The Berlage

Navigating through the charms of book culture, this lecture examines architects’ approaches to structuring, constructing and designing books and traces how they have changed over time. Examining the crossovers between book culture and building culture makes the axes visible along which architectural knowledge circulates through books into buildings and back – from the celebration of specific architectural practices to the production of unique books, using pages and print to convey architectural ideas. Dissecting a wealth of books through five conceptual tools – texture, surface, rhythm, structure and scale – André Tavares analyzes the material qualities of books to assess their crossovers with architectural knowledge. The two incarnations of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park and Sydenham provide a background that confronts us not only with the rise of the industrialized book but also with the configuration of the book as a unique visual device. 

André Tavares is an architect, researcher at Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto where he is the principal investigator of the project Fishing Architecture funded through a European Research Council grant. Since 2006 has been founding director of Dafne Editora, an independent publishing house based in Porto. He is the author of several books, including The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (Lars Müller/Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016), Vitruvius Without Text (gta Verlag, 2022) and Architecture Follows Fish (MIT Press, 2024).