2022’s top 5 bestsellers
Bookshop by Uro’s most popular items last year included crisply fresh new releases as well as some older favourites. In the time-tested tradition of saving the best till last, our top five bestsellers follow, in reverse order…
5.
Planet City
Reprinted in 2022 after its sold-out 2021 release, Planet City brings us architect and film director Liam Young’s speculative vision of a future where 10 billion people converge in one hyperdense megalopolis, surrendering the rest of the planet to a global wilderness.
A remarkable cast of contributors (including the likes of science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson and sociologist Saskia Sassen) help create a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge. It’s also a very beautiful book, having won both the Australian Book Design Awards Best Designed Fully-Illustrated Book under $50 prize, and the Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Design Awards Gold prize for Editorial and Books in 2021.
You can click here to watch Liam Young talk with the book’s designer Stuart Geddes and the NGV’s Ewan McEoin about speculative fiction’s role in confronting the urgent environmental questions of today below, or grab a copy of the book here.
4.
Better Together
Published to accompany an exhibition that never happened (yep, COVID…), Better Together examines 33 artefacts involved in the design and construction of contemporary Australian architecture. From 1:1 models to photographic renditions of buildings as they were intended to be built (rather than as built), the book’s definition of architectural documents is expansive.
Rich, well-informed and at times wry ‘didactics’ by authors Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Kate Finning, Urtzi Grau and Anna Tonkin make for an entertaining and rewarding journey through the unique processes and pitfalls of contemporary architectural production.
A choice cross-section of some of the most accomplished practitioners emerging in Australian architecture today.
Click here to get yourself a copy.
3.
Light, Space, Place: The Architecture of Robin Gibson
The only monograph ever to be published on the architect responsible for building what almost seems like half of modern Brisbane, and arguably its most important and transformative complex of civic buildings: the Queensland Cultural Centre.
Robin Gibson’s work is sometimes understood as a late period international modernism, or brutalism. But through detailed archival research and firsthand interviews with his colleagues and clients, University of Queensland historians Deborah van der Plaat and Lloyd Jones have assembled a convincing case for a reappraisal of Gibson’s architecture as particular, and sensitive to climate and place — a distinctly subtropical language that’s not timber and tin, per the conventional understanding of Queensland architecture, but concrete and glass…
You can watch Philip Goad discuss Gibson’s legacy with the authors of Light, Space, Place here, or grab a copy of the book here.
2.
Public Sydney puzzle
The Public Sydney puzzle builds on Philip Thalis and Peter John Cantrill’s sold-out book of the same name to test the street knowledge of even the harbour city’s most dedicated dérivists. Explore and celebrate Sydney’s public spaces through their painstaking re-aggregation, line-by-rigorously-rendered-line!
First released in 2019, in 2022 we made the Public Sydney puzzle available at a 20% discount in orders of five or more copies, making it a popular present option for architecture practices and other organisations with an interest in the built environment.
1.
Lost Tablets
Our best-selling book of 2022 was an exercise in serious play. Fifty authors were invited to respond to fifty works from Jan van Schaik’s Lost Tablets series, which explores the geometric language of architecture through toy building blocks.
The brief was wide open, the cast of authors equally wide ranging.
Responses encompass speculative fiction, satire, poetry, autobiography, history, from respondents including Rory Hyde, Su san Cohn,
Ray Edgar, Queenie Bon Bon, Conrad Hamann…
You can watch live readings from the book by some of the authors below (Shona Stark’s poem-meets-sound sculpture at 28.00 being a particular gem….), or grab one of the few remaining copies we have left of this very limited release here.