Buildings often overawe us with their beauty. Architecture is both setting for our everyday lives and public art form—but it remains mysterious to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, one of our best, most stylish critics and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his architectural writing, answers our most fundamental questions about how good—and not-so-good—buildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, he takes us behind the scenes, revealing how architects as different as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Robert A. M. Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to "read" plans, how buildings respond to their settings, and how the smallest detail—of a stair balustrade, for instance—can convey an architect's vision. Ranging widely from a war memorial in London to an opera house in St. Petersburg, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to a famous architect's private retreat in downtown Princeton, How Architecture Works, explains the central elements that make up good building design. It is an enlightening humanist's toolkit for thinking about the built environment and seeing it afresh. "Architecture, if it is any good, speaks to all of us," Rybczynski writes. This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.

    "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.

    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.

    But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.Waste equals food. Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. They can be conceived as "biological nutrients" that will easily reenter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Or they can be "technical nutrients" that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles, rather than being "recycled" -- really, downcycled -- into low-grade materials and uses. Drawing on their experience in (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, McDonough and Braungart make an exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practice, and show how anyone involved with making anything can begin to do as well.

    Available for the first time, Sarah Susanka's best-selling books in one handsome slipcase set.-- Great gift package-- Offers all of Sarah Susanka's trendsetting architectural ideas in one set

    Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and condo towers an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how our cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and all of us can help build it.

    Thirty-one leading architects are represented in this updated Third Edition in examinations of more than 100 structures assessed through a diagrammatic technique that is applicable to any structure. This impressive collection includes sixteen new buildings and eight innovative architects distinguished by the strength, quality, and interest of their designs. Readers will find valuable guidance in analyzing architectural history as an evolutionary process by exploring the commonality of design ideas reflected in a broad range of structures by internationally renowned architects. Both novices and seasoned professionals will find Precedents in Architecture, Third Edition a very useful tool for enriching their design vocabulary and for the ongoing assessment of buildings found in today's evolving landscape.

    Whether you’ve dabbled in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and been disappointed with the results, are a complete SEO newbie looking for a large slice of the ranking pie or you’re a seasoned professional looking to stay up to date with the best SEO practices, this book is for you. How would it feel to… Understand how Google chooses which websites to rank? Know exactly what keywords to target to attract people who are ready to buy what you sell? Have your most profitable keywords hit the top spot? Confidently be able to tweak your website and its structure (no technical know-how needed!) for fast gains? Be able to write killer content that Google and your visitors love? Build relationships with key publication players in your industry and have them begging for your content? Have crafted a complete SEO strategy to laser-target your focus and get big results? What kind of results can you achieve? One of our clients came to us in 2015 asking for help. His business was making $2k per month in sales, and he was contemplating closing shop. Today, that business turns over $3.4million per month, thanks to the strategies in this book.You’ll read about this business and others in the book. Every strategy is data-backed and battle-tested by the Exposure Ninja team, who grow real businesses like yours. What's inside? Section 1: The Foundations You’ll learn: The four free ways to appear on the first page of Google How to identify keywords that will drive hordes of hungry traffic to your website The key to seeing ranking gains in just weeks Why snooping on your competitors is crucial, and how to steal the good bits. Section 2: Your Website Transform your website’s ranking by: Structuring it to make it easy for Google AND visitors to use Using content to 10x your traffic Transforming your blog into a sales generator Avoiding the SEO pitfalls that can do more harm to your website than good Section 3: Promoting Your Website You’ll find out: The exact process that took one business from 35 to 3,450 leads a month How to get links from national newspaper websites The easy way to pitch content sounding desperate How to get links from social media Section 4: Designing Your SEO Strategy SEO can be overwhelming. Replace panic with serene calm as you: Put everything into a comprehensive strategy Pick the key tasks to get results if you’re low on time Learn which metrics to track and which to ignore Implement three key practices that will ensure long-term improvement, whatever Google throws at you "But how do I know all this is possible?" Tim Cameron-Kitchen started out as a professional drummer. After building and ranking a website for his next-door neighbour, he got bitten by the SEO bug. Hundreds of clients later and with a team of 100 at his agency Exposure Ninja, Tim's story shows that anyone, even if you don't have a background in SEO, can learn what it takes to rank their website on Google.

    When you flick on your light switch the light goes on--how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go? When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make urban life possible. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them-the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways. Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere. The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does this all work?

    In this revised edition of Mr. Giedion's classic work, major sections have been added and there are 81 new illustrations. The chapters on leading contemporary architects have been greatly expanded. There is new material on the later development of Frank Lloyd Wright and the more recent buildings of Walter Gropius, particularly his American Embassy in Athens. In his discussion of Le Corbusier, Mr. Giedion provides detailed analyses of the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Le Corbusier's only building in the United States, and his Priory of La Tourette near Lyons. There is a section on his relations with his clients and an assessment of his influence on contemporary architecture, including a description of the Le Corbusier Center in Zurich (designed just before his death], which houses his works of art. The chapters on Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto have been brought up to date with examples of their buildings in the sixties. There is an entirely new chapter on the Danish architect Jorn Utzon, whose work, as exemplified in his design for the Sydney Opera House, Mr. Giedion considers representative of post-World War II architectural concepts. A new essay, Changing Notions of the City, traces the evolution of the structure of the city throughout history and examines current attempts to deal with urban growth, as shown in the work of such architects as Jose Luis Sert, Kenzo Tange, and Fumihiko Maki. Mr. Sert's Peabody Terrace is discussed as an example of the interlocking of the collective andindividual spheres. Finally, the conclusion has been enlarged to include a survey of the limits of the organic in architecture.

    Since the first edition was published in 2005, it has been adopted as a textbook at many universities. Organized into chapters on "Raw Materials/Building Materials (Modules)," "Building Components (Elements)," "Building Methods (Structures)," and "Buildings (Examples)," the book now includes a new section on translucent materials and an article on the use of glass. The chapter on "Building Elements" now includes a discussion of facades, and the chapter on "Structures" has been expanded to cover "Principles of Space Creation." The examples section now includes extensive documentation of current projects whose systematic character is oriented around the production process.Experience with the preceding edition has shown that the book has become an indispensable handbook for reference and reading not only for students and teachers but also for architects.

    He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today’s global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the “art-architecture complex” provides invaluable insight into broader social and economic trajectories in urgent need of analysis.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    30-Second Architecture

    She explores far-flung destinations and captures the essence of each in small details, exotic color palettes, exquisite textures, and traditional crafts. Along the way, she shows readers how to incorporate these elements into interiors and how to replicate the ideas in their own spaces. Overflowing with imaginative ideas from across the globe with breathtaking photos of each destination accompanied by examples of gorgeous real-life interiors, plus tips for applying the looks at home Nomad promises to serve as the ultimate lookbook for designers and wanderers the world over.

    Its applicability to the design process is seen in the physical fit, or interface, between the human body and the various components of interior space.Human Dimension and Interior Space is the first major anthropometrically based reference book of design standards for use by all those involved with the physical planning and detailing of interiors, including interior designers, architects, furniture designers, builders, industrial designers, and students of design. The use of anthropometric data, although no substitute for good design or sound professional judgment should be viewed as one of the many tools required in the design process. This comprehensive overview of anthropometrics consists of three parts.The first part deals with the theory and application of anthropometrics and includes a special section dealing with physically disabled and elderly people. It provides the designer with the fundamentals of anthropometrics and a basic understanding of how interior design standards are established. The second part contains easy-to-read, illustrated anthropometric tables, which provide the most current data available on human body size, organized by age and percentile groupings. Also included is data relative to the range of joint motion and body sizes of children. The third part contains hundreds of dimensioned drawings, illustrating in plan and section the proper anthropometrically based relationship between user and space. The types of spaces range from residential and commercial to recreational and institutional, and all dimensions include metric conversions.In the Epilogue, the authors challenge the interior design profession, the building industry, and the furniture manufacturer to seriously explore the problem of adjustability in design. They expose the fallacy of designing to accommodate the so-called average man, who, in fact, does not exist. Using government data, including studies prepared by Dr. Howard Stoudt, Dr. Albert Damon, and Dr. Ross McFarland, formerly of the Harvard School of Public Health, and Jean Roberts of the U.S. Public Health Service, Panero and Zelnik have devised a system of interior design reference standards, easily understood through a series of charts and situation drawings. With Human Dimension and Interior Space, these standards are now accessible to all designers of interior environments.