Reviewing Design Book Review : A Counteranthology

Design Book Review, published between 1983 and 2001, was a wide-ranging journal of architectural ideas founded and edited in offices in Berkeley, California. Taking the book review as its primary format, the journal connected its community of readers with emerging ideas in architecture, design, urban planning, and beyond. DBR guided its readers through this expanding landscape of architectural publishing with a distinctly accessible voice — "no less than the indispensable record and the liveliest critique of contemporary architectural consciousness", as the late Michael Sorkin put it. Gathering together a remarkable constellation of authors, it remains an enduring document of design discourse in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Assembled by the editors in a spirit of counteranthology, Reviewing Design Book Review features notable texts from DBR’s pages alongside an oral history and newly commissioned essays that extend the journal’s ambitions into the present.