Appropriated, chewed up, mulled over, digested, contemplated, and contorted - gathering up along the way fashion, ecology, politics, and art - architectural concepts become veritable things unto themselves in the present tense. As astoundingly diverse as contemporary architecture is, most importantly it is a reflection of what's happening right now all over the world, in people's minds and in the global collective consciousness. The many faces of world architecture today make for a mind-expanding book. Here you'll find the most recent work of over 60 architects and firms, including familiar names such as O. Gehry, Meier, Ando, Foster, and Starck, as well as a host of newcomers sure to be the architecture-celebrities of future generations. Highlights include Jakob & MacFarlane's morphological Restaurant at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Diller & Scofidio's "Blur Building" proposal for the International Expo 2001 in Switzerland (an ovular structure suspended over a lake, encapsulated by a fine mist of water, creating the look of a cloud hovering over the lake), and Herzog & de Meuron's remarkable Tate Modern. Proving that contemporary architecture is not limited to physical building design, New York firm Asymptote's Guggenheim Virtual Museum is also included, a place where visitors can take a cyber-stroll through rooms that are designed to be "compelling spatial environments." Presented alphabetically by architect or firm, Architecture Now! can be used like a reference guide, with extensive photographs and illustrations, biographical and contact information for designers, and a careful selection of today's most influential 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.

    Aalto turned to ideas based on Functionalism, subsequently moving toward more organic structures, with brick and wood replacing plaster and steel. He also designed buildings, furniture, lamps, and glass objects. 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 and resolutions The appendix includes a list of complete or selected works, biography, bibliography and a map indicating the locations of the architect's most famous buildings

    From Egyptian wall paintings to the Venetian Renaissance, impressionism to digital images, Philip Ball tells the fascinating story of how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted throughout the ages to render the gorgeous hues we admire on our walls and in our museums.Finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.

    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?

    This revised fourth edition reflects the most recent changes in residential frame construction. It contains more details for engineered wood products, fasteners, and seismic hold-down requirements, as well as the latest IRC code updates. It is well annotated and covers foundations, floors, walls, stairs, and roofs. Because examples are taken from actual job sites by a trusted expert, this book is an invaluable visual aid that can help builders and homeowners alike to tackle a wide range of framing projects.

    First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has."Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.

    From the grandiose projects of Stalin and Hitler to the "theme park" excess of today's presidential libraries, Sudjic goes behind the scenes of history's great manipulators of building propaganda-and exposes Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and other architects in a disturbing new light. This controversial book is essential reading for all those interested in the power of architecture-or the architecture of power. * A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year

    In Japan, one goes there to cleanse the soul. Bathing in Japan is about much more than cleanliness: it is about family and community. It is about being alone and contemplative, time to watch the moon rise above the garden.Along with sixty full-color illustrations of the light and airy baths themselves, The Japanese Bath, delves into the aesthetic of bathing Japanese style and the innate beauty of the steps surrounding the process. The authors explain how to create a Japanese bath in your own home. A Zen meditation, the Japanese bath, indeed, cleanses the soul, and one emerges refreshed, renewed, and serene.

    Traces the development of architecture from Stonehenge to the new AT&T Building in New York and looks at important movements, architects, and buildings.

    . . . Unlike Dewey, he has provided detailed incisive argumentation, and has shown just where the dogmas and dualisms break down.” —Richard Rorty, The Yale Review

    He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.

    Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally unhomely modern condition. The essays are at once historical--serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical--opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart.Vidler, one of the deftest and surest critics of the contemporary scene, explores aspects of architecture through notions of the uncanny as they have been developed in literature, philosophy, and psychology from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. He interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture--its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its seeing walls replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness.Focusing on the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, as well as theorists of the urban condition, Vidler delineates the problems and paradoxes associated with the subject of domesticity.

    Each in turn comes under scrutiny in this exhilarating dialogue between two of the most interesting thinkers working in philosophy and architecture today. From such singular objects, Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel move on to fundamental problems of politics, identity, and aesthetics as their exchange becomes an imaginative exploration of the possibilities of modern architecture and the future of modern life. Among the topics the two speakers take up are the city of tomorrow and the ideal of transparency, the gentrification of New York City and Frank Gehry’s surprising Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. As Nouvel prompts Baudrillard to reflect on some of his signature concepts (the virtual, transparency, fatal strategies, oblivion, and seduction, among others), the confrontation between such philosophical concerns and the specificity of architecture gives rise to novel and striking formulations—and a new way of establishing and understanding the connections between the practitioner and the philosopher, the object and the idea. This wide-ranging conversation builds a bridge between the fields of architecture and philosophy. At the same time it offers readers an intimate view of the meeting of objects and ideas in which the imagined, constructed, and inhabited environment is endlessly changing, forever evolving. Jean Baudrillard is one of the most influential thinkers of his generation and author of The Vital Illusion (2001). Jean Nouvel has designed buildings throughout the world, including the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and is a recipient of France’s Grand Prix d’Architecture. Robert Bononno, a translator and teacher, lives in New York City.

    Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, this mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Today, we have slowly come to realize that the legacy of this mythology is haunting us.Designers understand the urgency of reducing humanity’s negative environmental impact, yet perpetuate the same mythology of technology that relies on exploiting nature. Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remain inherently unsustainable.Lo―TEK, derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs, countering the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. It is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems.With a foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis and four chapters spanning Mountains, Forests, Deserts, and Wetlands, this book explores thousands of years of human wisdom and ingenuity from 20 countries including Peru, the Philippines, Tanzania, Kenya, Iran, Iraq, India, and Indonesia. We rediscover an ancient mythology in a contemporary context, radicalizing the spirit of human nature.