The Anatomy of the Architectural Book addresses the crossovers between book culture and building culture. 1925 and 1851 constitute the axes along which is made visible the circulation of architectural knowledge through books towards subsequent crystallization in buildings, together with a reverse idea—moving from the celebration of specific architectural practices to the production of unique books, using pages and prints to convey architectural ideas. This relationship between books and buildings, like the one between architectural and editorial practices, serves as an anchor for assessing a wide range of documentary sources, through various geographical contexts. The cross-sections confront us not only with the rise of the industrialized book (and thus of the editor as an important intermediary between the author and the printer), but also with the configuration of the book as a unique visual device (with the designer taking part in a progressively more complex chain of decision-making).

Since 2006, André Tavares has been founding director of Dafne Editora, an independent publishing house based in Porto. Currently he is editor-in-chief of the magazine Jornal Arquitectos. He holds a doctorate from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto, where he completed his dissertation in 2009 on the presence of reinforced concrete in architects' design strategies in the early-twentieth century. Following from research in Mendrisio, Paris, and São Paulo, he has published several books addressing the international circulation of knowledge among Portuguese-speaking architects, including Arquitectura Antituberculose (Faup-publicações, 2005), Os fantasmas de Serralves (Dafne, 2007), Novela Bufa do Ufanismo em Concreto (Dafne, 2009), and Duas obras de Januário Godinho (Dafne, 2012). He coedited Mark Wigley's Casa da Música/Porto (Cada da Música, 2008) and Eduardo Souto de Moura's Floating Images (Lars Müller, 2012). With Diogo Seixas Lopes, he has been appointed chief cocurator for the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.