In it Boyd rallied against Australia's promotion of ornament, decorative approach to design and slavish imitation of all things American.'The basis of the Australian ugliness,' he wrote, 'is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffles about vigorously in the middle - as she estimates the middle - of the road, picking up disconnected ideas wherever she finds them.'Boyd was a fierce critic, and an advocate of good design. He understood the significance of the connection between people and their dwellings, and argued passionately for a national architecture forged from a genuine Australian identity. His concerns are as important now, in an era of suburban sprawl and inner-city redevelopment, as they were half a century ago.Caustic and brilliant, The Australian Ugliness is a masterpiece that enables us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes. This handsome anniversary edition is complemented by Robin Boyd's original sketches for the book and a new afterword by major contemporary architects.

    Extensively and beautifully illustrated, the book includes photos, plans, scales for world-famous structures such as the Parthenon, Versailles, the Brooklyn Bridge, and many others."

    the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.- Charles Eames... everything hangs on something else.- Ray EamesNothing says modernist perfection like an Eames design. Though they are best known to the general public for their furniture, the husband and wife duo of Charles and Ray Eames (1907-78 and 1912-88, respectively) were also forerunners in the fields of architecture, industrial design, photography, and film. This book covers all the aspects of their illustrious career, from the earliest furniture experiments and molded plywood designs to the Case Study Houses to their work for Herman Miller and films such as the seminal short, Powers of Ten.

    We see a network of walls, columns, cables, pipes and tunnels required to satisfy the basic needs of a city's inhabitants.

    This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls ‘non-space’ results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of ‘supermodernity’ to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena—a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible.Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.

    We need to move away from the definition of function as utility, she argues, to align it with how function is defined in mathematics, biology or music. Form, on the other hand, should be considered not only in the way buildings are produced, but also how they perform sensorially. Function and form, considered together in architecture, stand in opposition to the dualism which defined our approach to the built environment throughout the twentieth century. This book provides a thought-provoking account of the challenges facing the 21st century built environment, and an enlivened awareness of the wider possibilities of architectural form.

    This offers the first broad treatment of the city in both its historic and its contemporary aspects.

    More than a diatribe against the trade, La Cecla makes a call to rethink urban space and take the cities back from “casino capitalism” that has left a string of failed urban projects, such as the Sagrera of Barcelona and the expansion of Columbia University in New York City. Recounting his travels across the globe, La Cecla provides insights to aid in resisting the planners and to find the spirit of a place. These commentaries on the works of past and present masters of urban and landscape will take an important place in continued public discourse for years to come.

    Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly's Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly's legacy.From the forward: For more than 30 years, Project for Public Spaces has been using observations, surveys, interviews and workshops to study and transform public spaces around the world into community places. Every week we give presentations about why some public spaces work and why others don't, using the techniques, ideas, and memorable phrases from William H. "Holly" Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.Holly Whyte was both our mentor and our friend. Perhaps his most important gift was the ability to show us how to discover for ourselves why some public spaces work and others don't. With the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and its companion film in 1980, the world could see that through the basic tools of observation and interviews, we can learn an immense amount about how to make our cities more livable. In doing so, Holly Whyte laid the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned. It is our pleasure to offer this important book back to the world it is helping to transform.

    The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and practice of urban design from a wide range of sources. It gradually builds the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject.

    Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating.In her new book--which gathers together the best of her writing, from one of her first pieces in the New York Times in 1962 on le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard, to essays in the New York Review of Books, to more recent writing in the Wall Street Journal--Huxtable bears witness to some of the twentieth century's best--and worst--architectural masters and projects.With a perspective of more than four decades, Huxtable examines the century's modernist beginnings and then turns her critic's eye to the seismic shift in style, function, and fashion that occurred midcentury--all leading to a dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century. Much of the writing in On Architecture has never appeared in book form before, and Huxtable's many admirers will be delighted to once again have access to her elegant, impassioned opinions, insights, and wisdom."Looking back, I realize that my career covered an extraordinary period of change, that I was writing at a time in which architecture was changing slowly but radically--a time when everything about modernism was being incrementally questioned and rejected as we moved into a new kind of thinking and building." And while it was a quiet, nearly stealth revolution, it was a absolutely a revolution in which the past was reaccepted and reincorporated, periods and styles ignored by modernism were reexamined and reevaluated. History and theory, once considered irrelevant, became central to the practice of architecture again."

    --LewisMumford. . . important to America and all the rest of the world in ourstruggle to design rational, wholesome, and productive landscapes.--Laurie Olin, Hanna Olin, Ltd.This century's most influential landscape architecture book.--Landscape Architecture. . . an enduring contribution to the technical literature oflandscape planning and to that unfortunately small collection ofwritings which speak with emotional eloquence of the importance ofecological principles in regional planning. --Landscape and UrbanPlanningIn the twenty-five years since it first took the academic world bystorm, Design With Nature has done much to redefine the fields oflandscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and ecologicaldesign. It has also left a permanent mark on the ongoing discussionof mankind's place in nature and nature's place in mankind withinthe physical sciences and humanities. Described by one enthusiasticreviewer as a user's manual for our world, Design With Natureoffers a practical blueprint for a new, healthier relationshipbetween the built environment and nature. In so doing, it providesnothing less than the scientific, technical, and philosophicalfoundations for a mature civilization that will, as Lewis Mumfordecstatically put it in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating anddisappearing before our eyes.

    This beautifully illustrated book features photographs, plans and diagrams that help put significant periods into historical, geographical and cultural contexts.

    The creator of the Barcelona Pavilion (1929), the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1945?1951) and the Seagram Building in New York (1954?1958), Mies was one of the founders of a new architectural style. Well known for his motto ?less is more, ? he sought a kind of refined purity in architectural expression that was not seen in the reduced vocabulary of other Bauhaus members. His goal was not simply building for those of modest income (Existenzminimum) but building economically in terms of sustainability, both in a technical and aesthetical way; the use of industrial materials such as steel and glass were the foundation of this approach. Though the extreme reduction of form and material in his work garnered some criticism, over the years many have tried?mostly unsuccessfully?to copy his original and elegant style. This book explores more than 20 of his projects between 1906 and 1967, from his early work around Berlin to his most important American buildings. Basic Architecture features: ? Each title contains approximately 120 images, including photographs, sketches, drawings, and floor plans ? Introductory essays explore the architect's life and work, touching on family and background as well as collaborations with other architects ? The body presents the most important works in chronological order, with descriptions of client and/or architect wishes, construction problems (why some projects were never executed), and resolutions ? The appendix includes a list of complete or selected works, biography, bibliography and a map indicating the locations ofthe architect's most famous buildings

    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. "