Today, I received a copy of BLDGBLOG BOOK by Geoff Manaugh. I was intending to purchase a copy through Amazon, but then the economy caught up with me. Luckily, Mike Osegueda writer with the Fresno Bee and blogger for FresnoBeeHive received a press copy from Chronicle Books. Through twitter mikeoz wrote “i got it in the mail yesterday. (I get all kinds of odd books). i’ll give it to you.”

And indeed it is a weird book. BLDGBLOG began as a blog focused on but not limited to architecture. While we are familiar with old media going to new media. However New media going to old media? A blog becoming a book? To top it off it’s on my favorite topic: architecture and the built and unbuilt environment.

Why is this a theory thursday? Well with a table of contents like 1)Architecture, Conjecture, Urban Speculation; 2)The Underground; 3)Redesigning the Sky; 4)Music Sound Noise; and 5)Landscape Futures; you can imagine it is chock full of theory. I plan to fully explore the ideas and blog/review about it as I go.

I hope Geoff Manaugh will forgive me for not purchasing his book. Maybe he’ll forgive me for putting a press copy to good use and hopefully inspiring some Fresnans to purchase a copy.

Here is the abstract:

Far from being limited to the construct of our built environment, architecture has long been considered a venue for tracing human thought – how we perceive and judge our world is recognizable in the buildings we create. Challenging us to look beyond the present paths of thinking and into the future of architecture is Geoff Manaugh, creator of the popular website BLDGBLOG.

Read by millions since its launch in 200, BLDGBLOG is the leading voice in speculation about architecture, landscape and the built environment. Now The BLDGBLOG Book distills author Geoff Manaugh’s unique ideas, offering an enthusiastic guide to the future of architecture, with stunning images and exclusive new content. From underground exploration to climate change, via the music of icebergs, J. G. Ballard, and tectonic warfare, this is a fascinating and unpredictable.”

Also inspiring is the first paragraph:

I started BLDGBLOG in the summer of 2004, inspired more or less by four things: I was writing a novel about surveillance, terrorism, independent film, and the London Underground; I was auditing a course about Archigram, the 1960s British pop-architectural supergroup that once dreamt of bolt-on instant cities, “mobile villages,” and inflatable utopias; I was reading a lot of J. G. Ballard (Super-Cannes, Concrete Island, The Drowned World, Crash); and I was feeling generally hemmed in by the city in which I lived. Whil my initial impulse might have been to complain – noting every little thing about the world that bothered me – I decided, in fact, to do the opposite: I made a conscious decision to write only about the things that interested me.