100 years/100 books : School of Architecture Centenary, 1917-2017

Library Exhibition Series #2 THE CIVIC

Welcome to the second instalment in this series celebrating ‘the architecture book’.

Curated by Michael Milojevic, School of Architecture and Planning Professional Teaching Fellow; Sarah Cox, Architecture Archivist and Fiona Lamont, Library Assistant.

This exhibition, THE CIVIC, explores the concept and reality of ‘the city’ and selects from the main collection and non-circulating Historic and Folio Collections, a variety of important items which demonstrate the library’s depth of material in this field.

We display items from the 18th century Roman delineator-imagineer Piranesi, to the equally megalomaniacal 21st century Paolo Soleri, and show key Modern European and American polemical urban design classics.

Each Architect or Planner proposes a very different kind of city; ‘the Americans’ Jane Jacobs, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Christopher Alexander, and Colin Rowe, and ‘the Europeans’ Le Corbusier, Aldo Rossi, Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi.

Closer to home, and relating to the Auckland region, we include two significant items about topography and the urban by the late Emeritus Professor Richard Toy OBE.

Each item in this exhibition should be considered as an object with a particular, and indeed intentional ‘feel’ … the small-scale textual diatribe, the big scale folio, the large-format colour items and simpler local productions.

The Civic will be on display at the Architecture and Planning Library until early May 2017.

Fiona Lamont, Library Assistant, Architecture and Planning Library