I LEGO N.Y. Available Now at Urban Center Books, the MAS Bookstore
March 15th, 2010
I LEGO N.Y. is an imaginative new look at life in New York City constructed entirely out of LEGOs. The former New Yorker illustrator, Christoph Niemann, posted photographs of his creations along with his handwritten captions on his New York Times blog. Resident and honorary New Yorkers around the world responded enthusiastically to the clever and minimalist inventions, which captured both the iconic (the Empire State Building) and the mundane (man standing on a subway platform) in fewer LEGO pieces than one might think possible.
This book includes all of the original images, plus 13 new creations. The resulting collection is delightful in its simplicity and moving in its ability to capture the spirit of life in New York in so few strokes.
Published on March 1, 2010, by Abrams Image, and priced at $14.95, I LEGO N.Y. is available now for purchase online at www.urbancenterbooks.org, the MAS bookstore for architecture and design. MAS members receive 10% off all purchases at Urban Center Books. (Note: discount is deducted from total cost post-sale. You will see the reduced price on your credit card bill, not at check-out.) To become a member of MAS, visit MAS.org/membership.
As of Saturday, January 23, 2010, MAS’ bookstore, Urban Center Books, will close when we vacate the Villard Houses for the Steinway Hall Building at 111 W. 57th Street.
Architecture depends—on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, mess: the real world. Architecture, author Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself.
Architect and author Adam Kalkin will present his recent book Quik Build: Adam Kalkin’s ABC of Container Architecture on Tuesday, March 3 at 7:00 p.m., hosted by the Municipal Art Society’s bookstore
A visual tour so saturated with realism you can smell the knishes neatly displayed in the window of the Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery, a visual tour comprised of hundreds of images of unique 19th and 20th-century retail graphics and neon signs still in use and inspiring us to purchase to this very day. 
Witty, wealthy, and well connected, the architect Philip Johnson was for years the most powerful figure in the cultural politics of his profession. As the Museum of Modern Art’s founding architecture curator in the early 1930s, he helped establish modernism in the United States.
Ada Louise Huxtable’s On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, published by Walker & Company, is a hefty new collection of her essays and newspaper columns from the past five decades of criticism. It tells the story of revolutionary upheavals in taste, from the triumph of an austere modernism to an often frivolous postmodernism to the endless variety of choices that exist today.
PIDGIN, a magazine publication of the graduate students of the Princeton School of Architecture (SOA), features the work of students, faculty, staff, & friends providing a “snapshot” of what is going on in the minds and hard-drives at SOA. It is an incubator for emerging ideas and includes papers, photographs, film stills, projects, tips, provocations, critiques, drawings and almost anything that communicates architectural ideas and transports them into the larger world.
In New York on a five-city tour, documentary filmmaker, Alex Beckstead screened “Paperback Dreams” in Soho last week. His new film follows two landmark Bay Area independent bookstores — Cody’s Books in Berkeley and Kepler’s Books in San Mateo — and their struggle to survive in a rapidly changing media landscape. Both stores played a central role in the free speech movement and the culture of the 1960’s because of their proximity to college campuses. The film tells a compelling and cautionary tale about the ups and downs of running great bookstores and the value they bring to their communities.