When she lost her father, Major Brian O’Mara, USMC in the Second Battle of Fallujah, she thought she’d taken the worst life had to give. She never imagined she would lose her mother to cancer, six years later. The life of a military child prepared her for the challenges of relocating, but for the first time, she’d be doing it alone. Where do you go when you’re the last man standing? The solution came to her when she received an email with a real estate listing in County Clare, Ireland. Having inherited her parents’ rental properties, she knew the value of a diamond in the rough. A secluded cottage in the land of her ancestors was just the fresh start she needed. What she wasn’t prepared for was another buyer, after the deal had been struck. As she becomes intertwined with the people, the music, and the spirit of the small town, she understands that she’s finally found somewhere to belong. Michael O’Brien and the entire O’Brien clan are a force to be reckoned with, but she will not allow them to take her new home. Michael O’Brien is a local hero and rescue swimmer for the Irish Coast Guard. He has lived in the small coastal village of Doolin, in County Clare, all of his life. Emerging from the ashes of a failed marriage, and living with his parents, is not where he expected to be at the age of twenty-nine. All he really wants is to buy the local Kelly cottage, fix it up, and live in peace. After two years on the market, he never imagined there would be a competing bidder. He certainly didn’t expect some little yank to swoop in to town, and try to buy it right out from under him. He finds himself drawn into an unlikely battle with a fiery, young American woman, neither of them willing to bend. But as her secrets unravel and the woman is revealed, will he be able to push her out of the cottage, the town, and out of his life?

    Suddenly, in the magical light of the aurora borealis, he has a vision of an impossibly tall building rising gracefully from the frozen lake and disappearing into the clouds above him. This pilvenpiirtaja -- "cloud sketcher" or skyscraper -- sparks a lifelong quest for beauty in Esko. He will pursue and protect these two passions -- his vision and his love -- no matter how great the cost, for the rest of his life. It is a journey that leads him into the Bolshevik revolution and the Jazz Age nightclubs of New York City and to strike a Faustian bargain with a ruthless gangster -- all in the pursuit of artistic perfection and impossible, unattainable love.

    This is Kenneth Frampton's follow-up to his A Critical History of Modern Architecture.

    An orange café chair, bright blue bicycles against a fence, a weathered white door—Nichole Robertson's sumptuous photographs of the distinctive details of Paris, all arranged by color, evoke a sense of serendipitous discovery and celebrate the city as never before. At once a work of art and a window into the heart of the city, Paris in Color will surprise and delight those who love art, design, color, and, of course, Paris!

    Four Walls and a Roof challenges this notion, presenting a candid account of what it is really like to work as an architect.Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from suburban New York to the rubble of northern Iraq, from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to garbage-strewn wastelands that represent the demolished hopes of postwar social housing. We meet oligarchs determined to translate ambitions into concrete and steel, developers for whom architecture is mere investment, and the layers of politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architectural idea and the chance of its execution.Four Walls and a Roof tells the story of a profession buffeted by external forces that determine--at least as much as individual inspiration--what architects design. Perhaps the most important myth debunked is success itself. To achieve anything, architects must serve the powers they strive to critique, finding themselves in a perpetual conflict of interest. Together, architects, developers, politicians, and consultants form an improvised world of contest and compromise that none alone can control.

    On that afternoon, her husband of ten years crash-landed his malfunctioning single-engine plane in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Dr. Darrell Swank suffered multiple fractures, and third degree burns over sixty percent of his body when the gas tank exploded as he crawled away from the wreckage. Over the next five weeks, she struggled to be a mother to their children while she kept a near round-the-clock vigil at the hospital. Darrell’s survival was questionable from one day to the next, and even if he survived, would he be the same man he was before the crash? Did his fate depend on this test of her faith?The Death of Me is the true story of a wife and mother living day to day through a fog of shock and unimaginable agony. And, alone in the aftermath, fumbling for some way to not only survive, but to thrive. It is a story of pain, of release, of forgiveness. And of healing, resilience, and rebirth. It is a story of a writer finding her voice.

    Don't open the door. Jake Austin finds himself standing in the middle of a dirt road, looking at an old farmhouse with no memory of how he got there. It isn’t the first time he’s been somewhere and not remember how—but it is the first time he’s woken up alone. Valley Draper has lived in the farmhouse for as long as she can remember. It might be haunted, but nothing comes without a price. When the handsome if not confused Jake comes in like he owns the place, Valley decides quickly that he needs a rude awakening. With a storm coming closer and time ticking away, can Jake find a way back home? Or are he and Valley stuck in a place that is much more than either of them bargained for?

    Jumping one thousand years in time, Lackey and Mallory tell the compelling story of Harrier Gillain, the first Knight-Mage in a thousand years; Tiercel Rolfort, the first High Mage in hundreds of years; and Shaiara, the young leader of a desert tribe who takes both boys under her wing but finds that she has a special affection for Harrier. These three young people are their world's main defense against the evil called up by the rogue Wild Mage, Bisochim.Included in The Enduring Flame Trilogy are The Phoenix Unchained, The Phoenix Endangered, and The Phoenix Transformed.

    

    Entertaining and intelligent, it provides a concise history of the subject, and is also a fascinating resource to dip into. Arranged in a broadly chronological order to show the development of architecture, the ideas that comprise the book include innovative and influential concepts, technologies, techniques and movements. Each idea is presented through interesting text and arresting visuals, and explores when the idea first evolved and the subsequent impact it has had up to the present day.

    In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique. Makeshift Metropolis describes how current ideas about urban planning evolved from the movements that defined the twentieth century, such as City Beautiful, the Garden City, and the seminal ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs. If the twentieth century was the age of planning, we now find ourselves in the age of the market, Rybczynski argues, where entrepreneurial developers are shaping the twenty-first-century city with mixed-use developments, downtown living, heterogeneity, density, and liveliness. He introduces readers to projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Yards in Washington, D.C., and, further afield, to the new city of Modi’in, Israel—sites that, in this age of resource scarcity, economic turmoil, and changing human demands, challenge our notion of the city. Erudite and immensely engaging, Makeshift Metropolis is an affirmation of Rybczynski’s role as one of our most original thinkers on the way we live today.

    Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life.Perfectly complementing Nathaniel Kahn’s award-winning documentary, My Architect, Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Kahn, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American architect, was a “public” architect. Eschewing the usual corporate skyscrapers, hotels, and condominiums, he focused on medical and educational research facilities, government centers, museums, libraries, parks, religious buildings, and other structures that would serve the public good. Yet this warm, captivating person, beloved by students and admired by colleagues, was also a secretive and mysterious character hiding behind a series of masks.Drawing on extensive original research; lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students; and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive man, which reveals the mind behind some of the twentieth century's most celebrated architecture.

    

    The few buildings he was able to design during the 1920s, when he also spent much of his time painting and writing, brought him to the forefront of modern architecture, though it wasnt until after World War II that his epoch-making buildings were constructed, such as the Unite dHabitation in Marseilles and the Church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture Series features:an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts and plans)

    Rendering is used in the preparation of drawings for engineers, designers and manufacturers, and in advertising and industry generally.