Street Architecture, written by architect Hans van der Heijden, architecture specialist Karin Templin and Haller Brun designers, is a real architecture book: minimalist, ordered and disciplined, with utterly stylized architectural drawings, immaculate architectural photography from Stefan Muller, and a surprising approach to the material. Van der Heijden’s designs for residential buildings are driven more by his observation of the city – as defined by facades and streets – than by any theory of architecture, and Templin accordingly compares van der Heijden’s residential designs with street frontages in Florence and other European cities. After an analysis of van der Heijden’s architecture and the elements that characterize it there is a presentation of a number of projects and a pictorial analysis of premodern European streets and their characteristics. Added to the black and full colour inks is an extra colour, Pantone Grey, and the grey of the cover is continued on the edges of the block. The effect is that the book has something sculptural about it, the interior and cover adding up to an uncommonly coherent whole.
It would be possible to find the überminimalist cover dull, but the carefully balanced typography and well thought-through structure and mise-en-page give the maximum possible space to the subject. The whole thing speaks of so much precision, care and loving attention that the result is far from dull, instead glowing with love for the job, both of architect and of book designer.