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.

    "This big-shouldered book, full of ardor...offers us a reasonable hope that with attention and care we can again make public education what it was meant to be, and must yet be."—The Los Angeles Times.

    The Whole Earth Review called Envisioning Information a "passionate, elegant revelation."

    This comprehensive book clearly explains every aspect of this endeavor, including design (siting, orientation, climate consideration), materials (sisal, cactus, bamboo, earth), and implementation. The author emphasizes throughout the book what is inexpensive and sustainable. Included are sections discussing urban planning, small-scale energy production, cleaning and storing drinking water, and dealing with septic waste, and all information is applied to three distinct tropical regions: humid areas, temporate areas, and desert climates. Hundreds of explanatory drawings by van Lengen allow even novice builders to get started.

    Akka uses Actors-independently executing processes that communicate via message passing—as the foundation for fault-tolerant applications where individual actors can fail without crashing everything. Perfect for high-volume applications that need to scale rapidly, Akka is an efficient foundation for event-driven systems that want to scale elastically up and out on demand, both on multi-core processors and across server nodes.Akka in Action is a comprehensive tutorial on building message-oriented systems using Akka. The book takes a hands-on approach, where each new concept is followed by an example that shows you how it works, how to implement the code, and how to (unit) test it. You'll learn to test and deploy an actor system and scale it up and out, showing off Akka's fault tolerance. As you move along, you'll explore a message-oriented event-driven application in Akka. You'll also tackle key issues like how to model immutable messages and domain models, and apply patterns like Event Sourcing, and CQRS. The book concludes with practical advice on how to tune and customize a system built with Akka.

    Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky's early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change.Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of "archaeology" of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.Perspective in Panofsky's hands becomes a central component of a Western "will to form," the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world.Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.

    Using full-color photos, detailed drawings, and clear step-by-step instructions, Beemer shows you exactly how to build one small (12ʹ x 16ʹ) timber-frame structure — suitable for use as a cabin, workshop, or studio. He also explains how to modify the structure to suit your needs and location by adding a loft, moving doors or windows, changing the roof pitch, or making the frame larger or smaller. You’ll end up with a beautiful building as well as solid timber-framing skills that you can use for a lifetime.

    His elegantly clear visual language not only defined product design for decades, but also our fundamental understanding of what design is and what it can and should do. Dieter Rams created ten rules of design more than twenty years ago. Sometimes referred to as the ten commandments, they are just as relevant today: Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design helps a product to be understood. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design is durable. Good design is consistent to the last detail. Good design is environmentally friendly. Good design is as little design as possible. Less and More elucidates the design philosophy of Dieter Rams. The book contains images of hundreds of Rams's products as well as his sketches and models from Braun stereo systems and electric shavers to the chairs and shelving systems that he created for Vitsoe and his own company sdr+. In addition to the rich visual presentation of his designs, the book contains new texts by international design experts that explain how the work was created, describe its timeless quality, and put it into current context. In this way, the work of Dieter Rams is given a contemporary reevaluation that is especially useful in light of the rediscovery of functionalism and rationalism in today s design. Less and More shows us the possibilities that design opens for both the manufacturer and the consumer as a means of making our lives better through attractive, functional solutions that also save resources. "

    Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life-and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of affordances from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms-wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks-have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

    

    social scientist and consultant examines five professions - engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning - to show how professionals really go about solving problems. The best professionals, Donald Sch�n maintains, know more than they can put into words. To meet the challenges of their work, they rely less on formulas learned in graduate school than on the kind of improvisation learned in practice. This unarticulated, largely unexamined process is the subject of Sch�n's provocatively original book, an effort to show precisely how 'reflection-in-action' works and how this vital creativity might be fostered in future professionals.

    "Grid Systems in Graphic Design - Raster Systeme für die Visuelle Gestaltung" By Josef Müller-Brockmann. English version by D. Q. Stephenson. English and German text. This is the 5th Edition, published by Verlag Niggli AG, 2007. Full title: "Grid Systems in Graphic Design. A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three Dimensional Designers - Raster Systeme für die Visuelle Gestaltung. Ein Handbuch für Grafiker, Typografen und Ausstellungsgestalter". A comprehensive handbook on modern typography and using the Grid System, illustrated with drawings, diagrams, black & white photographs & numerous examples of graphic design. Subjects include: Grid and Design Philosophy; The Typographic Grid and its purpose; Sizes of Paper; Typeface Alphabets; Margin Proportions; Construction of the Grid and Type Area; Type & Picture Area with 8, 20 and 32 Grid Fields; Photograph & Illustration in the Grid System; the Grid in Corporate Identity and Three-Dimensional Design & more.

    Includes essays and excerpts from the works of prominent modern thinkers such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, and Isaiah Berlin among others.

    Here, walking is seen as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the "negotiated" space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.

    Lefebvre was the first and one of the few who dared herald the end of the industrial town, with the development of its outskirts and suburbs, and the advent of the Urban. Lefebvre saw in the creation of this urban society new hope for the development of more favourable conditions for humanity.