This is an occasional column about recent books in architecture, landscape, energy, and sustainability. Read a previous installment here.

Elizabeth Farrelly is a whole lot of fun, especially for an architecture critic. In Blubberland (MIT Press), she torches the bland architecture of suburbs and megachurches with such devastating wit that you can’t help but chuckle as you read along. But Blubberland is not just for architecture snobs. Ms. Farrelly also takes on big philosophical questions of love and God, fashion and beauty — all in pondering why we humans are consuming ourselves to death. From the first page, Ms. Farrelly launches right into a quest “to see what the f… is going on with this crazy species,” as she puts it.

“Want used to mean need. Want was life or death stuff, as in ‘the lad wants feeding,’ ‘the horse wants putting down.’ Now want has flipped one-eighty to imply an arbitrary and even whimsical desire, unfettered by need, significance or logic. As in, ‘I want it because I want it, geddit?’ At the same time, and perhaps because our wanting has become so willful, human beings have grown insatiable. The more we have, it seems, the more we want, as though desire itself is the thing we cannot forgo. As though, even cocooned by layers of brimming superfluity, we must want or perish. Welcome to Blubberland. You’re rolling in it.”

Who could stop there? In analyzing the rampant consumption that is eating up the world, Ms. Farrelly discusses the long-evolved hunter-gatherer impulses, the loss of a sense of beauty, and the modern malaise of spiritual emptiness. Along the way, she throws in biting critiques of McMansions, Modernism, politics, feminism, and more. This is essential reading for anyone interested in sustainability—reading that goes beyond how to set up a composter or how to calculate one’s carbon footprint, and gets to the essence of what is wrong with modern living. •

In USA (Reaktion Books), Gwendolyn Wright tracks the history of Modern American architecture, beginning with Frank Lloyd Wright and ending with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Ms. Wright, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, argues that American Modernism is its own thing — not a cheap derivative of European Modernism. Ms. Wright is not quite the writer that Ms. Farrelly is, but her straightforward style is refreshingly unpretentious (especially among architect writers) and her words can cut when she wants them to. Of Modern architecture in the 1980s, she writes:

“Shock value was part of the calculated appeal in the polyphonous ‘play’ of contemporary architecture. Philip Johnson cheerfully proclaimed: ‘I am a whore’ to a privileged group of colleagues in 1982. ‘I do not believe in principles,’ he added for effect, ‘in case you haven’t noticed.’ Narcissistic nonchalance became a sign of creative independence. Important architects were talked about on first-name terms—Philip, Peter, and Bob—since everyone knew who they were (or scurried to find out). The media and big commissions made architects marketable, assuring major corporations for the select few. If this attitude liberated American design processes and forms, it also unmoored architects from an earlier sense of responsibility.” •

Sanford Kwinter’s Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar), on the other hand, is one of those design-criticism books that is all showy writing—and even showy book design. Pages unfold to reveal hidden illustrations and essays, and to add to the enigma, there is not a page number in the entire book, making the table of contents all but worthless. The book has a fire-engine-red, rubbery cover that gives off headache-inducing fumes. Ah, but what about the prose? It gives headaches, too. You’ll have to follow passages like this:

“What is taking place today is nothing to do with the eclipse of a material or mechanical world by an increasingly electronic one, but rather the emergence of a new regime of subjection that uses the undeniable allure of an archaic revival (a return to matter, complexity, and free development) to facilitate a repressive reorganization of social space, as well as a mastery of the very conceptual lexicon with which this reorganization will be thought through.”

Many of these essays first appeared in ANY magazine, a New York architectural journal that produced roughly two dozen issues between 1993 and 2000. Despite rampant linguistic and philosophical wankery, some essays here are engaging—such as Mr. Kwinter’s essay on globalization. The book will certainly be welcome to Kwinter fans, of which there are a few. —Scott Carlson