Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly's Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly's legacy.From the forward: For more than 30 years, Project for Public Spaces has been using observations, surveys, interviews and workshops to study and transform public spaces around the world into community places. Every week we give presentations about why some public spaces work and why others don't, using the techniques, ideas, and memorable phrases from William H. "Holly" Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.Holly Whyte was both our mentor and our friend. Perhaps his most important gift was the ability to show us how to discover for ourselves why some public spaces work and others don't. With the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and its companion film in 1980, the world could see that through the basic tools of observation and interviews, we can learn an immense amount about how to make our cities more livable. In doing so, Holly Whyte laid the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned. It is our pleasure to offer this important book back to the world it is helping to transform.

    Now revised, enlarged and expanded, Kenneth Frampton brings the story up to date and adds an entirely new concluding chapter that focuses on four countries where individual talent and enlightened patronage have combined to produce a comprehensive and convincing architectural culture: Finland, France, Spain and Japan. The bibliography has also been reviewed and extended, making this volume more indispensable than ever.

    It has influenced a generation of students and critics interested in the formation of attitudes, themes, and forms which were characteristic of artists and architects working primarily in Europe between 1900 and 1930 under the compulsion of new technological developments in the first machine age.

    Le Modulor was published in 1950 and after meeting with success, Le Corbusier went on to publish Modulor 2 in 1955. In many of Le Corbusier's most notable buildings, including the Chapel at Ronchamp and the Unite d'habitation, evidence of his Modulor system can be seen. These two volumes form an important and integral part of Le Corbusier's theoretical writings.

    Discussion relates the importance of space to relativism throughout time.

    Arwas discusses the work of Art Deco's leading French exponents -- Ruhlmann, Puiforcat, Erte, Dunand, Fouquet, Cassandre, Boucheron, and Icart, to name but a few -- as he traces the evolution of the style from its first appearance at the famed 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, from which it took its name.

    It offers vast amounts of information on the essential component elements of each building. A true classic in the industry.

    

    Known for his many commercial buildings — Auditorium Building in Chicago (1889), Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1891), Prudential Building in Buffalo (1895), and Carson, Pirie and Scott Building in Chicago (1899 & 1903) — Sullivan is equally admired today for his two major books: The Autobiography of an Idea and Kindergarten Chats.In this creative, seminal work, his theories about architecture, art, education, and life in general are presented in the form of dialogues, or "chats," between an architect and a novice. Sullivan's contempt for 19th-century eclectic architecture ("That the bulk of our architecture is rotten to the core, is a statement which does not admit of one solitary doubt"), his striving for a more functional approach, and his theory of the skyscraper are just a few of the principles and insights that emerge in these pages. As the architect and writer Claude Bragdon has remarked: "Kindergarten Chats remains in my memory as one of the most provocative, amusing, astounding, inspiring things that I have ever read."This edition is the first low-priced reprint of the 1918 definitive edition of Kindergarten Chats, which was personally revised by Sullivan himself, who rewrote those chapters and generally streamlined the argument of the original version. Eight additional papers, covering the years 1885–1906, supplement the basic text: they include "Ornament in Architecture," "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," "The Young Man in Architecture," and "What is Architecture?" Architecture students, architects, artists, educators, and readers who enjoy the stimulus of a lively and iconoclastic mind will all be attracted by the magnetic power of this bold, thought-provoking book.

    From the book jacket blurb: "Living in space stations or in floating bubbles is not as farfetched as it may sound, and Fantastic Architecture brings to the reader this world of the future, of visionary dreams, as well as the world of obscure eccentrics who have created their own "unofficial" architecture.

    These buildings were designed to catch the eye, to be remembered. No ad agency conceived them—they were often designed by the owners themselves, poured of ferro concrete and shaped by the undisguised desire to sell.

    

    The Old House Journal Compendium

    Over 450 illustrations.

    Casts light on the varied and original paths that modern architects have taken in their search for new forms, documenting with hundreds of photographs and diagrams superb engineering feats in Europe and America.

    This book--itself designed with graphic modularity and richly illustrated with examples of forms created by nature and by man, including some remarkable and surprising architectural structures developed by the author--leads the designer in this "natural" direction, beyond the familiar limitations of the right angle and the cube and into a richer world of forms based on the triangle, the hexagon, and general polyhedra, as well as saddle polyhedra spanned by minimal continuous surfaces.The author writes that "Systems can be envisaged which consist of some minimum inventory of component types which can be alternatively combined to yield a great diversity of efficient structural form. We call these "minimum inventory/maximum diversity" systems."By such a 'system' I mean a "minimized" inventory of component types (a kit of parts) "along with" rubrics whereby the components may be combined.... The snowflake is the most graphic example in nature of the minimum inventory/maximum diversity principle. In fact, it may be considered an archetype of physicogeometric expression. All planar snow crystals are found to have star-like forms with six corners (or subsets thereof).... However, within this six-fold form, no two snowflakes have ever been known to be exactly alike...."An integral part of the concept of minimum inventory/maximum diversity systems is the principle of conservation of resources. The formative processes in natural structure are characteristically governed by least-energy responses. Perhaps the simplest expression of this is found in the principle of closest packing, a principle which even in its most elementary form is common in both the animate and inanimate worlds."Pearce's work follows in the tradition established by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson and Konrad Wachsmann, and reflects his earlier close working association with Charles Eames and Buckminster Fuller. With Eames, he contributed to the design of seating and other furniture systems, and he edited the preliminary text of Fuller's "Synergetics, " that grand summary of his thoughts, and prepared the illustrations for the published version of that book.Many of the ideas explored in this book have already undergone "reduction to practice" in the firm Pearce founded, Synestructics, Inc. Its initial products have been kits and kites, and a ministructure large enough for kids to crawl through, the "Curved Space Labyrinth," a saddle polyhedra system made of transparent plastic. Adult-sized structures, and indeed megastructures, based on these principles can be realized as soon as entrepreneurs emerge whose vision is commensurate with that of Peter Pearce.

    

    At the same time, it explores the broader determinants of architectural production: the rapid economic expansion of Paris and the main provincial centers and the increasing demand for improved public amenities—theaters, schools, markets, and hospitals. This generously illustrated book provides a vivid commentary on society and manners in pre-Revolutionary France.

    

    --antiqbook.com

    

    This creative book is a unique reference for professionals and an invaluable guide for beginning artists and designers, small businessmen, church and community organizations, and anyone involved in the preparation of display material.