City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction


David Macaulay - 1974
    With black and white illustrations and detailed explanations, this comprehensive and visual resource is perfect for young readers interested in history, architecture, and Roman civilization.

Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan


Rem Koolhaas - 1978
    Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle -- "the culture of congestion" -- and its architecture. "Manhattan," he writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York's history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.

Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Theory


James Corner - 1999
    While this recovery invokes a return of past traditions and ideas, it also implies renewal, invention, and transformation. Recovering Landscape collects a number of essays that discuss why landscape is gaining increased attention today, and what new possibilities might emerge from this situation. Themes such as reclamation, urbanism, infrastructure, geometry, representation, and temporality are explored in discussions drawn from recent developments not only in the United States but also in the Netherlands, France, India, and Southeast Asia. The contributors to this collection, all leading figures in the field of landscape architecture, include Alan Balfour, Denis Cosgrove, Georges Descombes, Christophe Girot, Steen Hoyer, David Leatherbarrow, Bart Lootsma, Sebastien Marot, Anuradha Mathur, Marc Treib, and Alex Wall.

The Hidden Dimension


Edward T. Hall - 1966
    Introducing the science of "proxemics," Hall demonstrates how man's use of space can affect personal business relations, cross-cultural exchanges, architecture, city planning, and urban renewal.

The Art of Building Cities: City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals


Camillo Sitte - 1889
    Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Camillo Sitte (1843-1903) was a noted Austrian architect, painter and theoretician who exercised great influence on the development of urban planning in Europe and the United States. The publication at Vienna in May 1889 of "Der Stadtebau nach seinen k�nstlerischen Grundsatzen" ("The Art of Building Cities") began a new era in Germanic city planning. Sitte strongly criticized the current emphasis on broad, straight boulevards, public squares arranged primarily for the convenience of traffic, and efforts to strip major public or religious landmarks of adjoining smaller structures regarded as encumbering such monuments of the past. Sitte proposed instead to follow what he believed to be the design objectives of those whose streets and buildings shaped medieval cities. He advocated curving or irregular street alignments to provide ever-changing vistas. He called for T-intersections to reduce the number of possible conflicts among streams of moving traffic. He pointed out the advantages of what came to be know as "turbine squares"--civic spaces served by streets entering in such a way as to resemble a pin-wheel in plan. His teachings became widely accepted in Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia, and in less than a decade his style of urban design came to be accepted as the norm in those countries.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There


TED Books - 2013
    As a result, we face both a dire emergency and a tremendous opportunity. At their best, our modern cities are hubs of human connection, fountains of creativity, and exemplars of green living. Yet at the same time, they still suffer the symptoms of industrial urbanization: pollution, crowding, crime, social fragmentation, and dehumanization. Now is the time to envision what cities can be and to transform them. This book, produced in partnership with the Atlantic Cities, celebrates 12 promising, provocative responses to this challenge, in realms ranging from transportation to food to art. It asks and begins to answer: How can we transform cities to be sustainable, efficient, beautiful, and invigorating to the human soul? And practically speaking, how do we get from here to there?

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces


William H. Whyte - 1980
    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.

101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School


Matthew Frederick - 2018
       Students of urban design often find themselves lost between books that are either highly academic or overly formulaic, leaving them with few tangible tools to use in their design projects. 101 Things I Learned® in Urban Design School fills this void with provocative, practical lessons on urban space, street types, pedestrian experience, managing the design process, the psychological, social, cultural, and economic ramifications of physical design decisions, and more. Written by two experienced practitioners and instructors, this informative book will appeal not only to students, but to seasoned professionals, planners, city administrators, and ordinary citizens who wish to better understand their built world.

The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design


Roman Mars - 2020
    The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.

Patina Farm


Brooke Giannetti - 2016
    When Brooke and Steve Giannetti decided to leave their suburban Santa Monica home to build a new life on a farm, they looked into themselves, and traveled to Belgium and France, for inspiration. Brooke’s inviting prose combines with 200 photographs and Steve’s architectural drawings to show their inspirations, their materials selections, and the enviable result of their team effort and creativity: an idyllic farm in California’s Ojai Valley. We see every corner of the family home, guesthouse, lush gardens, and delightful animal quarters. Steve Giannetti is a renowned architect, and Brooke is an interior decorator and writer of the design blog Velvet and Linen. They also own Giannetti Home, a store that sells furniture and products for the home in their signature Patina style. The couple’s work has been featured in the Veranda, Coastal Living, Good Housekeeping, the New York Times. They are the authors of Patina Style.

New Cottage Home


Jim Tolpin - 1998
    Jim Tolpin celebrates the diversity and charm of 30 sample cottages, from a Pacific Northwest cottage modeled after a French hunting lodge to a "salvage yard vernacular cottage" built with junkyard materials.Each featured home reflects individual personality, priorities, and lifestyle. Whether by the water, on a mountain, or in a forest, field, or town, these homes emphasize quality of place over quantity of space.

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies


Reyner Banham - 1971
    His construct of "four ecologies" examined the ways Angelenos relate to the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills. Banham delighted in this mobile city and identified it as an exemplar of the posturban future.

Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development


Manfredo Tafuri - 1976
    It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.

The New Small House


Katie Hutchison - 2015
    The book presents fundamental small-house design strategies, complete with whole-house case studies for homeowners eager to simplify. Creating a great small house is illustrated in the opening chapter with 10 approaches, including: borrowed view and daylight multipurpose spaces privacy pockets using quality materials Twenty-five stunning small houses are profiled in the second part of the book, organized by the nature of their locations.

Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form


Robert Venturi - 1972
    This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work. Synopsis Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work. About Author: Biography Steven Izenour (1940-2001)