Holiday books: Architecture

Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s, edited by Robert W. Rydell and Laura Burd Schiavo (Yale University Press; 210 pages; $45). Modernism was never so enticing to mainstream America as at the Depression-era World's Fairs - when fantasies like San Francisco's Treasure Island showcased sleek, sexy buildings filled with gadgets that promised an approaching utopia for cooks, commuters and everyone in between. The essays are good, but it's the photos that steal the show.

American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, by Alice T. Friedman (Yale University Press; 262 pages; $65). If your architectural ideal is a Victorian home, midcentury modernism can seem boring and flat. But this smartly written survey of a few key architects and their creations shows with clarity how, for a short time, the modern style and American Style were one and the same.

John Margolies: Roadside America, edited by Jim Heimann (Taschen; 256 pages; $39.99). You know what the Bay Area landscape needs? A gas station made to look like an igloo, like the one in Ottawa, Kan. Or a diner to equal the steak house in Byron, Ga., that occupies the body of a DC-7. These 400-plus photographs are the legacy of one man's effort to document the freewheeling extremes of what gets built along commercial strips to make a fast-moving driver hit the brakes. Now such roadsides are the domain of franchised retail and design review boards, and it's our collective loss.

The Architecture of Harry Weese, by Robert Bruegmann (W.W. Norton; 240 pages; $59.95). Anyone who has ever been entranced by the vaulted concrete catacombs of the Washington, D.C., Metro system knows the work of Harry Weese. Even if you don't, this is an unusually satisfying and readable monograph on a Chicago architect whose firm rose and fell, but who at his best in the 1960s and '70s created intelligent buildings marked by a quiet grandeur that hasn't yet dimmed.

Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age, by Blair Kamin (University of Chicago; 291 pages; $30). Chicago is lucky to have Kamin, whose architectural criticism in that city's Tribune continues the spirited tradition of Allan Temko and Ada Louise Huxtable. This collection from the past decade shows a deft eye for the latest Windy City tower but also the larger weave of culture and design, such as 9/11's ripple effect of "fortress architecture that disfigured public spaces, transportation hubs, and government buildings."