Architecture

During the course of a career spanning more than fifty years, Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) designed nearly one hundred single family houses. Aalto, also known for his furniture and glassware, worked in a distinctive style that blended modernism and traditional vernacular architecture.

If there’s anything architects like doing more than designing buildings, it’s talking about architecture. Whether musing about their inspirations (a blank sheet of paper, the sun hitting the side of a building), expanding on each other’s thoughts (on materials, collaboration, clients, and constraints), or dishing out a clever quip, architects make good copy.

The work of Japanese architect Toyo Ito explores the dynamic relationship between buildings and their environments. His principal focus is on developing an architecture free of the grid system, which he believes homogenizes people and their lives. Toyo Ito: Force of Nature documents the architect’s 2009 Kassler lecture at Princeton University School of Architecture.

The newest volume in our popular Conversations series features Japanese architect Tadao Ando. One of the most celebrated living architects, Ando is best known for crafting serenely austere structures that fuse Japanese building traditions with Western modernism.

A collection of the best and most popular bikes to be found anywhere right now, this book gives the overview of what is out there for every kind of cyclist. Whether you are a BMXtreme or mountain bike enthusiast, a keen tourer or racer, a city commuter or courier, or simply fascinated with the constantly advancing mechanics and engineering of folding and other innovative bike designs, this book has something for you.

Lighting is a key feature of almost all interiors but it is often treated in a rather superficial manner in most books. This volume features more than 40 recent international projects where the lighting is the defining design feature.

With the increasing sophistication of CAD and other design soft ware, there is now a wide array of means for both designing and fabricating architecture and its components. The proliferation of advanced modeling soft ware and hardware has enabled architects and students to conceive and create designs that would be very difficult to do using more traditional methods. This book focuses on the inspiring possibilities for architecture that can be achieved with all the diff erent technologies and techniques available for making complete designs or their components.

This book provides an in-depth study of the design and construction processes behind 25 leading contemporary buildings. Covering a broad range of international projects, the book illustrates the working methods and creative concerns of both long established and emerging international architects.

Architect Andrew Skurman is an unabashed classicist. His award-winning San Francisco–based firm, Andrew Skurman Architects, specializes in designing superbly crafted custom residences inspired by the building traditions of French châteaux, Mediterranean villas, and Georgian country houses.

The first volume in our new Modern Landscapes: Transition and Transformation series, Lawrence Halprin’s Skyline Park showcases the acclaimed landscape designer’s urban renewal effort for downtown Denver in the 1970s. Drawing on the rugged beauty of the city’s natural surroundings for inspiration, Halprin created a signature landmark of sunken fountains, walls, and berms that served as an urban promenade and an oasis from the surrounding streets.

Recycled Home features 50 stylish craft projects for the home, using discarded or repurposed materials. Step-by- step illustrations guide you through each project, and no special skills are needed. From quick fixes taking half an hour to a patchwork throw to spend a weekend on, you’ll find something to inspire you. Update your home creatively and economically with flair and style. Recycled Home will appeal to those interested in interiors, textiles, craft , gardening, and sustainability.

Modern architecture is a story of movements, styles, and genres. But what of the work that remains defiantly unique, refusing to submit to a label or genre? The New Modern House is a comprehensive look at the emerging trend of architecture that favors substance over style, combining functional design and sustainable processes with a straightforward, honest aesthetic.

Featuring many of the world’s most highly acclaimed landscape architects, this book presents 40 of the most recently completed and infl uential landscape designs. Each project is presented with color photographs, site plans and sections as well as numerous consistently styled construction details. Intended for architects, engineers and landscape architects, the book will also be invaluable for architecture, garden and landscape design students, for whom it will be a resource not only for understanding the work of the best contemporary landscape architects, but also as a tool for their own design work.

Detail in Contemporary Residential Architecture provides analysis of both the technical and the aesthetic importance of details in the development of contemporary residential architecture. Featuring many of the world’s most highly acclaimed architects, the book presents more than 50 of the most recently completed and infl uential house designs.

Rome as we know it is largely a creation of the Renaissance, restructured and risen anew from a neglected medieval town. This book traces the extraordinary works of painting, sculpture, and architecture commissioned by Rome’s church and civic nobility as part of their rival bids for power and prestige.

No one captured the midcentury modernism of the Mad Men era better than Balthazar Korab. As one of the period’s most prolific and celebrated architecture photographers, Korab captured images as graceful and elegant as his subjects.

This book explores the theories, practices, and principles of new approaches to solar architecture that foster both design excellence and low-energy use. In response to the challenges of global warming and climate change, design and technology enable architects to achieve greater performance standards while at the same time developing an environmental aesthetic. Towards Zero-energy Architecture is a much-needed call for the design professions to redefine architecture to help solve ecological problems.

IF CARS COULD TALK examines urban environments, how they are born, change, and die, and offers fresh approaches to unlocking our cities’ great potential. More than half of the world’s population lives in a city and that number stands to increase. Crafted with the tools gleaned during the author’s 40 years of working as an urban designer around the world, Fain’s message could not be more timely.

Metals, as surface or structure—as the generators of space—play a role in nearly every strain of modernization in architecture. They define complete geographies of work, production, and political life. Non-architectural metals delivered in automobiles, and hard goods in the United States and worldwide have all been sourced as the engines of the sprawling late twentieth-century city in all of its forms. But in the received aspects of architectural history, metals, and in particular steel, remain less diluted; they are presented as intrinsic to the profession as material precedes concepts—they are carriers of architectural meaning.

The AsBuilt series is dedicated to presenting recent examples of formal and material innovation in architecture through detail and technical drawings, diagrams, photographs, and work-in-progress material, including fabrication and assembly. Details, Technology, and Form, the third volume in the series, explores the genesis of twenty-five projects built in the United States and Canada, many notable for their multi-disciplinary design process. Editors Christine Killory and René Davids have selected buildings which have contributed to the ongoing evolution of architecture as a synthesis of art, engineering, and craft. From designs inspired by responses to environmental and energy concerns to re-interpretations of regional precedents or transformations of pre-fabricated building systems, all are testaments to the range and reach of contemporary architectural technology.

Paolo Soleri’s architectural-philosophical thinking sets forth fundamental reformulations to address the globalizing world’s most urgent environmental, urban infrastructural, and socio-ethical problems. In this book, Soleri’s most recent philosophical-architectural ideas are distilled into a concentrated overview that is more accessible to the general reader than his previous books.

Pilot and photographer Alex MacLean has flown his plane over large areas of the United States, documenting the landscape—from beautiful agricultural patterns to geometric city grids. In his new book, he directs his lens at the rooftops of New York City, showing the great complexity and life of the roofs of New York’s buildings. Depicting not only the city’s famous water towers, but pools, tennis courts, gardens, sunbathers, art, and restaurants up in the air, MacLean’s powerful images give readers a glimpse of a part of the city that usually remains hidden. Maps and captions help the reader to easily locate the photographs, and an essay by XXX puts MacLean’s work into context.

Every generation thinks it is special, new, and different—and ours is no exception. What perhaps may make the claim stronger for the current generation are the circumstances: global networking and integration, and global economic and security crises; environmental activism and environmental catastrophe; virtual revolution and physical stagnation. Against these challenges and in light of the fundamental ruptures of the Great Recession, the committee posits that the future will operate on a wholly different paradigm. This difference will require architects and the discipline to practice architecture and design without preconceptions and assumptions, rethinking how designers engage constructively with our cities, our environments, and our societies. Not content to wait for the hoped-for return of economic conditions favorable to conventional ideas about architectural practice, architects must ask: What is the new role of the designer?

Written for students and practitioners in the fields of architecture and interior design, our new Architecture BriefSustainable Design provides a concise overview of all the techniques available for reducing the energy footprint ofstructures and space...

This book is a guide to the history and architecture of the University of Virginia. It features a scholarly narrative of the campus’s development, from Thomas Jefferson’s original design for a handful of students, to the sprawling institution that is now one of the top public universities in the country.

Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, the latest addition to the Architecture Briefs series, is a handbook on how to write effectively and critically about the contemporary city.

Shrouded in mystery and rich with history, Alcatraz draws over a million visitors each year. This enlightening volume provides the first complete history of Alcatraz told through its architecture.

This innovative and unique book is a visual guide to the buildings that surround us, naming all the visible architectural features. Unlike other architectural dictionaries, the reader doesn't have to know the name before looking it up. Clear line drawings and extensive color photographs illustrate each of the main building types, from forts to churches, stately homes to skyscrapers.

What does history look like? How do you draw time? Cartographies of Time is the first history of the timeline, written engagingly and with incredible visuals.

Terry Farrell is one of the world's leading urban designers and one of Britain’s foremost architects. He has worked on high-profile building schemes and masterplans in cities as diverse as Seattle, London and Seoul.

John Marx is of the generation of design architects who witnessed their pencils morph into mouses and their drafting tables into computer desktops. Throughout this transition, he has maintained a remarkable aesthetic consistency in his architectural proje...