--LewisMumford. . . important to America and all the rest of the world in ourstruggle to design rational, wholesome, and productive landscapes.--Laurie Olin, Hanna Olin, Ltd.This century's most influential landscape architecture book.--Landscape Architecture. . . an enduring contribution to the technical literature oflandscape planning and to that unfortunately small collection ofwritings which speak with emotional eloquence of the importance ofecological principles in regional planning. --Landscape and UrbanPlanningIn the twenty-five years since it first took the academic world bystorm, Design With Nature has done much to redefine the fields oflandscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and ecologicaldesign. It has also left a permanent mark on the ongoing discussionof mankind's place in nature and nature's place in mankind withinthe physical sciences and humanities. Described by one enthusiasticreviewer as a user's manual for our world, Design With Natureoffers a practical blueprint for a new, healthier relationshipbetween the built environment and nature. In so doing, it providesnothing less than the scientific, technical, and philosophicalfoundations for a mature civilization that will, as Lewis Mumfordecstatically put it in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating anddisappearing before our eyes.

    Now he presents an exquisite collection that captures the full range of his work and the magic of chance encounters in New York City. Hayes's "frank, beautiful, bewitching" street photographs "unmask their subjects' best and truest selves" (Jennifer Senior, New York Times): A policeman pauses at the end of a day. Cooks sneak in cigarette breaks. A pair of movers plays cards on the back of a truck. Friends claim the sidewalk. Lovers embrace. A flame-haired girl gazes mysteriously into the lens. And park benches provide a setting for a couple of hunks, a mom and her baby, a stylish nonagenarian . . . How New York Breaks Your Heart reveals ordinary New Yorkers at their most peaceful, joyful, distracted, anxious, expressive, and at their most fleeting--bringing the texture of the city to vivid life. Woven through with Hayes's lyric reflections, these photos will, like the city itself, break your heart by asking you to fall in love.

    Tolkien, creator of Middle-earth.This new book from renowned expert John Garth takes us to the places that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to create his fictional locations in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and other classic works. Featuring more than 100 images, it includes Tolkien’s own illustrations, contributions from other artists, archive images, maps and spectacular present-day photographs.Inspirational locations range across Great Britain – particularly Tolkien’s beloved West Midlands and Oxford – but also overseas to all points of the compass. Sources are located for Hobbiton, the elven valley of Rivendell, the Glittering Caves of Helm’s Deep, and many other key spots in Middle-earth, as well as for its mountain scenery, forests, rivers, lakes and shorelands.A rich interplay is revealed between Tolkien’s personal travels, his wide reading and his deep scholarship as an Oxford professor. Garth uses his own profound knowledge of Tolkien’s life and work to uncover the extraordinary processes of invention, to debunk popular misconceptions about the inspirations for Middle-earth, and to put forward strong new claims of his own.

    The Nature of Design, on the other hand, is about starting things, specifically an ecological design revolution that changes how we provide food, shelter, energy, materials, and livelihood, and how we deal with waste.Ecological design is an emerging field that aims to recalibrate what humans do in the world according to how the world works as a biophysical system. Design in this sense is a large concept having to do as much with politics and ethics as with buildings and technology.The book begins by describing the scope of design, comparing it to the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Subsequent chapters describe barriers to a design revolution inherent in our misuse of language, the clockspeed of technological society, and shortsighted politics. Orr goes on to describe the critical role educational institutions might play in fostering design intelligence and what he calls a higher order of heroism.Appropriately, the book ends on themes of charity, wilderness, and the rights of children. Astute yet broadly appealing, The Nature of Design combines theory, practicality, and a call to action.

    This is all done through stimulating discussions on the elements, media, methods, content, composition, and style of art.Along with discussions on the purpose of art (Ch. 1-9), a separate Chapter (18) takes a look at art beyond Europe and the U.S. and examines art from all around the world. The history of art is contained chronologically in the second part of the book, (Ch. 10-17).

    The most common type is often where a large group of like-minded punks cram into a house usually intended to accommodate two or three people, resulting in low rent and, thus, extended hours of leisure for the residents to pursue their true interests. "Punk House" features anarchist warehouses, feminist collectives, tree houses, workshops, artists studios, self-sufficient farms, hobo squats, community centers, basement bike shops, speakeasies, and all varieties of communal living spaces. In over 300 images of fifty houses in twenty-five cities in the US, photographer Abby Banks finds the already weathered face of a seventeen-year-old runaway; the soft hands of a vinyl junkie (record collector); the mohawked show-goer; the dirty dishes in the sink; silk screened posters on the wall; and many other revealing glimpses of these anarchist interiors.

    In this evocative and lavishly illustrated narrative, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan delve into the history of the park idea, from the first sighting by white men in 1851 of the valley that would become Yosemite and the creation of the world’s first national park at Yellowstone in 1872, through the most recent additions to a system that now encompasses nearly four hundred sites and 84 million acres.The authors recount the adventures, mythmaking, and intense political battles behind the evolution of the park system, and the enduring ideals that fostered its growth. They capture the importance and splendors of the individual parks: from Haleakala in Hawaii to Acadia in Maine, from Denali in Alaska to the Everglades in Florida, from Glacier in Montana to Big Bend in Texas. And they introduce us to a diverse cast of compelling characters—both unsung heroes and famous figures such as John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ansel Adams—who have been transformed by these special places and committed themselves to saving them from destruction so that the rest of us could be transformed as well.The National Parks is a glorious celebration of an essential expression of American democracy.

    We start counting our fingers and toes and end up balancing checkbooks and calculating risk. So powerful is the appeal of numbers that many people ascribe to them a mystical significance. Other numbers go beyond the supernatural, working to explain our universe and how it behaves. In Cosmic Numbers, mathematics professor James D. Stein traces the discovery, evolution, and interrelationships of the numbers that define our world. Everyone knows about the speed of light and absolute zero, but numbers like Boltzmann’s constant and the Chandrasekhar limit are not as well known, and they do far more than one might imagine: They tell us how this world began and what the future holds. Much more than a gee-whiz collection of facts and figures, Cosmic Numbers illuminates why particular numbers are so important—both to the scientist and to the rest of us.

    World famous sites including the Grand Canyon, Mount Everest and the Great Barrier Reef feature alongside lesser-known gems such as the Shirakami-Sanchi Forest and the hauntingly beautiful Wrangel Island. llustrated with stunning photography and providing realistic advice for visiting these sometimes remote corners of the earth, this book serves as both an inspiration and a practical guide. There is a wealth of wonders here to exhaust even the most intrepid of armchair travellers. Here you will find the cave where 20 million bats roost, the remote Indian Ocean island that is home to 100,000 Giant Tortoises, as well as the world's most active volcano, the longest cave system and the lake so deep that it would take all the world's rivers more than a year to refill it. Mountain ranges, deserts, gorges, rivers, glaciers, marshes, cliffs, waterfalls, coral reefs, tropical rainforests.(Sentences in a slightly different order since some of them were already here,)

    From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue—and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light. Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany—home of the last Spix’s macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our “blue marble” planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell.

    Now, updated and expanded, this classic reference continues to bring to readers the full array of civilization's architectural achievements.Insightful, engagingly written and graced with close to a thousand superb illustrations, the Second Edition of this extraordinary volume offers a sweeping narrative that examines architecture as it reflects the social, economic, and technological aspects of human history. The scope of the book is astonishing. Kostof examines a surprisingly wide variety of man-made structures: prehistoric huts and the TVA, the pyramids of Giza and the Rome railway station, the ziggurat and the department store. Kostof considered every building worthy of attention, every structure a potential source of insight, whether it be prehistoric hunting camps at Terra Amata, or the caves at Lascaux with their magnificent paintings, or a twenty-story hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

    Yet this influence is not unidirectional, say the authors  of this fascinating book: people profoundly influence crow culture, ecology, and evolution as well. Examining the often surprising ways that crows and humans interact, John Marzluff and Tony Angell contend that those interactions reflect a process of “cultural coevolution.” They offer a challenging new view of the human-crow dynamic—a view that may change our thinking not only about crows but also about ourselves. Featuring more than 100 original drawings, the book takes a close look at the influences people have had on the lives of crows throughout history and at the significant ways crows have altered human lives. In the Company of Crows and Ravens illuminates the entwined histories of crows and people and concludes with an intriguing discussion of the crow-human relationship and how our attitudes toward crows may affect our cultural trajectory. As the authors state in their preface: “Crows and people share similar traits and social strategies. To a surprising extent, to know the crow is to know ourselves."

    One of the oldest forms of indigenous shelter still in use today, yurts have exploded into the twenty-first century as a multi-faceted, thoroughly modern, utterly versatile, and immensely popular modern structure whose possibilities are still being explored. Kemery introduces the innovators who redesigned the yurt and took it from back country trekking and campground uses to modern permanent homes and offices.

    The 30 projects include a simple pendant encasing a large semiprecious stone and a flat chain-mail neckpiece.

    Cold Comfort is his temperamental tribute to the city of Duluth, Minnesota, where bears wander the streets and canoe racks are standard equipment.