Book picks similar to
The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper by Kate Ascher
architecture
non-fiction
nonfiction
science
Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections - The Ultimate Guide to Star Wars Vehicles and Spacecraft
David West Reynolds - 1998
The main ships are explored and cutaway to reveal the armaments, propulsion systems, armor, control systems, and other key aspects of each vehicle, from Han Solo's Millennium Falcon to Darth Vader's TIE fighter. Special features and hidden mechanisms, never before revealed, are described and illustrated in graphic detail. Together with Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary, these books comprise a definitive classic Star Wars reference library.Book Details:
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: 10/5/1998
Pages: 32
Reading Level: Age 8 and Up
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.
Detroit: An American Autopsy
Charlie LeDuff - 2013
Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit’s vacant lots. In another life, Charlie LeDuff won the Pulitzer Prize reporting for The New York Times. But all that is behind him now, after returning to find his hometown in total freefall. Detroit is where his mother’s flower shop was firebombed; where his sister lost herself to drugs; where his brother works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as “Made in America.” With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark—and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses—LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He embeds with a local fire brigade struggling to defend its neighborhood against systemic arson and bureaucratic corruption. He investigates state senators and career police officials, following the money to discover who benefits from Detroit’s decline. He befriends union organizers, homeless do-gooders, embattled businessmen, and struggling homeowners, all ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Americans have hoped for decades that Detroit was an exception, an outlier. What LeDuff reveals is that Detroit is, once and for all, America’s city: It led us on the way up, and now it is leading us on the way down. Detroit can no longer be ignored because what happened there is happening out here. Redemption is thin on the ground in this ghost of a city, but Detroit: An American Autopsy is no hopeless parable. Instead, LeDuff shares a deeply human drama of colossal greed, ignorance, endurance, and courage. Detroit is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer—and a black comic tale of the absurdity of American life in the twenty-first century.
Architect and Entrepreneur: A Field Guide to Building, Branding, and Marketing Your Startup Design Business
Eric Reinholdt - 2015
The guide advocates novel strategies and tools that merge entrepreneurship with the practice of architecture and interior design. The Problem: Embarking on a new business venture is intimidating; you have questions. But many of the resources available to help entrepreneur architects and interior designers start their design business lack timeliness and relevance. Most are geared toward building colossal firms like SOM and Gensler using outdated methods and old business models. If you’re an individual or small team contemplating starting a design business, this is your field guide; crafted to inspire action. The Solution: Using the lean startup methodology to create a minimum viable product, the handbook encourages successive small wins that support a broader vision enabling one to, “think big, start small, and learn fast.” It’s a unique take on design practice viewed through the lens of entrepreneurship and is designed to answer the questions all new business owners face, from the rote to the existential. Questions about: - Startup costs - Business models (old and new) - Marriage of business and design - Mindset - Branding & naming (exercises and ideas) - Internet marketing strategies - Passive income ideas - Setting your fee - Taxes - Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) - Securing the work - Client relations - Software - Billing rates - Contracts Building a business isn’t a singular act; it’s a series of small steps. Using the outline found in Architect + Entrepreneur you can start today. The chapters are organized to guide you from idea to action. Rather than write a business plan you’ll be challenged to craft a brand and you’ll sell it using new technologies. Follow the guide sequentially and you’ll have both the tools and a profitable small business. The Author Award-winning architect, Eric Reinholdt has built his design practice, 30X40 Design Workshop using the strategies outlined in the book. He has successfully transitioned from an employee to architect entrepreneur and continues to refine his brand message, help other architects build their independent practice and serve his clients all from a Longhouse he designed for his family on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction's Most Beloved Heroines
Samantha Hahn - 2013
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.
Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
Alain Bertaud - 2018
Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground--the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative--"sustainable," "livable," "resilient"--often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens.Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this "urban planners' dream" created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities' productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.
Re:cyclists: 200 Years on Two Wheels
Michael Hutchinson - 2017
The calls to ban it were more or less instant.Re:cyclists is the tale of what happened next, of how we have spent two centuries wheeling our way about town and country on bikes--or on two-wheeled things that vaguely resembled what we now call bikes. Michael Hutchinson picks his way through those 200 years, discovering how cycling became a kinky vaudeville act for Parisians, how it became an American business empire, and how it went on to find a unique home in the British Isles. He considers the penny-farthing riders exploring the abandoned and lonely coaching roads during the railway era, and the Victorian high-society cyclists of the 1890s bicycle craze--a time when no aristocratic house party was without bicycles and when the Prince of Wales used to give himself an illicit thrill on a weekday afternoon by watching the women's riding-school in the Royal Albert Hall.Re:cyclists looks at how cycling became the sport, the pastime and the social life of millions of ordinary people, how it grew and how it suffered through the 1960s and '70s, and how at the dawn of the twenty-first century it rose again, much changed but still ultimately just someone careering along on two wheels.
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives
Carolyn Steel - 2008
Yet few eaters are conscious of the processes that are required to bring food into a metropolis. This original and revolutionary study examines the way in which modern food production has damaged the balance of human existence, and reveals a centuries-old dilemma that holds the key to a host of current problems, among them obesity, the inexorable rise of the supermarkets, and the destruction of the natural world. The rise and impact of such American hallmarks as industrialized food and meat production, the supermarket, fast food restaurant chains, and processed edibles on city life is examined alongside the historical roots and the contemporary issues at each stage of the food cycle, from farm to plate to landfill. Original and inspiring, this is a warning call to the waste and destruction caused by today’s food systems, and a guide to correcting its errors.
Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach
Mark Richards - 2020
Until now. This practical guide provides the first comprehensive overview of software architecture's many aspects. You'll examine architectural characteristics, architectural patterns, component determination, diagramming and presenting architecture, evolutionary architecture, and many other topics.Authors Neal Ford and Mark Richards help you learn through examples in a variety of popular programming languages, such as Java, C#, JavaScript, and others. You'll focus on architecture principles with examples that apply across all technology stacks.
The Ancient Engineers
L. Sprague de Camp - 1960
de Camp has the trick of being able to show technology engaging in feats as full of derring-do as those of Hannibal's army. History as it should be told."--Isaac Asimov,
The New York Times Book Review
The Pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon of Greece, the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum of Rome. Today, we stand in awe before these wonders of the ancient world. They hold our history and the deepest secrets of our past in their hidden recesses.In The Ancient Engineers, L. Sprague de Camp delves into the heart of the mystery. He introduces us to the master builders who had the vision, the power, and the passion to reach for the clouds and touch the heavens. We share in some of the greatest technological triumphs of all time--triumphs of the human mind, imagination, and spirit.
The Landscape of Man
Geoffrey Jellicoe - 1975
A selection from Geoffrey Jellicoe's "The Atlanta Historical Garden" is included.
A History of New York in 101 Objects
Sam Roberts - 2014
A Checker taxicab and a conductor’s baton. An oyster and a mastodon tusk. Inspired by A History of the World in 100 Objects, The New York Times’ Sam Roberts chose fifty objects that embody the narrative of New York for a feature article in the paper. Many more suggestions came from readers, and so Roberts has expanded the list to 101. Here are just a few of what this keepsake volume offers: · The Flushing Remonstrance, a 1657 petition for religious freedom that was a precursor to the First Amendment to the Constitution.· Beads from the African Burial Ground, 1700s. Slavery was legal in New York until 1827, although many free blacks lived in the city. The African Burial Ground closed in 1792 and was only recently rediscovered.· The bagel, early 1900s. The quintessential and undisputed New York food (excepting perhaps the pizza).· The Automat vending machine, 1912. Put a nickel in the slot and get a cup of coffee or a piece of pie. It was the early twentieth century version of fast food.· The “I Love NY” logo designed by Milton Glaser in 1977 for a campaign to increase tourism. Along with Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover depicting a New Yorker’s view of the world, it was perhaps the most famous and most frequently reproduced graphic symbol of the time.Unique, sometimes whimsical, always important, A History of New York in 101 Objects is a beautiful chronicle of the remarkable history of the Big Apple that will enrich your mind and rekindle memories.
Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons From Science Fiction
Nathan Shedroff - 2012
Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these "outsider" user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.
The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228
Dick Couch - 2001
SEAL training is the distillation of the human spirit, a tradition-bound ordeal that seeks to find men with character, courage, and the burning desire to win at all costs, men who would rather die than quit.
The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
Bruce Katz - 2013
Across the nation cities and metropolitan areas, and the networks of pragmatic leaders who govern them, are taking on the big issues that Washington won't, or can't, solve. They are reshaping our economy and fixing our broken political system."The Metropolitan Revolution" is a national movement, and the book describes how it is taking root in New York City, where efforts are under way to diversify the city's vast economy; in Portland, Oregon, which is selling the sustainability solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world; in Northeast Ohio, where groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes; in Houston, where a modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder; in Miami, where innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations; in Denver and Los Angeles, where leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises; and in Boston and Detroit, where innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century.Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley highlight these success stories and the people behind them in order to share lessons and catalyze action. This revolution is happening, and every community in the country can benefit.