. . Splendidly presented, filled with thoughtful and brilliant intuitive insights." —The New Republic In a brilliant synthesis of words and pictures, Edmund N. Bacon relates historical examples to modern principles of urban planning. He vividly demonstrates how the work of great architects and planners of the past can influence subsequent development and be continued by later generations. By illuminating the historical background of urban design, Bacon also shows us the fundamental forces and considerations that determine the form of a great city. Perhaps the most significant of these are simultaneous movement systems—the paths of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, public and private transportation—that serve as the dominant organizing force, and Bacon looks at movement systems in cities such as London, Rome, and New York. He also stresses the importance of designing open space as well as architectural mass and discusses the impact of space, color, and perspective on the city-dweller. That the centers of cities should and can be pleasant places in which to live, work, and relax is illustrated by such examples as Rotterdam and Stockholm.

    Classical buildings as widely spaced in time as a Roman temple, an Italian Renaissance palace and a Regency house all show an awareness of these rules even if they vary them, break them or poetically contradict them. Sir Christopher Wren described them as the Latin of architecture and the analogy is almost exact. There is the difference, however, that whereas the learning of Latin is a slow and difficult business, the language of classical architecture is relatively simple. It is still, to a great extent, the mode of expression of our urban surroundings, since classical architecture was the common language of the western world till comparatively recent times. Anybody to whom architecture makes a strong appeal has probably already discovered something of its grammar for himself.In this book, the author's purpose is to set out as simply and vividly as possible the exact grammatical workings of this architectural language. He is less concerned with its development in Greece and Rome than with its expansion and use in the centuries since the Renaissance. He explains the vigorous discipline of the orders and the scope of rustication; the dramatic deviations of the Baroque and, in the last chapter, the relationship between the classical tradition and the modern architecture of today. The book is intended for anybody who cares for architecture but more specifically for students beginning a course in the history of architecture, to whom a guide to the classical rules will be an essential companion.

    . . a perfect introduction to the architecture of the Italian Renaissance."--Richard Stapleford, Cooper Union School of ArchitectureA classic guide to one of the most pivotal periods in art and architectural history, The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance remains the most lucid and comprehensive volume available.  From Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Palladio, and Brunelleschi to St. Peter's in Rome, the palaces of Venice, and the Medici Chapel in Florence, Peter Murray's lavishly illustrated book tells readers everything they need to know about the architectural life of Italy from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries.

    

    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.

    While public attention was preoccupied with the Impressionists, many painters were reacting in a totally different...and more imaginative way...to the grim horrors of the new industrial society around them. The roots of the Decadents, as these artists came to call themselves, were to be found in the poetic visions of the English Pre-Raphaelites of the 1850s. Their first great Continental exponent was a brilliant and neglected painter of the fantastic, Gustave Moreau; their most obvious expression was 'Art Nouveau,' a style closely interwoven with sinuous and half-unconscious eroticism. Philippe Julian takes the reader on a conducted tour through the bizarre symbolism of this half-forgotten world, introducing him to a large number of writers and artists. Many of these artists...Moreau; Toorop, the brilliant half-Balinese, half-Dutch painter and draftsman; the French Odilon Redon, the great master of Symbolist art; the Viennese Klimt; and the Belgian Khnopff...have been known for some time to a few enthusiasts; In this lively study their inventiveness and skill are explored afresh, and their fantastic imaginings and weird symbolism exposed to a sometimes ironic light. Proud of their romantic appearance, extravagant habits, and outrageous conduct, the artists of the 'mauve nineties' drew on a wide range of writers for their ideas, including not only Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Wilde, but also less well-known and stranger poets. The book ends with a short anthology of Symbolist themes taken from these writers, and 149 pictures drawn from museums and collection in the Europe and the U.S.

    In Formless: A User's Guide, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a job. The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

    From the Cape of Good Hope to the Sea of Galilee, along the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, their goal was to symbolically retrace the passage of early Man, from Australopithecus to Modern Man. Starting where volume I leaves off, this volume entrances readers with new, unexpected events both heart-warming and horrifying.

    From the pioneering Bus Rapid Transit system to parks designed to catch runoff and reduce flooding and the creation of pedestrian-only zones, Lerner has been the driving force behind a host of innovative urban projects. In more than forty years of work in cities around the globe, Lerner has found that changes to a community don’t need to be large-scale and expensive to have a transformative impact—in fact, one block, park, or a single person can have an outsized effect on life in the surrounding city. In Urban Acupuncture, Lerner celebrates these “pinpricks” of urbanism—projects, people, and initiatives from around the world that ripple through their communities to uplift city life. With meditative and descriptive prose, Lerner brings readers around the world to streets and neighborhoods where urban acupuncture has been practiced best, from the bustling La Boqueria market in Barcelona to the revitalization of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, South Korea. Through this journey, Lerner invites us to re-examine the true building blocks of vibrant communities—the tree-lined avenues, night vendors, and songs and traditions that connect us to our cities and to one another.Urban Acupuncture is the first of Jaime Lerner’s visionary work to be published in English. It is a love letter to the elements that make a street hum with life or a neighborhood feel like home, penned by one of the world’s most successful advocates for sustainable and livable urbanism.

    Essential to the understanding of the searching and remarkably informed spirit of this protean writer.

    Its coverage and color capture the authors' lasting excitement for the period and its artists. A three-part organization covers international currents in the Fourteen Century, Fifteenth-Century Innovations, and Renaissance and Reformation in the Sixteenth Century. For a complete understanding of Northern Renaissance Art--its geography, patronage, and audience expectations.

    To demonstrate the unique and profound influence on culture and society that photographs have, Photo Icons puts the most important landmarks in the history of photography under the microscope. Each chapter of this special edition focuses on a single image which is described and analyzed in detail, in aesthetic, historical, and artistic contexts. The book begins with the very first permanent images (Nic?phore Ni?pce's 1827 eight-hour-exposure rooftop picture and Louis Daguerre's famous 1839 street scene) and takes the reader up through the present day, via the avant-garde photography of the 1920s and works such as Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936), Robert Doisneau's Kiss in Front of City Hall (1950), and Martin Parr's 'New European photography.'

    He never dared to tell his family about the divorce, and when he asks her to come to France and pretend they’re still married for a couple of weeks to please his dying father, she’s not sure she can say no. She certainly isn’t prepared for the warmth of his family’s welcome, or the attraction that’s still simmering between her and Luc. But it’s just two weeks in a vineyard, no strings attached, right?

    In this mock autobiographical collection his mischievous drawings capture life's anxieties and ambitions from the mundane to the surreal. Here, at last, is The Truth about beer, doctors, shadow puppets, lunch, dolphins, boredom, and supernatural forces. Seductively strange and addictively amusing, this edgy little book welcomes the uninitiated and rewards the faithful.

    One day, after reading a book about Paris, he decides to pack a lunch and head for the city. “Like many of us Henri wants to see Paris.In Paris, there are thousands of buses. In Reboul, where Henri lives, there is only one bus.In Paris there are many parks and rows and rows of trees. The park in Reboul has only five trees. In Paris there are many zoos full of animals for the people to see. So one fine day Henri packs up some lunch and starts off to see all the things he had read about.” Along the way, Henri gets tired and falls asleep under a tree. And this is when the story gets really charming. What Henri sees, we see, in a flowing panorama of pictures conceived by the eminent graphic designer Saul Bass.