Book picks similar to
Single Building: Type Variant House: The Process of an Architectural Work by Vincent James
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The Little Book of Living Small
Laura Fenton - 2020
It features twelve case study homes in which style-savvy, small-space dwellers (from singles to families of four) open their doors and share their design secrets. Stylistically these homes range from urban to rural, minimalist to bohemian, with the unifying thread that they are all real homes of 1,200 square feet or less and offer clever solutions for you to use in your own home.Highly engaging with lists, tips, and actionable advice, The Little Book of Living Small shows readers how to make the most of limited square footage—with grace and style—and serves as the cheerleader readers need to help themselves feel satisfied and proud of their choice to live with less.Laura Fenton is the author of The Little Book of Living Small and the former lifestyle director at Parents magazine, where she oversaw all the home content for the publication. A writer with more than fifteen years of experience, her work has appeared in major publications including Better Homes & Gardens, Country Living, Good Housekeeping, and on leading home websites including Remodelista, HGTV.com, ElleDecor.com, Curbed, and Refinery29. Through her writing she has explored the topic of living small for more than a decade. She lives small with her husband, a photographer, and their son in Jackson Heights, Queens, in New York.
Laurie Baker: Life, Works & Writings
Gautam Bhatia - 2000
His distinctive brand of architecture, usually moulded around local building traditions (especially those of Kerela, his adopted home state in south India), is instantly identifiable and has, unsurprisingly, revolutionized traditional concepts of architecture in India. Baker's architecture is responsive, uses local materials and lays stress on low-cost design.This biograpy of Laurie Baker, like his work, is direct, simple and comprehensive; further embellished with sketches, plans, photographs and some of Baker's own writings, the book offers the professional architect view of the life, methods and thoughts of an unorthodox genius.
What Is a Designer: Things, Places, Messages
Norman Potter - 1999
The work adds up to a powerful and endlessly rewarding resource for students of all ages. First published in 1969, the book is now reissued to present the enduring core of Potter's arguments. An afterword by Robin Kinross sets the work andits author in their contexts.
Green from the Ground Up: Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Home Construction
David R. Johnston - 2008
It starts with clear explanations of the concepts and fundamentals of green, healthy and energy-efficient construction and walks the reader through the entire construction process, injecting expert advice at every decision point. Construction techniques, materials, and products are thoroughly explained, making the often vaguely understood concepts cleanly understandable. The book gives builders and architects the tools to respond to growing requests from homeowners for green and energy-efficient houses, whether new or remodeled. Homeowners can use the book to understand the concepts, process, and options, whether they're doing it themselves or working with a professional.
Improbable Libraries: A Visual Journey to the World's Most Unusual Libraries
Alex Johnson - 2015
Undaunted, librarians around the globe are thinking up astonishing ways of reaching those in reading need, whether by bike in Chicago, boat in Laos, or donkey in Colombia. Improbable Libraries showcases a wide range of unforgettable, never-before-seen images and interviews with librarians who are overcoming geographic, economic, and political difficulties to bring the written word to an eager audience. Alex Johnson charts the changing face of library architecture, as temporary pop-ups rub shoulders with monumental brick-and-mortar structures, and many libraries expand their mission to function as true community centers. To take just one example: the open-air Garden Library in Tel Aviv, located in a park near the city’s main bus station, supports asylum seekers and migrant workers with a stock of 3,500 volumes in sixteen different languages. Beautifully illustrated with two hundred and fifty color photographs, Improbable Libraries offers a breathtaking tour of the places that bring us together and provide education, entertainment, culture, and so much more. From the rise of the egalitarian Little Free Library movement to the growth in luxury hotel libraries, the communal book revolution means you’ll never be far from the perfect next read.
Design of Cities
Edmund N. Bacon - 1967
. . 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.
Vanderbilt's Biltmore
Robert Wernick - 2012
But ambition quickly took wing. The house swelled to 225 rooms and became - until 2012 when it was topped by the home of a billionaire in Mumbai, India – the world’s largest residence ever built for a private citizen. Here’s the story of the house that Vanderbilt built - from the gardens by Frederick Law Olmsted to the John Singer Sargent portraits that adorn its walls.
Minimalism
James Meyer - 2000
A beautifully illustrated book, internationally recognized as the definitive survey of Minimalism, now available in paperback
The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life
Carlo Ratti - 2016
But their evolution has been anything but linear—cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book, a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions of the many possibilities for tomorrow’s city. Pervasive digital systems that layer our cities are transforming urban life. The authors provide a front-row seat to this change. Their work at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory allows experimentation and implementation of a variety of urban initiatives and concepts, from assistive condition-monitoring bicycles to trash with embedded tracking sensors, from mobility to energy, from participation to production. They call for a new approach to envisioning cities: futurecraft, a symbiotic development of urban ideas by designers and the public. With such participation, we can collectively imagine, examine, choose, and shape the most desirable future of our cities.
The Twilight Child
Elizabeth Harris - 1998
Her husband, Will, is away fighting, and, alone in their cottage in the Sussex village of Firlebury, she waits anxiously for news. Her worries increase when, accompanying the gift of an antique cradle, come mysterious visions of an older, darker, Firlebury. Then she meets Gabriel, a soldier like Will, who seems to offer the support and comfort she so desperately needs. In this twilight world of alluring beauty and brutal savagery, is she awake, or is she dreaming? When her son, Michael, is born, Clare realises the full power of the darkness stealthily surrounding her and her child. As the forces of an ancient evil gather about her with terrifying violence, it seems that the mysterious Gabriel alone can help — but only at the risk of jeopardizing everything she holds dear … Praise for Elizabeth Harris: ‘Enormously enjoyable … hard to put down. Elizabeth Harris writes with sensitivity and skill and a spine-chilling eye for the sinister’ - Barbara Erksine, author of Lady of Hay ‘Enigmatic’ – Sunday Independent Elizabeth Harris graduated from Keele University with a degree in English and Psychology, and she has since gained a Certificate in Archaeology from the University of Kent. Born in Cambridge, her home is on the borders of Kent and Sussex, where she lives with her family. Since the publication of her first novel in 1990, she has divided her time between researching and writing, travelling extensively in Europe and the UK and living for part of the year in an ancient stone cottage on the edge of a Breton forest. Her six previous novels are The Herb Gatherers, The Egyptian Years, The Sun Worshippers, Time of the Wolf, The Quiet Earth and The Sacrifice Stone.
Architecture and Disjunction
Bernard Tschumi - 1994
Architecture and Disjunction, which brings together Tschumi's essays from 1975 to 1990, is a lucid and provocative analysis of many of the key issues that have engaged architectural discourse over the past two decades--from deconstructive theory to recent concerns with the notions of event and program. The essays develop different themes in contemporary theory as they relate to the actual making of architecture, attempting to realign the discipline with a new world culture characterized by both discontinuity and heterogeneity. Included are a number of seminal essays that incited broad attention when they first appeared in magazines and journals, as well as more recent and topical texts.Tschumi's discourse has always been considered radical and disturbing. He opposes modernist ideology and postmodern nostalgia since both impose restrictive criteria on what may be deemed legitimate cultural conditions. He argues for focusing on our immediate cultural situation, which is distinguished by a new postindustrial unhomeliness reflected in the ad hoc erection of buildings with multipurpose programs. The condition of New York and the chaos of Tokyo are thus perceived as legitimate urban forms.
Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius
Nikolaus Pevsner - 1936
First published in 1936 and twice revised since then, this survey explores a period of major, exciting transition away from stale Victorian historicism to the 20th century and our modern machine age.
Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology
David B. Williams - 2009
Williams any rock used as building material can tell a fascinating story. All he has to do is look at building stone in any urban center to find a range of rocks equal to any assembled by plate tectonics. In Stories in Stone, he takes you on his explorations to find 3.5-billion-year-old rock that looks like swirled pink and black taffy, a gas station made of petrified wood, and a Florida fort that has withstood 300 years of attacks and hurricanes, despite being made of a stone that has the consistency of a granola bar.In Stories in Stone, Williams also weaves in the cultural history of stone. He shows why a white, fossil-rich limestone from Indiana became the only building stone to be used in all 50 states; how in 1825, the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument led to America's first commercial railroad; and why when the same kind of marble used by Michelangelo was used on a Chicago skyscraper it warped so much after 19 years that all 44,000 panels of the stone had to be replaced. A love letter to building stone, from New England brownstone and Morton Gneiss of Minnsota to the limestone of Salem, Indiana; from granite and travertine to Carrara marble, David Willilams brings to life the stones you will see in the structures of every city, large and small. After reading his book, you will forever look at stone buildings with new eyes.
White
Kenya Hara - 2008
It is rather Kenya Haras attempt to explore the essence of White, which he sees as being closely related to the origin of Japanese aesthetics – symbolising simplicity and subtlety. The central concepts discussed by Kenya Hara in this publication are emptiness and the absolute void. Kenya Hara also sees his work as a designer as a form of communication. Good communication has the distinction of being able to listen to each other, rather than to press one's opinion onto the opponent. Kenya Hara compares this form of communication with an “empty container”. In visual communication, there are equally signals whose signification is limited, as well as signals or symbols such as the cross or the red circle on the Japanese flag, which – like an “empty container” – permit every signification and do not limit imagination. Not alone the fact that the Japanese character for white forms a radical of the character for emptiness has prompted him the closely associate the color white with emptiness.
Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
Marc Augé - 1992
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.