A portion of the paperback wrapper of A Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C., published by the Washington Metropolitan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1965. 
Are guidebooks still a valid and useful subgenre of architecture books" Do architects consult them when they visit a city" Do they walk around neighborhoods with them" Do publishers therefore still feel the need to put them out" The two titles at the top of this post attest that they are still being published, but there certainly aren't as many coming out now as in the past. The days of the Pevsner guides and G.E. Kidder Smith volumes ? when a single author or small team could spend years researching and documenting the architecture of a city or even a country ? are long gone. Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing guidebooks produced this century being reissued decades from now, akin to Ian Nairn's books on London and Paris (though I haven't seen any of them, Owen Hatherley's alternative guides to Britain sound like they might be contenders for such). Change has been evident in just the last decade and a half. In the middle of 2009 I reviewed two New York City guidebooks published by W. W. Norton, which immediately led to a book deal with them to write my first book, Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture, which came out at the end of 2011. In the years since then I've continued to amass new architectural guidebooks in my library, but a...