As a major center of iconic postwar architecture, Berlin has featured frequently in the Blue Crow Media catalog, with various offerings covering the city’s Modernist and Brutalist architecture, as well as its fascinating Cold War-era U-Bahn stations. Brutalist Berlin, out this month, transforms and expands the corresponding map into a proper full-length book, which serves equally well as both an on-the-ground travel guide and reference book for armchair travelers and scholars.
International Architecture, the initial title in the Bauhausbücher series, serves as a manifesto of sorts for editor Walter Gropius. Its general subject asserts the primacy of architecture over the other disciplines covered by the Bauhaus, and the specific structures he chooses are unerringly contemporary—some so new they are unbuilt, existing only as sketches or models.
With the new Modern Helsinki Map, Blue Crow Media extends their ever-expanding series to one of the world’s northernmost capitals. Too long seen as an outlier to the predominant cultural spheres of Europe, Helsinki is finally reclaiming its unique place in the continent: a thoroughly Nordic country that is at the crossroads of Scandinavian and Baltic, west and east, traditional and modern. Hundred-year-old wooden houses sit side-by-side with hypermodern concrete-and-glass structures, and modern buildings often have traits of traditional Finnish and Nordic architecture, built outward from a core of minimalism and functionality.
Riga’s architectural history spans centuries: many of its traditional Baltic wood buildings are battered but still standing, and its Art Nouveau structures are a standout, competing even with powerhouse cities like Paris in preservation and density. But it is Riga’s socialist modernist buildings that offer a unique lens into the city’s mid-to-late 20th century, with several major projects initiated before the fall of the Soviet Union but finished after, a physical record of Latvia’s postwar urban development under the shadow of occupation.
Ukraine’s 20th-century architectural legacy is complex, layered, and endlessly fraught. Featuring structures weathered by war, politics, and time in turn, Ukrainian Modernism, new from Fuel Publishing, captures the country’s architectural infrastructure at a particularly fraught and fragile moment. The result is a striking document of buildings that are conceptually complex, surprisingly varied, and, despite everything, resilient in the face of insurmountable forces.
A new collection from Blue Crow Media gives a global perspective on monumental concrete structures.
