Becoming an Architect: A Guide to Careers in Design, 2nd Edition (John Wiley & Sons, $39.95) by Lee W. Waldrep has been expanded and revised since its first edition to cover the most important issues that architects are currently encountering in their practice, such as BIM and integrated practice. Featuring interviews with working professionals, Becoming an Architect offers an overview of the profession, educational requirements, design specialties, job searches, and registration requirements, and a look at the the variety of career directions within the field.
In Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architectural Press, $35) author David Gissen, former curator of architecture at the National Building Museum, examines the way that architecture fights against and embraces forces of nature commonly thought destructive, primitive, and contrary to civilized life, such as mud, smoke, weeds, insects, dust. Through the experimental work of leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists who reject the idea of recreating the natural world without all that nature entails, Gissen explores an alternative view of the relationships between human society, architecture, and natural processes and ecosystems.