The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.Whereas many architects are wary of openly discussing the word beauty, this book has at its center the large and naïve question: What is a beautiful building? It is a tour through the philosophy and psychology of architecture that aims to change the way we think about our homes, our streets and ourselves.

    The roots of a tree indicate the sun’s direction; the Big Dipper tells the time; a passing butterfly hints at the weather; a sand dune reveals prevailing wind; the scent of cinnamon suggests altitude; a budding flower points south. To help you understand nature as he does, Gooley shares more than 850 tips for forecasting, tracking, and more, gathered from decades spent walking the landscape around his home and around the world. Whether you’re walking in the country or city, along a coastline, or by night, this is the ultimate resource on what the land, sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and clouds can reveal—if you only know how to look!

    That groundbreaking book proposed a new blueprint for the American home: a house that values quality over quantity, with an emphasis on comfort and beauty, a high level of detail, and a floor plan designed for today's informal lifestyle. Creating the Not So Big House is the blueprint in action. Focusing on key design strategies such as visual weight, layering, and framed openings, Sarah Susanka takes an up-close look at 25 houses designed according to Not So Big principles. The houses are from all over North America in a rich variety of styles -- from a tiny New York apartment to a southwestern adobe, a traditional Minnesota farmhouse, and a cottage community in the Pacific Northwest. Whether new or remodeled, these one-of-a-kind homes provide all the inspiration you need to create your own Not So Big House.

    An international favorite since its original hardcover publication in Spring 1994, this spectacular collection of enthralling, full-color photographs portrays an array of serendipitous and thoroughly charming cats against a backdrop of the beautiful Greek Isles. Combining the romantic beauty of the Mediterranean and the delightful behavior of felines, Cats in the Sun will appeal to cat lovers, travelers, and photographers alike.

    Nosy by nature, he wanted to see how personal style was reflected in private spaces. Lucky for us, he found his answer in the color-rich and eclectic quarters of a diverse group of subjects, including Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler, Faris Rotter, Andre Walker, and Olivier Zahm, in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, and London. Each profile is accompanied by Selby’s watercolor portraits of the subjects and objects from their homes, and illustrated questionnaires, which Selby asks each sitter to fill out. This book consists of over thirty profiles, many of which have never-before-seen, selected exclusively for the book. The result is a collection of unique spaces bursting with energy and personality that together create a colorful hodgepodge of inspirational interiors.

    From its beginnings in a carpenter's workshop and the development of the first plastic brick, to the group's current position as an international brand, a timeline highlights key moments in LEGO® history. Fascinating facts on every significant LEGO® product line, theme park, video game, artwork, competition, club, collectible and more combine with images from the LEGO Group's photo archives-many seen here for the first time-and inspiring ideas on how to make a variety of things from just a few bricks. Packaged in a beautiful slip case with cutting-edge design, this two-volume set also features Standing Small-a 96-page book celebrating the minifigure. LEGO, the LEGO logo, the Brick configuration and the Minifigure are trademarks of the LEGO Group. ©2009 The LEGO Group.

    Anna Karenina, Clarissa Dalloway, Daisy Buchanan...each seems to live on the page through celebrated artist Samantha Hahn's evocative portraits and hand-lettered quotations, with the pairing of art and text capturing all the spirit of the character as she was originally written. The book itself evokes vintage grace re-imagined for contemporary taste, with a cloth spine silk-screened in a graphic pattern, debossed cover, and pages that turn with the tactile satisfaction of watercolour paper. In the hand and in the reading, here is a new classic for the book lover's library.

    The legendary curator John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, has painstakingly selected what he considers Adams' finest work and has attempted to find the single best photographic print of each. Szarkowski writes that "Ansel Adams at 100 is the product of a thorough review of work that Adams, at various times in his career, considered important. It includes many photographs that will be unfamiliar to lovers of Adams' work, and a substantial number that will be new to Adams scholars. The book is an attempt to identify that work on which Adams' claim as an important modern artist must rest." Ansel Adams at 100-the highly acclaimed international exhibition and the book, with Szarkowski's incisive critical essay-is the first serious effort since Adams' death in 1984 to reevaluate his achievement as an artist. The exhibition prints, drawn from important public and private collections, have been meticulously reproduced in tritone to create the splendid plates in this edition, faithfully rendering the nuances of the original prints. Ansel Adams at 100 is destined to be the definitive book on this great American artist. John Szarkowski is director emeritus of the Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is the author of such classic works as Looking at Photographs, The Photographer's Eye, Photography Until Now, and Atget, as well as several books of his own photographs, including the recently reissued The Idea of Louis Sullivan.

    Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan’s 45-year hole of fire called the Door of Hell, coffins hanging off a side of a cliff in the Philippines, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.Atlas Obscura revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden, and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book you can open anywhere.

    Full page B&W photos

    And it was my privilege to listen.” —Sebastião Salgado On a very fortuitous day in 1970, 26-year-old Sebastião Salgado held a camera for the first time. When he looked through the viewfinder, he experienced a revelation: suddenly life made sense. From that day onward—though it took years of hard work before he had the experience to earn his living as a photographer—the camera became his tool for interacting with our world. Salgado, who “always preferred the chiaroscuro palette of black-and-white images,” shot very little color in his early career before giving it up completely. Raised on a farm in Brazil, Salgado possessed a deep love and respect for nature; he was also particularly sensitive to the ways in which human beings are affected by their often devastating socio-economic conditions. Of the myriad works Salgado has produced in his acclaimed career, three long-term projects stand out: Workers (1993), documenting the vanishing way of life of manual laborers across the world, Migrations (2000), a tribute to mass migration driven by hunger, natural disasters, environmental degradation and demographic pressure, and this new opus, Genesis, the result of an epic eight-year expedition to rediscover the mountains, deserts and oceans, the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society—the land and life of a still-pristine planet. “Some 46% of the planet is still as it was in the time of genesis,” Salgado reminds us. “We must preserve what exists.” The Genesis project, along with the Salgados’ Instituto Terra, are dedicated to showing the beauty of our planet, reversing the damage done to it, and preserving it for the future. Over 30 trips—travelled by foot, light aircraft, seagoing vessels, canoes, and even balloons, through extreme heat and cold and in sometimes dangerous conditions—Salgado created a collection of images showing us nature, animals, and indigenous peoples in breathtaking beauty. Mastering the monochrome with an extreme deftness to rival the virtuoso Ansel Adams, Salgado brings black-and-white photography to a new dimension; the tonal variations in his works, the contrasts of light and dark, recall the works of Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Georges de La Tour. What does one discover in Genesis? The animal species and volcanoes of the Galápagos; penguins, sea lions, cormorants, and whales of the Antarctic and South Atlantic; Brazilian alligators and jaguars; African lions, leopards, and elephants; the isolated Zo’é tribe deep in the Amazon jungle; the Stone Age Korowai people of West Papua; nomadic Dinka cattle farmers in Sudan; Nenet nomads and their reindeer herds in the Arctic Circle; Mentawai jungle communities on islands west of Sumatra; the icebergs of the Antarctic; the volcanoes of Central Africa and the Kamchatka Peninsula; Saharan deserts; the Negro and Juruá rivers in the Amazon; the ravines of the Grand Canyon; the glaciers of Alaska... and beyond. Having dedicated so much time, energy, and passion to the making of this work, Salgado likens Genesis to “my love letter to the planet.” Whereas the limited Collector’s Edition is conceived like a large-format portfolio that meanders across the planet, this unlimited book presents a selection of photographs arranged in five chapters geographically: Planet South, Sanctuaries, Africa, Northern Spaces, Amazonia and Pantanal. Each in its own way, this book and the Collector’s edition—both edited and designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado—pay homage to Salgado’s triumphant and unparalleled Genesis project.The world premiere of Sebastião Salgado: Genesis will open at the Natural History Museum in London on April 11, 2013. The exhibition builds on the Museum’s reputation as the home of the planet’s best nature photography. For further information and to book tickets please go to www.nhm.ac.uk/salgado. Additionally, from May 14th, a special portfolio of plantinum prints from Genesis will be shown at Phillips Howick Place gallery in London.Worldwide venues for the Genesis exhibition:The Natural History Museum, London, UK - April 11 through September 8, 2013 The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada - May 2 through September 2, 2013 Ara Pacis Museum, Rome, Italy - May 15 through September 15, 2013 Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil - May 28 through August 25, 2013 Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland - September 21, 2013 through January 12, 2014 La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, France - September 25, 2013 through January 5, 2014 SESC Belenzinho, São Paulo, SP, Brazil - September 9 - November 2013

    

    . .In You Are Here, bestselling author and celebrated astronaut Chris Hadfield creates a virtual orbit of Earth, giving us the really big picture: this is our home, from space. The millions of us who followed Hadfield's news-making Twitter feed from the ISS thought we knew what we were looking at when we first saw his photos. But we may have caught the beauty and missed the full meaning. Now, through photographs - many of which have never been shared - Hadfield unveils a fresh and insightful look at our planet. He sees astonishing detail and importance in these images, not just because he's spent months in space but because his in-depth knowledge of geology, geography and meteorology allows him to reveal the photos' mysteries.Featuring Hadfield's favourite images, You Are Here is divided by continent and represents one (idealized) orbit of the ISS. This planetary photo tour - surprising, playful, thought-provoking and visually delightful - provides a breathtakingly beautiful perspective on the wonders of the world. You Are Here opens a singular window on our planet, using remarkable photographs to illuminate the history and consequences of human settlement, the magnificence of newly uncovered landscapes, and the power of the natural forces shaping our world and the future of our species.

    Part personal narrative, part documentary, part travelogue, part chapbook, and all Kalman, these brilliant, whimsical paintings, ideas, and images - which initially appear random - ultimately form an intricately interconnected worldview, an idiosyncratic inner monologue.

    We witness fiery volcanic eruptions; wind-sculpted icebergs in the Antarctic; mind-blowing migrations of wildlife large and small; natural wonders from Belize's Great Blue Hole to Yellowstone in Wyoming; also the imprint that humanity has made on the planet.