Now, updated and expanded, this classic reference continues to bring to readers the full array of civilization's architectural achievements.Insightful, engagingly written and graced with close to a thousand superb illustrations, the Second Edition of this extraordinary volume offers a sweeping narrative that examines architecture as it reflects the social, economic, and technological aspects of human history. The scope of the book is astonishing. Kostof examines a surprisingly wide variety of man-made structures: prehistoric huts and the TVA, the pyramids of Giza and the Rome railway station, the ziggurat and the department store. Kostof considered every building worthy of attention, every structure a potential source of insight, whether it be prehistoric hunting camps at Terra Amata, or the caves at Lascaux with their magnificent paintings, or a twenty-story hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

    A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.

    Evoking feelings of awe and humility, they make us want to understand what inspired the people who had the audacity to build them. This engrossing book surveys an era that has fired the historical imagination for centuries. In it Robert A. Scott explores why medieval people built Gothic cathedrals, how they built them, what conception of the divine lay behind their creation, and how religious and secular leaders used cathedrals for social and political purposes. As a traveler’s companion or a rich source of knowledge for the armchair enthusiast, The Gothic Enterprise helps us understand how ordinary people managed such tremendous feats of physical and creative energy at a time when technology was rudimentary, famine and disease were rampant, the climate was often harsh, and communal life was unstable and incessantly violent.While most books about Gothic cathedrals focus on a particular building or on the cathedrals of a specific region, The Gothic Enterprise considers the idea of the cathedral as a humanly created space. Scott discusses why an impoverished people would commit so many social and personal resources to building something so physically stupendous and what this says about their ideas of the sacred, especially the vital role they ascribed to the divine as a protector against the dangers of everyday life.Scott’s narrative offers a wealth of fascinating details concerning daily life during medieval times. The author describes the difficulties master-builders faced in scheduling construction that wouldn’t be completed during their own lifetimes, how they managed without adequate numeric systems or paper on which to make detailed drawings, and how climate, natural disasters, wars, variations in the hours of daylight throughout the year, and the celebration of holy days affected the pace and timing of work. Scott also explains such things as the role of relics, the quarrying and transporting of stone, and the incessant conflict cathedral-building projects caused within their communities. Finally, by drawing comparisons between Gothic cathedrals and other monumental building projects, such as Stonehenge, Scott expands our understanding of the human impulses that shape our landscape.

    As a school that strove to combine applied art with both the fine arts and technology, the Bauhaus movement has outlasted all other trends in architecture and design. This volume provides insight into the historical, cultural, philosophical, political and pedagogical background of the 1930s, when the Bauhaus was founded. It also portrays the famous Bauhaus directors and teachers and describes their signature pedagogical methods. Finally, the authors take readers inside Individual workshops, where they can discover for themselves the unique wealth of forms and ideas that remain the hallmark of Bauhaus products. Through its contributions to current discourse on the Bauhaus as a "fixed star of the avant-garde," its wealth of pictorial material (some of which has never before been published), as well as the rich variety of topics it addresses, this book offers a comprehensive look at one of the most significant institutions in the history of modern art and culture.

    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.

    When Brooke and Steve Giannetti decided to leave their suburban Santa Monica home to build a new life on a farm, they looked into themselves, and traveled to Belgium and France, for inspiration. Brooke’s inviting prose combines with 200 photographs and Steve’s architectural drawings to show their inspirations, their materials selections, and the enviable result of their team effort and creativity: an idyllic farm in California’s Ojai Valley. We see every corner of the family home, guesthouse, lush gardens, and delightful animal quarters. Steve Giannetti is a renowned architect, and Brooke is an interior decorator and writer of the design blog Velvet and Linen. They also own Giannetti Home, a store that sells furniture and products for the home in their signature Patina style. The couple’s work has been featured in the Veranda, Coastal Living, Good Housekeeping, the New York Times. They are the authors of Patina Style.

    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.

    Ancient Aegean culture has a particularly important place within European history and art history because of its profound links to the origins ofEuropean civilization.Paintings, pottery, objects made from gold, silver, and ivory, carved reliefs, textiles, and architecture, are all fully illustrated and discussed. The authors reveal the many different functions that this vast range of arts and artifacts served within the cultural and social context of the EasternMediterranean and Near East.Combining the latest research and critical approaches with an up-to-date historiography this book gives readers a clear understanding of Ancient Aegean visual arts and of our changing interpretations of this extraordinary era.

    In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

    In these chapters we learn about how and why we see color, the nature of rainbows, animals with color vision far superior and far inferior to our own, how our language influences the colors we see, and much more. Between these chapters, authors Joann Eckstut and Ariele Eckstut turn their attention to the individual hues of the visible spectrum?red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet?presenting each in fascinating, in-depth detail.Including hundreds of stunning photographs and dozens of informative, often entertaining graphics, every page is a breathtaking demonstration of color and its role in the world around us. Whether  you see red, are a shrinking violet, or talk a blue streak, this is the perfect book for anyone interested in the history, science, culture, and beatuty of color in the natural and man-made world.

    Long considered the survey of modern art, this engrossing and liberally illustrated text traces the development of trends and influences in painting, sculpture, photography and architecture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Retaining its comprehensive nature and chronological approach, it now comes thoroughly reworked by Michael Bird, an experienced art history editor and writer, with refreshing new analyses, a considerably expanded picture program, and a more absorbing and unified narrative.

    His works—among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum—earned him a good measure of his fame, but his flamboyant personal life earned him the rest. Here Brendan Gill, a personal friend of Wright and his family, gives us not only the fullest, fairest, and most entertaining account of Wright to date, but also strips away the many masks the architect tirelessly constructed to fascinate his admirers and mislead his detractors. Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages.

    It presents a broad spectrum of subjects and designs, with practical experience and evaluation of the use of these buildings serving as a leitmotif. This immensely successful book has gone through many reprints and has also been published in Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Taiwanese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, French, Polish and Persian. More than 750 illustrations give a broad insight into Hertzberger's 'library' and a stimulating impression of the influences and sources of inspiration of one of the Netherlands' major postwar architects.

    He than disappeared. The book decodes the symbology found upon and within the Gothic Cathedrals of Europe which have openly displayed the secrets of alchemy for 700 years.

    This book offers a fresh perspective on various developments shaping our cultural history.