The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings

This was an excellent book to read while stuck in quarantine — even though it is not brand new (published in 2015), it brings you a lot of hope about the physical spaces of our future. The biggest takeaway I see her is that architecture, in a lot of ways, is an enduring, multi-thousand year collective human project to figure out how to marry human development with the far more advanced structures and technologies evolution has already created for us.

That is what I see as one of the through-lines in this book; more efficient collective spaces, uses for spare parking garages when cars aren’t using them, flood-able soccer fields, public pools in the Hudson River that filter the water, invisible treehouses in Scandinavia that blend into the forest, but warn birds away from flying into them. The biggest thing this book reminds you of is cost — a lot of these projects provide beautiful solutions to architectural problems that are fractions of the price of current construction.