broke on the building in 1906 and it was dedicated in 1909, the same year Wright left for Europe to work on the Wasmuth Portfolio. Given the importance of Unity Temple in Wright's oeuvre, it made sense that Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple: A Good Time Place, a celebration of the edifice, was released in 2009. Although restoration plans, led by T. Gunny Harboe, began around 2006, the "award-winning transformative restoration" would not be complete until 2017, twelve years after the building celebrated its centennial. With Unity Temple carefully restored and open to the public for about five years, the time was right to update the 2009 book by Patrick F. Cannon with photographer James Caulfield. I have not seen the earlier book, but it appears to be a square book of approximately nine inches, whereas the newly "reborn" book taking on a larger page size — nearly 10 x 12 inches. The slim, 120-page book has a brief history of the commission, its design and its construction, at the beginning, with a text by Harboe on the restoration, a selective bibliography (including Robert McCarter's 1997 case study from the "Architecture in Detail" series), and some texts from ca. 1909 in the back matter. In between are approximately 75 pages of photographs by Caulfield. Unfortunately, what should be the best part of the book — post-restoration photographs of Unity Temple's exterior and interior — is the most disappointing. Without knowing the details, Caulfield appears to have a preference for HDR photography, which makes the concrete building look like a computer model on the outside and too evenly illuminated on the inside. Only in the photos where Caulfield lets shadows be dark (the cover photo being one of those) can readers fully appreciate what Wright accomplished more than a century ago. I'm from suburban Chicago so am quite familiar with the numerous Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Oak Park. But even though my wife hails from St. Louis, and therefore I've been there quite a few times and have seen firsthand various parts of the city and county, I was not previously familiar with Alexander August Fischer, the subject of this hefty book by his inadvertent biographer, Nancy Moore Hamilton. I say inadvertent because in retirement Hamilton, a longtime resident of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and former geographer and data analyst who had spent just one year of her life in St. Louis, found herself drawn to St. Louis and the streetscapes built by A. A. Fischer. As the photos on the cover of the book (some of many in the book shot by photographer Reed R. Ratcliffe in 2022) attest, the streetscapes of Fischer are a pleasing lot — or, at least the ones that have survived intact to 2022, a century or more after they were created, are. After all, when I think of the streetscapes of St. Louis, what comes to mind are vacant lots and vacant or condemned buildings being just as numerous on any block as extant and/or occupied buildings, such is the unfortunate present of the Midwestern city. Hamilton's large book published by the Missouri Historical Society is like two books in one: a biography of Fischer and a directory of the many buildings by Fischer's company. Following Hamilton's semi-autobiographical introduction, which goes into some detail on how she ended up spending close to two decades focused on the subject of Fischer and his buildings, is the biography: four chronological chapters on Fischer's life, from his German ancestors to his death (in 1936 at the age of 70) and legacy. The subject may only seem appealing to residents of St. Louis, but it is a lavishly illustrated biography, with numerous large photographs by Ratcliffe as well as archival photographs and other documents. At just 120 pages and accompanied by the illustrations, the biography is a fairly quick read. The bulk of the book follows: the 340-page "Directory of A. A. Fischer Builds" that methodically presents one building per page with data and illustrations. It doesn't matter if a building was razed, it is given a page and indicated as such. While extant buildings receive photos by Radcliffe, buildings long-gone have older photographs or just maps. And speaking of maps, the book is accompanied by a foldout poster that locates every building in the book — very helpful.  The pros of the book are obvious, mainly that Hamilton fills a void in the scholarship of the built environment in St. Louis. A. A. Fischer was a prolific builder of residential buildings across the city in the first decades of the 20th century, though his impact was basically unheralded. In this sense, the book is more than welcome. My only con with the book is its hefty format. With a 10 x 12" paper size and nearly 2" thick, it is a large, unwieldy book. The pages are nearly full in the biography, but the photos in the directly are small and the margins across those same pages are large. With the layout of the directory apparently sized to entries with the most available information, most of the these pages are therefore empty space. I feel that either the photos should have been larger across the directory pages, or the whole book should have opted for a smaller page size. Of course, the latter would make the book a less impressive object — one that wouldn't have immediately conveyed the size of Fischer's contributions to St. Louis.