Architecture

Pretty Good House provides a framework and set of guidelines for building or renovating a high-performance home that focus on its inhabitants and the environment—but keeps in mind that few people have pockets deep enough to achieve a “perfect” solution. The essential idea is for homeowners to work within their financial and practical constraints both to meet their own needs and do as much for the planet as possible.

 A Pretty Good House is:

 * A house that's as small as possible

 *  Simple and durable, but also well designed

 * Insulated and air-sealed 

 * Above all, it is affordable, healthy, responsible, and resilient.

Root Shock examines 3 different U.S. cities to unmask the crippling results of decades-old disinvestment in communities of color and the urban renewal practices that ultimately destroyed these neighborhoods for the advantage of developers and the elite.

Like a sequel to the prescient warnings of urbanist Jane Jacobs, Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove reveals the disturbing effects of decades of insensitive urban renewal projects on communities of color. For those whose homes and neighborhoods were bulldozed, the urban modernization projects that swept America starting in 1949 were nothing short of an assault. Vibrant city blocks - places rich in culture - were torn apart by freeways and other invasive development, devastating the lives of poor residents. Fullilove passionately describes the profound traumatic stress- the "root shock"that results when a neighborhood is demolished. She estimates that federal and state urban renewal programs, spearheaded by business and real estate interests, destroyed 1,600 African American districts in cities across the United States. But urban renewal didn't just disrupt black communities: it ruined their economic health and social cohesion, stripping displaced residents of their sense of place as well. It also left big gashes in the centers of cities that are only now slowly being repaired. Focusing on the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the Central Ward in Newark, and the small Virginia city of Roanoke, Dr. Fullilove argues powerfully against policies of displacement. Understanding the damage caused by root shock is crucial to coping with its human toll and helping cities become whole. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute and professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University. She is the author of five books, including Urban Alchemy.

A Framework for Geodesign: Changing Geography by Design presents the key concepts, history, and methodology of geodesign. As an idea, geodesign has the potential to enable more effective and symbiotic collaboration among the several design professions, geographically-oriented sciences, information technologists, and people impacted by change (“the people of the place”) when all of these groups aim to influence major environmental and social change for the better. According to author Carl Steinitz, this collaboration is essential.

Steinitz’s framework, described here in detail, can contribute to that goal. It is clear that for serious societal and environmental issues, designing for change cannot be a solitary activity. It inevitably is a team endeavor with many participants from the design professions and geographic sciences, linked by technology from several locations for rapid communication and feedback, and reliant on transparent communication with the people affected by change. These demands create opportunities for geodesign and the need for organizing that collaboration.

Part I of the book is about the necessary but sometimes difficult collaboration between designers and scientists, and also focuses on key aspects of study areas, scale, and size which influence how geodesign is organized and carried out. Part II presents Steinitz’s framework and addresses six key questions, and their related types of models, which must be integrated in geodesign. Part III features nine case studies that illustrate different ways of designing for change, while Part IV explores the future of geodesign in research, education, and practice.

A Framework for Geodesign ooks mostly to the future, with a primary intention of helping the collaborating participants to achieve, in the words of the author, “practical benefits from geodesign.”

Architectural historian Roger W. Moss and photographer Tom Crane set out to celebrate the surviving accessible historic architecture of Philadelphia, envisioning a series of books that would provide much more than the snapshots found in guidebooks. They began with Historic Houses of Philadelphia, bringing the region's most impressive museum homes to life. Historic Sacred Places of Philadelphia followed, an exclusive tour of fifty hallowed sites. In Historic Landmarks of Philadelphia, Moss and Crane feature prominent, memorable structures that reflect stages in Philadelphia's growth.

There are sixty-five National Historic Landmarks in Philadelphia, structures that have been identified as being "nationally significant" and having "meaning to all Americans." This newest addition to Moss and Crane's trilogy includes a wide array of historic sites, ranging from concert halls to prisons, train stations to museums, banks to libraries. The buildings are arranged chronologically rather than geographically, to emphasize Philadelphia's evolution from modest mercantile outpost of a colonial power, to capital of a proud new nation, to a robust world-renowned cosmopolitan city.

Historic Landmarks of Philadelphia presents such notable attractions as Fort Mifflin, Independence Hall, the Fairmount Water Works, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Boathouse Row, Laurel Hill Cemetery, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Academy of Music, the Union League of Philadelphia, Memorial Hall, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Masonic Temple, and the sights that line the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Rodin Museum, in more than two hundred color illustrations. It celebrates master builders and their influence on the course of American architecture while identifying the distinctive qualities that embody Philadelphia's history and spirit.

A Barra Foundation Book

50 years Learning from Las Vegas

From the bustle of Johannesburg to the neon of Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown’s advocacy for "messy vitality" has transformed the way we look at the urban landscape. Unconventional, eloquent, and with a profound sociopolitical message, Scott Brown is one of our era’s most influential thinkers on architecture and urbanism.

The anthology Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes – marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal treatise Learning from Las Vegas – paints a portrait of Scott Brown as seen through the eyes of leading architectural historians and practitioners. It features new scholarship on　her education on three continents, her multidisciplinary teaching, and her use of urban patterns and forces as tools for architectural design – a practice documented in a new comment by Scott Brown, noting that sometimes "1+1>2."

• With contributions by Mary McLeod, Joan Ockman, Sylvia Lavin, Stanislaus von Moos, Jacques Herzog, Robin Middleton, and Denise Scott Brown, among others
• A comprehensive portrait of one of contemporary architecture’s most significant personalities

Dilip da Cunha integrates history, art, cultural studies, hydrology, and geography to tell the story of how rivers have been culturally constructed as lines granted a special role in defining human habitation and everyday practice. What we take to be natural features of the earth's surface, according to da Cunha, are products of human design and a particular way of seeing that has roots stretching as far back as ancient Greek cartography. Although Alexander the Great never saw the Ganges, he conceived of it as a flowing body of water, with sources, destinations, and banks that marked the separation of land from water. This Alexandrine view of the river, da Cunha argues, has been pursued and adopted across time and around the world. With ever more sophisticated mappings of its form and characteristics, the river's essential features are refined and standardized: its source identified by a point; its course depicted as a stroke; and its propensity to flood imagined as the erasure of the boundary between water and land.

While da Cunha's vision of rivers is a global one, he takes an especially close look at the Ganges, as he traces the ways in which it has been pictured, mapped, surveyed, explored, and measured across the millennia. He argues that the articulation of the river Ganges has placed it at odds with Ganga, a "rain terrain" that does not conform to the line of separation, containment, and calibration that are the formalities of a river landscape. By calling rivers into question, da Cunha depicts an ecosystem that is neither land nor water but one of ubiquitous wetness in which rain is held in soil, aquifers, glaciers, snowfields, building materials, agricultural fields, air, and even plants and animals.

Printed in full color and featuring more than 150 illustrations, The Invention of Rivers proposes rain, or "the rainscape," as an alternative starting point for imagining, understanding, and designing human habitation.

Mindy Thompson Fullilove presents ways to strengthen neighborhood connectivity and empower marginalized communities through investigation of urban segregation from a social heath perspective. "Fullilove passionately demonstrates how, through an urbanity of inclusion, we can heal our fractured cities to make them whole again.

What if divided neighborhoods were causing public health problems? What if a new approach to planning and design could tackle both the built environment and collective well-being at the same time? What if cities could help each other?
Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, the acclaimed author of Root Shock, uses her unique perspective as a public health psychiatrist to explore and identify ways of healing social and spatial fractures simultaneously. Using the work of French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart and the American urban design firm Rothschild Doyno Collaborative as guides as well as urban restoration projects from France and the US as exemplary cases, Fullilove identifies nine tools that can mend our broken cities and reconnect our communities to make them whole.

Courts and societies across the early modern Eurasian world were fundamentally transformed by the physical, technological, and conceptual developments of their era. Evolving forms of communication, greatly expanded mobility, the spread of scientific knowledge, and the emergence of an increasingly integrated global economy all affected how states articulated and projected visions of authority into societies that, in turn, perceived and responded to these visions in often contrasting terms. Landscape both reflected and served as a vehicle for these transformations, as the relationship between the land and its imagination and consumption became a fruitful site for the negotiation of imperial identities within and beyond the precincts of the court.

In Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World, contributors explore the role of landscape in the articulation and expression of imperial identity and the mediation of relationships between the court and its many audiences in the early modern world. Nine studies focused on the geographical areas of East and South Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe illuminate how early modern courts and societies shaped, and were shaped by, the landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, palaces, cities, and hunting parks, and conceptual ones, such as those of frontiers, idealized polities, and the cosmos.

The collected essays expand the meaning and potential of landscape as a communicative medium in this period by putting an array of forms and subjects in dialogue with one another, including not only unique expressions, such as gardens, paintings, and manuscripts, but also the products of rapidly developing commercial technologies of reproduction, especially print. The volume invites a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complexity with which early modern states constructed and deployed different modes of landscape for different audiences and environments.

Contributors: Robert Batchelor, Seyed Mohammad Ali Emrani, John Finlay, Caroline Fowler, Katrina Grant, Finola O’Kane, Anton Schweizer, Larry Silver, Stephen H. Whiteman.

Frank Furness (1839-1912) has remained a curiosity to architectural historians and critics, somewhere between an icon and an enigma, whose importance and impact have yet to be properly evaluated or appreciated. To some, his work pushed pattern and proportion to extremes, undermining or forcing together the historic styles he referenced in such eclectic buildings as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania Library. To others, he was merely a regional mannerist creating an eccentric personal style that had little resonance and modest influence on the future of architecture. By placing Furness in the industrial culture that supported his work, George Thomas finds a cutting-edge revolutionary who launched the beginnings of modern design, played a key part in its evolution, and whose strategies continue to affect the built world.

In his sweeping reassessment of Furness as an architect of the machine age, Thomas grounds him in Philadelphia, a city led by engineers, industrialists, and businessmen who commissioned the buildings that extended modern design to Chicago, Glasgow, and Berlin. Thomas examines the multiple facets of Victorian Philadelphia's modernity, looking to its eager embrace of innovations in engineering, transportation, technology, and building, and argues that Furness, working for a particular cohort of clients, played a central role in shaping this context. His analyses of the innovative planning, formal, and structural qualities of Furness's major buildings identifies their designs as initiators of a narrative that leads to such more obviously modern figures as Louis Sullivan, William Price, Frank Lloyd Wright and eventually, the architects of the Bauhaus.

Misunderstood and reviled in the traditional architectural centers of New York and Boston, Furness's projects, commissioned by the progressive industrialists of the new machine age, intentionally broke with the historical styles of the past to work in a modern way—from utilizing principles based on logistical planning to incorporating the new materials of the industrial age. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes more than eighty black-and-white and thirty color photographs that highlight the richness of his work and the originality of his design spanning more than forty years.

Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. However, such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes immerses the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India.

Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. Islamic gardens began from the practical need to organize the surrounding space of human civilization, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map on which to distribute natural resources. Ruggles follows the evolution of these early farming efforts to their aristocratic apex in famous formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra.

Whether in a humble city home or a royal courtyard, the garden has several defining characteristics, which Ruggles discusses. Most notable is an enclosed space divided into four equal parts surrounding a central design element. The traditional Islamic garden is inwardly focused, usually surrounded by buildings or in the form of a courtyard. Water provides a counterpoint to the portioned green sections.

Ranging across poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations, and richly illustrated with pictures and site plans, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes is a book of impressive scope sure to interest scholars and enthusiasts alike.

Chanticleer, a forty-eight-acre garden on Philadelphia's historic Main Line, is many things simultaneously: a lush display of verdant intensity and variety, an irreverent and informal setting for inventive plant combinations, a homage to the native trees and horticultural heritage of the mid-Atlantic, a testament to one man's devotion to his family's estate and legacy, and a good spot for a stroll and picnic amid the blooms. In Chanticleer: A Pleasure Garden, Adrian Higgins and photographer Rob Cardillo chronicle the garden's many charms over the course of two growing cycles.

Built on the grounds of the Rosengarten estate in Wayne, Pennsylvania, Chanticleer retains a domestic scale, resulting in an intimate, welcoming atmosphere. The structure of the estate has been thoughtfully incorporated into the garden's overall design, such that small gardens created in the footprint of the old tennis court and on the foundation of one of the family homes share space with more traditional landscapes woven around streams and an orchard.

Through conversations and rambles with Chanticleer's team of gardeners and artisans, Higgins follows the garden's development and reinvention as it changes from season to season, rejoicing in the hundred thousand daffodils blooming on the Orchard Lawn in spring and marveling at the Serpentine's late summer crop of cotton, planted as a reminder of Pennsylvania's agrarian past. Cardillo's photographs reveal further nuances in Chanticleer's landscape: a rare and venerable black walnut tree near the entrance, pairs of gaily painted chairs along the paths, a backlit arbor draped in mounds of fragrant wisteria. Chanticleer fuses a strenuous devotion to the beauty and health of its plantings with a constant dedication to the mutability and natural energy of a living space. And within the garden, Higgins notes, there is a thread of perfection entwined with whimsy and continuous renewal.

Why does live performance continue to engage us? In a world saturated with recorded entertainment, we seek out the intimacy and immediacy of live music and theater. What is the relationship between design and the experiences, perceptions, and memories it engenders? At its best, architecture, a collection of elements - some apparent, some hidden - shapes and intensifies the process and experience of performance. Set Pieces pairs the words of leading artists and critics with details showcasing the design and inner workings from projects by Diamond Schmitt Architects for some of the world’s most remarkable performing-arts buildings. The book provides an immersive study of sixteen design elements that enhance and transform the perception of performance - and evoke experiences that surpass visual understanding.

A detailed study of early historical preservation efforts between the 1780s and the 1850s

In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how Americans in the fledgling United States pointed to evidence of the past in the world around them and debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. From Indigenous mounds in the Ohio Valley to Independence Hall in Philadelphia; from Benjamin Franklin's childhood home in Boston to St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; from Dutch colonial manors of the Hudson Valley to Henry Clay's Kentucky estate, early advocates of preservation strove not only to place boundaries on competitive real estate markets but also to determine what should not be for sale, how consumers should behave, and how certain types of labor should be valued.

Before historic preservation existed as we know it today, many Americans articulated eclectic and sometimes contradictory definitions of architectural preservation to work out practical strategies for defining the relationship between public good and private profit. In arguing for the preservation of houses of worship and Indigenous earthworks, for example, some invoked the "public interest" of their stewards to strengthen corporate control of these collective spaces. Meanwhile, businessmen and political partisans adopted preservation of commercial sites to create opportunities for, and limits on, individual profit in a growing marketplace of goods. And owners of old houses and ancestral estates developed methods of preservation to reconcile competing demands for the seclusion of, and access to, American homes to shape the ways that capitalism affected family economies. In these ways, individuals harnessed preservation to garner political, economic, and social profit from the performance of public service.

Ultimately, Martinko argues, by portraying the problems of the real estate market as social rather than economic, advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

A pioneer of architectural history

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) entered the modernist canon with her “Frankfurt Kitchen.” She is also considered a pioneer of social architecture, a women’s rights activist, and, last but not least, a heroine of the resistance to the Nazi dictatorship.

In this book, available in English for the first time, recent research in the fields of art history, contemporary history, pedagogy, and gender studies provides a nuanced picture of Schütte-Lihotzky, whose estate is archived at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The volume explores her rich architectural oeuvre, her transnational experiences and professional networks, her political development as a Communist, and her current reception. It breaks through the mythology to present a rounded picture of Schütte-Lihotzky, an icon of architectural history.

In the history of planning, the design of an entire community prior to its construction is among the oldest traditions. Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change explores the twenty-first-century fortunes of planned communities around the world. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the editors and contributors examine what happened to planned communities after their glory days had passed and they became vulnerable to pressures of growth, change, and even decline.

Beginning with Robert Owen's industrial village in Scotland and concluding with Robert Davis's neotraditional resort haven in Florida, this book documents the effort to translate optimal design into sustaining a common life that works for changing circumstances and new generations of residents. Basing their approach on historical research and practical, on-the-ground considerations, the essayists argue that preservation efforts succeed best when they build upon foundational planning principles, address landscape, architecture, and social engineering together, and respect the spirit of place.

Presenting twenty-three case studies located in six continents, each contributor considers how to preserve the spirit of the community and its key design elements, and the ways in which those elements can be adapted to contemporary circumstances and changing demographics. Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change espouses strategies to achieve critical resilience and emphasizes the vital connection between heritage preservation, equitable sharing of the benefits of living in these carefully designed places, and sustainable development.

Communities: Bat'ovany-Partizánske, Cité Frugès, Colonel Light Gardens, Den-en Chôfu, Garbatella, Greenbelt, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Jardim América, Letchworth Garden City, Menteng, New Lanark, Pacaembú, Radburn, Riverside, Römerstadt, Sabaudia, Seaside, Soweto, Sunnyside Gardens, Tapiola, The Uplands, Welwyn Garden City, Wythenshawe.

Contributors: Arnold R. Alanen, Carlos Roberto Monteiro de Andrade, Sandra Annunziata, Robert Freestone, Christine Garnaut, Isabelle Gournay, Michael Hebbert, Susan R. Henderson, James Hopkins, Steven W. Hurtt, Alena Kubova-Gauché, Jean-François Lejeune, Maria Cristina a Silva Leme, Larry McCann, Mervyn Miller, John Minnery, Angel David Nieves, John J. Pittari, Jr., Gilles Ragot, David Schuyler, Mary Corbin Sies, Christopher Silver, André Sorensen, R. Bruce Stephenson, Shun-ichi J. Watanabe.

Paula Deitz has delighted readers for more than thirty years with her vivid descriptions of both famous and hidden landscapes. Her writings allow readers to share in the experience of her extensive travels, from the waterways of Britain's Castle Howard to the Japanese gardens of Kyoto, and home again to New York City's Central Park. Collected for the first time, the essays in Of Gardens record her great adventure of continual discovery, not only of the artful beauty of individual gardens but also of the intellectual and historical threads that weave them into patterns of civilization, from the modest garden for family subsistence to major urban developments. Deitz's essays describe how people, over many centuries and in many lands, have expressed their originality by devoting themselves to cultivation and conservation.

During a visit to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, Deitz first came to appreciate the notion that landscape architecture can be as intricately conceived as any major structure and is, indeed, the means by which we redeem the natural environment through design. Years later, as she wandered through the gardens of Versailles, she realized that because gardens give structure without confinement, they encourage a liberation of movement and thought. In Of Gardens, we follow Deitz down paths of revelation, viewing "A Bouquet of British Parks: Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London"; the parks and promenades of Jerusalem; the Moonlight Garden of the Taj Mahal; a Tuscan-style villa in southern California; and the rooftop garden at Tokyo's Mori Center, among many other sites.

Deitz covers individual landscape architects and designers, including André Le Nôtre, Frederick Law Olmsted, Beatrix Farrand, Russell Page, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. She then features an array of parks, public places, and gardens before turning her attention to the burgeoning business of flower shows. The volume concludes with a memorable poetic epilogue entitled "A Winter Garden of Yellow."

The gardens of Versailles—along with the name of their chief creator, André Le Nôtre (1613-1700)—have become synonymous with the French style of "formal" garden. This style in its turn would succumb to another "national" mode, the English school of naturalistic and picturesque landscapes. But as Thierry Mariage makes clear, the garden style that Le Nôtre brought to perfection need not be seen in opposition to the later "English" one. Rather, he claims, they represent two points along a continuum that exists between the natural and cultural worlds.

Published originally in Belgium as L'univers de Le Nostre, Mariage's examination of Le Nôtre moves beyond traditional art historical documentation and appreciation into a realm of interpretation. He situates Le Nôtre's garden art in a complex social and cultural world, where the practices of land management, surveying techniques and hydrology, military practice, and both scientific and literary perspectives on land use and experience brought into being a unique form of landscape architecture. His analysis opens up the fashion in which design techniques and garden philosophy are shaped by material culture.

In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, leading planers and social scientists examine public space today and freedom of assembly.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has challenged the physical manifestation of the First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly. Where and how can people congregate today? Forty social scientists, planners, architects, and civil liberties experts explore the definition, use, role, and importance of public space for the exercise of our democratic rights to free expression. The book also discusses whose voice is heard and what factors limit the participation of minorities in Occupy activities. This foundational work puts issues of democracy and civic engagement back into the center of dialogue about the built environment.

Beyond Zuccotti Park is a collaborative effort of Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, City College of New York School of Architecture, New Village Press and its parent organization, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. The book is part of an open civic inquiry on the part of these organizations. The project was seeded by a series of free public forums, Freedom of Assembly: Public Space Today, held at the Center for Architecture in response to the forced clearance of Occupy activities from Zuccotti Park and public plazas throughout the country. The first two recorded programs took place on December 17, 2011 and February 4, 2012.

Modern land administration applies geospatial thinking to better understand and plan the proper use, conservation, and equitable use of land and property.

Location intelligence is changing the way land administration works to protect and maintain appropriate land use and achieve better economic, environmental, and social benefits. The real-life stories in Valuing Place and Purpose: GIS for Land Administration show how communities, government agencies, nonprofits, and other organizations implement geographic information systems (GIS) in four key areas:

     · Visualizing parcels and property

     · Managing land use

     · Strengthening climate and conservation efforts

     · Addressing land rights, equity, and social justice

The book also includes a special section to help readers get started using web apps, online maps, dashboards, and other GIS solutions to represent and understand the value of land and property and efficiently manage, edit, and share land parcel data more accurately.

To conserve our natural assets—our green infrastructure—we need to map them, and plan for their protection.

Every day, decisions about land development are made—often without consideration to the natural features and functions already there. The placement of housing on rich soil, paving over aquifer recharge zones, or disconnecting wildlife corridors are mistakes easily avoided if we start to consider our natural elements as part of our infrastructure. 

Green Infrastructure: Map and Plan the Natural World with GIS describes the why and how of green infrastructure (GI) mapping and implementation through text, maps, and online illustrations. It explains how to utilize the national model that Esri has built using Green Infrastructure Center's methodology. This six-step process provides a framework for thinking strategically about GI planning and details how to set goals to inform GI maps in order to meet real needs on the ground. Using actual data to create two case studies, this book shows how the Esri model and data from the Esri Living Atlas can be adapted using local data to create a custom GI plan. 

With a green infrastructure strategy, communities can work to preserve and connect open spaces, watersheds, wildlife habitats, parks, and other critical landscapes. Green Infrastructure: Map and Plan the Natural World with GIS explains how to protect and foster a connected, resilient, and biologically diverse landscape for sustainable growth. 

One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka—or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, São Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West.

The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West.

Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are "authentic." He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.

Sustainable, circular, up-to-date

Most modern buildings are built from diverse materials, but few confront their manifold composition as a question of both design and performance. This book takes a close look at a series of global building traditions and contemporary practices to uncover the possibilities and challenges of working with mixed materials. Visually stunning, color-coded drawings reveal the materials and construction for every project. Through case studies, design experiments and writings, the authors examine the opportunities of heterogeneous construction for contemporary, sustainable, circular, and culturally situated architecture. With contributions by Jeannette Kuo, Ajay Manthripragada, and Jesús Vassallo, and photography by Naho Kubota. Graphic design by Andrew LeClair.

• Richly illustrated case studies of lesserknown hybrid construction techniques
• Beautiful graphic design and unique spot color printing reveal the interrelationships of materials in construction
• In-depth essays that discuss the technical, cultural, and environmental implications of heterogeneous construction

New exciting and surprising design approaches how great living quality can be wonderfully made possible in small spaces. 

A tiny house is much more than just a very small residence. It is a living concept that reflects the challenges of the future – from the fundamental question of how to finance the dream of home ownership to more complex considerations, such as whether doing without material luxury means more freedom, to social issues such as how we deal with our planet's resources. 

This volume presents remarkable examples of masterfully implemented solutions for tiny houses. The designs of these micro-wonders show that even – or especially – well thought-out room concepts can be realized in the smallest of spaces, without sacrificing excellent design. Intelligent floor plans, multifunctional rooms and ingenious nesting of furnishing components create not only compact living spaces, but also unique habitats.

This book considers architectural models not as stable objects but as a question: What is a model, really? And where in the design process does it assume its powers or perform its tasks? Thirty essays respond to nine pointed questions, discovering surprising affinities and interweaving observations from diverse disciplinary, geographical, and scholarly perspectives, all framed by an introductory essay and a dialog between historian Annabel Wharton and artist Thomas Demand. Are You a Model? approaches models as phenomena and architectural tools without seeking to determine conclusive answers. Compiled by a group of architectural and art historians, historians of science, software engineers, architects, and curators, it views models as an epistemologically diverse practice rather than objects sorted by periods, genres, or materials.

With contributions by Giulia Amoresano, Yana Boeva, Giulia Boller, Stefanie Brünenberg, Alberto Calderoni, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Wonseok Chae, Diana Cristobal Olave, Carlotta Darò, Cansu Degirmencioglu, Kai Drewes, Ruth Ezra, Jia Yi Gu, Erik Herrmann, Carolin Höfler, Deniz Avci Hosanli, Christian Janecke, Sebastian Loosen, John McMorrough, Christina Moushoul, Ana Carolina Pellegrini, Eliza Pertigkiozoglou, Andreas Pilot, Stéphanie Quantin-Biancalani, Salome Schepers, Ecaterina Stefanescu, Simona Valeriani, Mara Trübenbach, Annabel Wharton, Matthew Wells, Baris Wenzel, Holger Zaunstöck, Maxime Zaugg, and Tamar Zinguer.

Denkmalpflegeprojekte in komplexen städtischen Umgebungen sind vielfach von erheblichen Diskrepanzen zwischen formaler Politik und pragmatischen Realitäten geprägt. Fallbeispiele aus dem Iran, der Türkei, Ägypten und Indien zeigen die unzähligen Faktoren auf, die auf die praktische Denkmalpflege einwirken und deren Ideale untergraben. Die vorgestellten Projekte veranschaulichen, wie politische, wirtschaftliche und ideologische Dynamiken die Ergebnisse vor Ort beeinflussen und sie von akademischen Grundsätzen und nationalen oder internationalen Strategien ablenken. Die Autorinnen und Autoren verfügen über ein tiefes Verständnis der lokalen Dynamiken und zeigen die disziplinären, bürokratischen und soziopolitischen Strukturen auf, die die Planung des städtischen Kulturerbes in unterschiedlichen Kontexten prägen.

• Untersucht Denkmalschutzrichtlinien in lokalen Kontexten
• Lenkt den Blick auf lokale Komplexitäten
• Ergebnisse des DFG-Projekts "Assembling Iran's Urban Heritage Conservation Policy and Practice: Problematised in Tehran"

Inverse Utopia looks at urbanism from the perspective of modernism and postmodernism, as well as at how commercialization has transformed the modern city. In his earlier book Ladders (1997), the author described the emergence of the cul-de-sac as a typical manifestation of this trend.

In this new book, Inverse Utopia, he argues for the development of architectural and urban forms that respond to contemporary ecological and social challenges. The title refers to a statement by the philosopher Günther Anders: whereas utopians are unable to make the things they imagine, others are unable to imagine the things they make.

This book is a stand-alone volume but may be read as a sequel to Ladders.

• Essential text describing the work of Anna Heringer, an architect specialized in clay
• How architecture can have a positive impact on the environment and society
• Building with local resources to maintain ecological balance
• Available in German, French and English

It has been shown that spatial perception can be improved through practice. Opportunities to offer such practice are offered in this workbook, which was tested by nearly one thousand architecture students before publication, and emerged from an academic study funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, conducted jointly by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the ETH Zurich.

The architectural work of Hans and Wassili Luckhardt (1890–1954/1889–1972) is not yet adequately appreciated. As members of the Glass Chain initiative and the Ring collective, they shaped, especially through their work with Alfons Anker, the development of Modernist architecture in the 1920s, as evidenced by their winning design for the layout of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. While their early work was anchored in utopian expressionism, a more objective attitude emerged later, based on the application of new architectural constructs.
The book documents all 40 of Hans und Wassili Luckhardt’s realized buildings. Two essays deal with the unbuilt and utopian projects. Newly taken photographs and newly drawn plans by Carsten Krohn complement the historical illustrations.

• Comprehensive documentation of the work of Hans and Wassili Luckhardt.
• With approx. 80 new photographs and 80 newly drawn plans by Carsten Krohn

Versatile wooden windows

In her book, the trained carpenter and architect Judith Resch looks at what scope still exists in modern window design and construction. The process of simplification is more difficult to achieve for windows than for most building components, since windows, due to their function, must meet high technical specifications. She presents a variety of window design projects that have one thing in common: they pursue a singular design concept using the simplest possible means. All projects are presented in detail with technical drawings and photographs.

• 10 simple wooden window designs
• From retrofitting historical windows to the possibilities of DIY design
• Precisely designed, handcrafted, highly repairable windows

Frank Furness (1839-1912) has remained a curiosity to architectural historians and critics, somewhere between an icon and an enigma, whose importance and impact have yet to be properly evaluated or appreciated. To some, his work pushed pattern and proportion to extremes, undermining or forcing together the historic styles he referenced in such eclectic buildings as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania Library. To others, he was merely a regional mannerist creating an eccentric personal style that had little resonance and modest influence on the future of architecture. By placing Furness in the industrial culture that supported his work, George Thomas finds a cutting-edge revolutionary who launched the beginnings of modern design, played a key part in its evolution, and whose strategies continue to affect the built world.

In his sweeping reassessment of Furness as an architect of the machine age, Thomas grounds him in Philadelphia, a city led by engineers, industrialists, and businessmen who commissioned the buildings that extended modern design to Chicago, Glasgow, and Berlin. Thomas examines the multiple facets of Victorian Philadelphia's modernity, looking to its eager embrace of innovations in engineering, transportation, technology, and building, and argues that Furness, working for a particular cohort of clients, played a central role in shaping this context. His analyses of the innovative planning, formal, and structural qualities of Furness's major buildings identifies their designs as initiators of a narrative that leads to such more obviously modern figures as Louis Sullivan, William Price, Frank Lloyd Wright and eventually, the architects of the Bauhaus.

Misunderstood and reviled in the traditional architectural centers of New York and Boston, Furness's projects, commissioned by the progressive industrialists of the new machine age, intentionally broke with the historical styles of the past to work in a modern way—from utilizing principles based on logistical planning to incorporating the new materials of the industrial age. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes more than eighty black-and-white and thirty color photographs that highlight the richness of his work and the originality of his design spanning more than forty years.

One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka—or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, São Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West.

The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West.

Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are "authentic." He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.

Site, Sight, Insight presents twelve essays by John Dixon Hunt, the leading theorist and historian of landscape architecture. The collection's common theme is a focus on sites, how we see them and what we derive from that looking. Acknowledging that even the most modest landscape encounter has validity, Hunt contends that the more one knows about a site and one's own sight of it (an awareness of how one is seeing), the greater the insight. Employing the concepts, tropes, and rhetorical methods of literary analysis, he addresses the problem of how to discuss, understand, and appreciate places that are experienced through all the senses, over time and through space.

Hunt questions our intellectual and aesthetic understanding of gardens and designed landscapes and asks how these sites affect us emotionally. Do gardens have meaning? When we visit a fine garden or designed landscape, we experience a unique work of great complexity in purpose, which has been executed over a number of years—a work that, occasionally, achieves beauty. While direct experience is fundamental, Hunt demonstrates how the ways in which gardens and landscapes are communicated in word and image can be equally important. He returns frequently to a cluster of key sites and writings on which he has based much of his thinking about garden-making and its role in landscape architecture: the gardens of Rousham in Oxfordshire; Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770); William Gilpin's dialogues on Stowe (1747); Alexander Pope's meditation on genius loci; the Désert de Retz; Paolo Burgi's Cardada; and the designs by Bernard Lassus and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged.

In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.

Celebrated landscape architect Gilles Clément may be best known for his public parks in Paris, including the Parc André Citroën and the garden of the Musée du Quai Branly, but he describes himself as a gardener. To care for and cultivate a plot of land, a capable gardener must observe in order to act and work with, rather than against, the natural ecosystem of the garden. In this sense, he suggests, we should think of the entire planet as a garden, and ourselves as its keepers, responsible for the care of its complexity and diversity of life.

"The Planetary Garden" is an environmental manifesto that outlines Clément's interpretation of the laws that govern the natural world and the principles that should guide our stewardship of the global garden of Earth. These are among the tenets of a humanist ecology, which posits that the natural world and humankind cannot be understood as separate from one another. This philosophy forms a thread that is woven through the accompanying essays of this volume: "Life, Constantly Inventive: Reflections of a Humanist Ecologist" and "The Wisdom of the Gardener." Brought together and translated into English for the first time, these three texts make a powerful statement about the nature of the world and humanity's place within it.

Just as there is love at first sight between people, Václav Cílek writes, there can be love at first sight between a person and a place. A landscape is more than a location, it is one party in a relationship—even when the spirit of a certain setting is not perceptible to those who visit. But whether we travel to experience rapture or excitement, to discover truth and beauty, or to be dazzled, we search for the essence of faraway landscapes to gain perspective on our own place within the world. To Breathe with Birds delves into the imaginative and emotional bonds we form with landscapes and how human existence—a recent development, geologically speaking—shapes and is shaped by a sense of place.

In subtle and lyrical prose, renowned geologist and author Václav Cílek explores topics from the history of asphalt to the spirits we imagine in trees, from geodiversity to the mathematics of snowflakes. Weaving earth science and environmentalism together with memoir and myth, his chapters visit resonant locations from India to Massachusetts, though most are deeply rooted in the river-laced, war-scarred landscape of Cílek's Czech homeland. These reflections are accompanied by Morna Livingston's evocative photographs, which capture the beauty and strangeness of natural and human-made forms. The first book-length appearance of Cílek's work in English translation, To Breathe with Birds offers insightful perspectives on the symbolism of landscapes as we struggle to conserve and protect the depleted earth.

The contributors of Policy, Planning, and People argue for the promotion of social equity and quality of life by designing and evaluating urban policies and plans. Edited by Naomi Carmon and Susan S. Fainstein, the volume features original essays by leading authorities in the field of urban planning and policy, mainly from the United States, but also from Canada, Hungary, Italy, and Israel. The contributors discuss goal setting and ethics in planning, illuminate paradigm shifts, make policy recommendations, and arrive at best practices for future planning.

Policy, Planning, and People includes theoretical as well as practice-based essays on a wide range of planning issues: housing and neighborhood, transportation, surveillance and safety, the network society, regional development and community development. Several essays are devoted to disadvantaged and excluded groups such as senior citizens, the poor, and migrant workers. The unifying themes of this volume are the values of equity, diversity, and democratic participation. The contributors discuss and draw conclusions related to the planning process and its outcomes. They demonstrate the need to look beyond efficiency to determine who benefits from urban policies and plans.

Contributors: Alberta Andreotti, Tridib Banerjee, Rachel G. Bratt, Naomi Carmon, Karen Chapple, Norman Fainstein, Susan Fainstein, Eran Feitelson, Amnon Frenkel, George Galster, Penny Gurstein, Deborah Howe, Norman Krumholz, Jonathan Levine, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Enzo Mingione, Kenneth Reardon, Izhak Schnell, Daniel Shefer, Michael Teitz, Iván Tosics, Lawrence Vale, Martin Wachs.

The remaining corner of an old farm, unclaimed by developers. The brook squeezed between housing plans. Abandoned railroad lines. The stand of woods along an expanded highway. These are the outposts of what was once a larger pattern of forests and farms, the "last landscape." According to William H. Whyte, the place to work out the problems of our metropolitan areas is within those areas, not outside them. The age of unchecked expansion without consequence is over, but where there is waste and neglect there is opportunity. Our cities and suburbs are not jammed; they just look that way. There are in fact plenty of ways to use this existing space to the benefit of the community, and The Last Landscape provides a practical and timeless framework for making informed decisions about its use.

Called "the best study available on the problems of open space" by the New York Times when it first appeared in 1968, The Last Landscape introduced many cornerstone ideas for land conservation, urging all of us to make better use of the land that has survived amid suburban sprawl. Whyte's pioneering work on easements led to the passage of major open space statutes in many states, and his argument for using and linking green spaces, however small the areas may be, is a recommendation that has more currency today than ever before.

Like their penchant for clubs, cricket, and hunting, the planting of English gardens by the British in India reflected an understandable need on the part of expatriates to replicate home as much as possible in an alien environment. In Flora's Empire, Eugenia W. Herbert argues that more than simple nostalgia or homesickness lay at the root of this "garden imperialism," however. Drawing on a wealth of period illustrations and personal accounts, many of them little known, she traces the significance of gardens in the long history of British relations with the subcontinent. To British eyes, she demonstrates, India was an untamed land that needed the visible stamp of civilization that gardens in their many guises could convey.

Colonial gardens changed over time, from the "garden houses" of eighteenth-century nabobs modeled on English country estates to the herbaceous borders, gravel walks, and well-trimmed lawns of Victorian civil servants. As the British extended their rule, they found that hill stations like Simla offered an ideal retreat from the unbearable heat of the plains and a place to coax English flowers into bloom. Furthermore, India was part of the global network of botanical exploration and collecting that gathered up the world's plants for transport to great imperial centers such as Kew. And it is through colonial gardens that one may track the evolution of imperial ideas of governance. Every Government House and Residency was carefully landscaped to reflect current ideals of an ordered society. At Independence in 1947 the British left behind a lasting legacy in their gardens, one still reflected in the design of parks and information technology campuses and in the horticultural practices of home gardeners who continue to send away to England for seeds.

In this work, Carl Anthony shares his perspectives as an African-American child in post-World War II Philadelphia; a student and civil rights activist in 1960s Harlem; a traveling student of West African architecture; and an architect, planner, and environmental justice advocate in Berkeley. He contextualizes this within American urbanism and human origins, making profoundly personal both African American and American urban histories as well as planetary origins and environmental issues, to not only bring a new worldview to people of color, but to set forth a truly inclusive vision of our shared planetary future.
The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race connects the logics behind slavery, community disinvestment, and environmental exploitation to address the most pressing issues of our time in a cohesive and foundational manner. Most books dealing with these topics and periods silo issues apart from one another, but this book contextualizes the connections between social movements and issues, providing tremendous insight into successful movement building. Anthony's rich narrative describes both being at the mercy of racism, urban disinvestment, and environmental injustice as well as fighting against these forces with a variety of strategies.
Because this work is both a personal memoir and an exposition of ideas, it will appeal to those who appreciate thoughtful and unique writing on issues of race, including individuals exploring their own African American identity, as well as progressive audiences of organizations and community leaders and professionals interested in democratizing power and advancing equitable policies for low-income communities and historically disenfranchised communities.

In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, leading planers and social scientists examine public space today and freedom of assembly.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has challenged the physical manifestation of the First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly. Where and how can people congregate today? Forty social scientists, planners, architects, and civil liberties experts explore the definition, use, role, and importance of public space for the exercise of our democratic rights to free expression. The book also discusses whose voice is heard and what factors limit the participation of minorities in Occupy activities. This foundational work puts issues of democracy and civic engagement back into the center of dialogue about the built environment.

Beyond Zuccotti Park is a collaborative effort of Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, City College of New York School of Architecture, New Village Press and its parent organization, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. The book is part of an open civic inquiry on the part of these organizations. The project was seeded by a series of free public forums, Freedom of Assembly: Public Space Today, held at the Center for Architecture in response to the forced clearance of Occupy activities from Zuccotti Park and public plazas throughout the country. The first two recorded programs took place on December 17, 2011 and February 4, 2012.

Drawing upon a lifetime's knowledge, Patterns of Stylistic Change in Islamic Architecture presents Michael Meinecke's unique view of the evolution and development of Islamic architecture.
Departing from conventional method which groups buildings and monuments according to dynasties and defines national characteristics based on the ethnic origins of Arabic, Persian, or Turkish patrons, Meinecke emphasizes the similarities which resulted from interrelations among neighboring or far-away areas. He argues that transformations in the development of Islamic architecture can be explained by the movements of skilled craftsmen who traveled extensively in their search for challenging work, allowing for their influence to be felt across a broad region.
Meinecke's unique approach to Islamic architecture will no doubt inspire others to emulate his approach in studying other regions or areas. Few, however, will be able to attain the consummate mastery of the subject which enlivens these essays.

Liliane Wong's latest volume on adaptive reuse in architecture presents 50 spectacular conversion and reuse projects worldwide, including buildings such as the TWA Hotel at NewYork's John F. Kennedy Airport, the CaixaForum in Madrid, and the New Museum in Berlin. The projects are presented using a new classification system that addresses practitioners as well as academics. The author's introductory essay provides a comprehensive overview and historical context for the enormous evolution and expansion of adaptive reuse over the past 50 years.

• Presentation of 50 seminal and spectacular adaptive reuse projects in architecture
• New classification of a wide variety of remodeling and conversion projects
• Written by a leading expert in the field

Learn how architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms work to improve sustainability objectives and advance new ideas about creating more livable cities, workplaces, and campuses as they create greater operational efficiency.

Location intelligence is changing how land development and large infrastructure projects take shape. From new residential construction to planning a modern urban experience to building a high-speed rail system, a geographic approach helps pave the way to better, more sustainable designs.  

In Designing Our Future: GIS for Architecture, Engineering & Construction, see how the AEC industry is implementing geographic information systems (GIS) to improve workflows, bring context to large undertakings, and increase collaboration between governments, contractors, partners, and the public. With GIS, architects, engineers, and construction professionals are discovering new efficiencies, gaining deeper insights about complex projects, and transforming the way they plan, design, build, and operate in the built and natural environments.

In this collection of case studies and “how to” guidance, gain an overview of how GIS was used to:

• Reduce the carbon footprint and mitigate future climate-related damage from a cross-country, high-speed rail project in the US
• Document all above and below ground assets such as utility services, electric, gas, surface water and sewer drainage for a local transportation agency 
• Plan maintenance for and respond to hazards from aging structures and vulnerable hillsides using drones in Japan 

Designing Our Future: GIS for Architecture, Engineering & Construction also includes a “next steps” section that provides ideas, strategies, tools, and actions to help jump-start your own use of GIS. A collection of online resources, including additional stories, videos, new ideas and concepts, and downloadable tools and content, complements this book.

• construction and design methodology in multistorey timber construction
• new system of timber and timber hybrid construction
• elements, layer structure, tectonics

Bilingual Edition (English / German):

A trailblazer of modern architecture

With Josef Frank (1885–1967), the catalogue for the exhibition in the MAK, Vienna, focuses on one of the most important Austrian architects of the 20^th century. In addition to his groundbreaking architectural oeuvre, the discussion considers Frank as an extremely productive designer who, although sceptical and a prominent cultural critic, must be thanked for his many important stimuli to international design that are still valid today. As an architect and designer who is still "contemporary" to this day, Frank was known for his pragmatic design approach, and pleaded for "normal" – but not at all normative – architecture and design. For Frank, the qualities of social experience were more important than formal aspects; his interiors and utilitarian articles were primarily intended to serve the comfort of the user. Josef Frank’s ideas of an uncontrived and unpretentious utilitarian expedience, which was focused on an independent, free, enlightened housing and living culture beyond all stylistic dogmas and fashionable conventions, is more topical today than ever.

Mit Josef Frank (1885–1967) widmet sich der Katalog zur Ausstellung im MAK, Wien, einem der bedeutendsten österreichischen Architekten des 20. Jahrhunderts. Neben dem wegweisenden architektonischen Werk geht es dabei insbesondere um einen Gestalter, dem das internationale Design bis heute wichtige Impulse verdankt. Gerade derzeit erscheinen Franks Vorstellungen einer aufgeklärt bürgerlichen Wohn- und Lebenskultur aktueller denn je.

Botschaftsneubauten sind prestigeträchtig und identitätsstiftend zugleich. Ihre primäre Aufgabe, einen Staat im Ausland zu vertreten und sein gesellschaftliches Selbstverständnis widerzuspiegeln, macht sie zu politischen Symbolen. In den vergangenen 150 Jahren suchte Deutschland in seinen auswärtigen Staatsbauten stets einen individuellen architektonischen Ausdruck. Insbesondere die während der vierzigjährigen deutschen Teilung von der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland errichteten Neubauten für diplomatische Vertretungen dokumentieren die enge Verknüpfung von politischen, kulturellen und personellen Entscheidungen sowie deren Rahmenbedingungen. Die Bauwerke eröffnen aus ihrer exterritorialen Position heraus einen erweiterten Blick auf die Geschichte und das Selbstverständnis. Sie prägen den auswärtigen Repräsentationsbau bis heute.

Adaptive reuse is a design practice where changes in the building structure go along with new programs and functions. Many concerns of the day that are the hallmark of current social discourse can equally be communicated through the vocabulary of design and reuse. Six common themes mirroring those of society in the new millennium are discernable in the current adaptive reuse practice: appropriation, ecology, equity, memory & redemption, identity and authenticity.

Selected articles from the IntAR Interventions and Adaptive Reuse Journal of the last ten years speak to the social issues of the recent decade. The introductory essay positions shifting norms of working from home or remote learning in the light of their revision through adaptive reuse, for example the post-pandemic repercussions on office towers and the classroom.

Representation of climate in design

Ephemeral phenomena like fire, precipitation, shade, and wind have emerged as important contemporary protagonists for environmental design due to their dynamic impact on buildings and cities. The importance of including these forces in architecture has gained rapid momentum in the global quest for sustainability.

This book investigates the history, theory and applications of climatic design in the built environment examining architecture and landscapes from various time periods. Based on a collaboration between the University of Sydney and the National University of Singapore, the book brings together contributing authors from Australia, Singapore, and the United States.

"Dry", "Wet", "Cool" and "Hot" divide the book into categories through which a wide array of representational topics are covered —from dust storms and clouds, to ice and bushfires. A concluding section presents project examples for exploratory application in the design of architecture.

Albert Kahn is probably the most important industrial architect of the 20th century. With his factory for the Ford T-models, designed for mass production, he found himself at the beginning of modern industrial architecture. His industrial buildings inspired the architects of European Modernism. They were the examples by which the structural rationality of Kahn’s industrial developments became the guiding principle for the New Building movement up until today.

The unrivalled monograph with its numerous photographs, plan layouts, site plans, and virtual 3D models comprehensively documents the buildings of Albert Kahn, which he was able to construct in a very short time due to his system-based working method – in the USA but also in the Soviet Union, Brazil, Sweden, France, China, Japan, and Australia.

Art and Architecture united

In this low-priced special edition, the book brings together the work of the Los Angeles-based architectural practice Johnston Marklee since its foundation in 1998. The practice is known for its uniform conceptual approach to each project and is internationally recognized for its engagement with contemporary art practices while being deeply rooted in the history and practice of architecture.

The book provides an insight into Johnston Marklee’s design process and cooperation with experts from related fields. It draws its material from seven conversations and seven artists’ interpretations of Johnston Marklee’s buildings and projects. A comprehensive list of work illustrated with small photographs and diagrams concludes this monograph.

• Lower priced, new paperback edition
• Edited and designed by Reto Geiser
• Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are Artistic Directors of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial

Technical Drawing deals with the representation of plans throughout all phases of a project. For students, the primary focus is on the development and methodical construction of a technical drawing.

Themes:

• Types of plan (from site plan and preliminary drawings to design and detail plans)
• Components of the plan (floor plan, section, elevation, detail)
• Line width, dimensioning, hatching, use of text, symbols
• Plan presentation and compilation

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the planning and implementation of this special kind of garden, taking the concrete planning process as its guide. From design fundamentals and concept development with different typology variants all the way to the choice of materials, the various construction principles, and building services, all subjects relevant to planning are comprehensively presented.
The planning information is illustrated with numerous international examples, with projects ranging from a "green wall" as interior design element and private house gardens in Australia, New Zealand, and Germany all the way to award – winning ecological office buildings in the USA and the Netherlands, an old - age home in Sweden, and an indoor park in Canada.

With an increasing interest in quality of nutrition and health, urban food production has begun to occur inside the growing cities worldwide and risks to compete with other urban needs.

The book introduces typologies, tools, evaluation methods and strategies, and shows the practical applications of the methods. Multiple projects illustrate solutions that augment quality via the insertion of food production entities into the urban realm.

A new paperback edition of the first collected volume from the Cairo School of Urban Studies

Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt’s future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today’s Middle East.

The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame.

Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.

A unique, richly illustrated study of Ottoman religious buildings standing today in Cairo

With the conquest in 1517 CE of Egypt by the Ottomans, Cairo lost its position as the capital of the Islamic empire to Istanbul but it retained an eminent position as the second most important city, with Egypt still regarded as one of the wealthiest provinces of the new empire. Round minarets with pointed hoods, as symbols of the new rulers, began filling the landscape alongside the octagonal minarets with pavilion tops of the Mamluks, new mosques, zawiyas, and madrasas/takiyas were built to emphasize the continuation of Sunni Islamic rule, while the use of tiles imported from Turkey introduced new decorative styles to the city’s existing rich carvings and marble paneling.

This book invites readers and students to revisit a long-overlooked era of Cairo’s architectural evolution, offering a unique, comprehensive study of Ottoman religious buildings still standing today. It provides detailed descriptions and walk-throughs of the buildings covered, visually, through its rich collection of plans, line drawings, and photographs, and through the narrative that infuses each image with life, shedding light on the continuous evolution of architecture in Cairo even after the city had ceased to be the capital of the Islamic empire.

Ahmad ibn Tulun (835–84), the son of a Turkic slave in the Abbasid court of Baghdad, became the founder of the first independent state in Egypt since antiquity, and builder of Egypt’s short-lived third capital of the Islamic era, al-Qata’i‘ and its great congregational mosque. After recounting the story of Ibn Tulun and his successors, architectural historian Tarek Swelim presents a topographic survey of al-Qata’i‘, a city lost since its complete destruction in 905. He then provides a detailed architectural analysis of the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, which was spared the destruction and is now the oldest surviving mosque in Egypt and Africa, from the time of its completion until today. Rare archival illustrations and early photographs document the changing appearance and uses of the mosque in modern times, while extraordinary 3D computer renderings take us back in time to recreate its architectural development through its early centuries. Plans, drawings, and maps complement the history, while striking modern color photographs showcase the elegant simplicity of the building’s architecture and decoration.
This definitive and generously illustrated book will appeal to scholars and students of Islamic art history, as well as to anyone interested in or inspired by the beauty of early mosque architecture.

Despite dictatorship, international sanctions, and the ravages of war, Baghdad endures with a surprisingly exceptional modern architectural heritage. This beautifully illustrated study reveals the splendors of early twentieth-century architecture that still stand on the streets of Iraq’s capital.
Caecilia Pieri’s documentation foregrounds the physical reality of modern Baghdad, very different from the image that we normally receive from the media. She draws on a number of unpublished sources and documents to present Baghdad’s architecture in a historical perspective, and her striking photographs taken between 2003 and 2006 document the residential areas of the twentieth-century city, providing an unprecedented resource for historians, urban planners, and general readers interested in discovering a new face of a world capital. With essays by Rifat Chadirji, Ihsan Fethi, and Naïm Kattan.

Setting the standard for modern cob construction – from design, engineering, and building code compliance, to sculpting beautiful structures

Cob – a mix of clay, sand, and straw – is one of the most popular and well-known natural building methods. Yet cob is often difficult to permit and can be used in inappropriate ways due to a lack of sound engineering and design information. Recent research and a newly developed building code promise to make cob building more accessible than ever.

Essential Cob Construction sets the new standard for cob construction. Incorporating rigorous, up-to-date engineering and building science and decades of practical lessons learned, coverage includes:

• Appropriate use of cob in different climates and contexts
• Thermal performance and moisture management
• Structural and architectural design considerations, including fire and earthquake resistance data from extensive laboratory testing
• Hands-on cob construction, including mix design, testing, manual and mechanical mixing, wall building, strong connections with foundations, roofs, and other structural elements, and finishing options
• Building code development and the permitting process for cob
• Planning, budgeting, and quality control
• The complete Cob Construction Appendix of the International Residential Code.

Essential Cob Construction is required reading for engineers, architects, designers, contractors, and owner-builders working with this ancient, aesthetically pleasing, low-carbon building material.

Although there is nothing complicated about constructing healthier homes, building for health is still not standard practice, and in fact there are many aspects of conventional home construction that are detrimental to human wellbeing.

From foundation to rooftop, to home care and repair, Prescriptions for a Healthy House takes the mystery out of healthy-house building, renovation and maintenance, by walking the owner/architect/builder team through the entire construction process. Chapters include:

• Frame construction alternatives
• Thermal and moisture control
• Finishes
• Flooring
• Furnishings

The authors -- an architect, medical doctor and restoration consultant -- bring a singular combination of expertise and perspectives to this book. The result -- now in its third completely updated edition -- is a unique guide to creating healthy indoor and outdoor spaces, including many new resources, as well as specialized knowledge from several nationally recognized experts in the field of building biology.

This unique guide will appeal to architects, designers, contractors, medical professionals and homeowners.

The devil is in the details-the science and art of designing and building durable, efficient, straw bale buildings

Straw bale buildings promise superior insulation and flexibility across a range of design aesthetics, while using a typically local and abundant low-embodied energy material that sequesters carbon-an important part of mitigating climate change.

However, some early straw bale designs and construction methods resulted in buildings that failed to meet design goals for energy efficiency and durability. This led to improved building practices and a deeper understanding of the building science underlying this building system.

Distilling two decades of site-built straw bale design and construction experience, Straw Bale Building Details is an illustrated guide that covers:

• Principles and process of straw bale design and building, options, and alternatives
• Building science of straw bale wall systems
• How design impacts cost, building efficiency, and durability
• Avoiding costly mistakes and increasing construction efficiency
• Dozens of time-tested detailed drawings for straw bale wall assemblies, including foundations, windows and doors, and roofs.

Whether you're an architect, engineer, contractor, or owner-builder interested in making informed choices, Straw Bale Building Details is the indispensable guide to current practice in straw bale design and construction.

Building a Revolution, one handful at a time.

In the face of widespread burnout and a world gone crazy, how do we find things to say "yes" to, rather than a resounding "no"?

On North America's West Coast, there's a group of rebel women who ten years ago chose to break free from a rigged economic and social system. They didn't take to the streets to lobby banks and governments to change their ways - they didn't have time for that. They had babies to feed and house. They reckoned that if nobody else was going to change the rules to support basic human needs and respect the biosphere, then we are all free to make our own rules.

They chose action. They decided to teach themselves how to build houses using the most abundant material on earth - mud. They'd learn by building, gathering skills and allies. They'd have fun, sharing whatever they learned with whoever wanted to come along for the ride. The Mudgirls revolution was born.

Part story of rebel women, grassroots self-governance, and community-building, part incendiary political and economic tract, and part practical guide to building natural homes for real people. Mudgirls Manifesto is about respecting the earth, each other, and crafting meaningful lives.

A powerful, positive antidote to troubled times.

The essential guide to prefab straw bale panels - an innovative spin on a widely used natural building method

Prefabricated straw bale wall panels combine the performance and low environmental impact of traditional straw bale with reduced labor and more consistent results. These structural insulated panels (SIPs) are built offsite and transported to the job site, or built onsite and "tipped up" into position. Essential Prefabricated Straw Bale Construction is a fully illustrated practical guide to this affordable, scalable method.

This indispensable manual includes a complete introduction to the use of prefabricated bale walls, packed with all the information you need to determine whether they are the right choice for your project. It covers:

• Specifications, engineering details and building code references
• Comprehensive step-by-step instructions and detail drawings
• Finishing and maintenance techniques
• Budgeting and labor estimates
• Additional resources

Essential Prefabricated Straw Bale Construction is part of New Society's Sustainable Building Series. Written by the world's leading sustainable builders, designers and engineers, these succinct, user-friendly handbooks are indispensable tools for any project where accurate and reliable information are key to success. Get the Essentials!

Chris Magwood is a sustainable builder and designer specializing in green and natural building techniques, the co-founder and co-director of the Endeavour Centre, and the author of several books on sustainable building including Making Better Buildings , More Straw Bale Building and Straw Bale Details .

The essential guide to hempcrete - a strong, versatile, environmentally friendly, energy-efficient natural insulating material

Hempcrete is a versatile, energy-efficient natural insulation material, useful for walls, roofs and floors. Made from the inner stem of the hemp plant mixed with a lime-based binder, it is a very strong, lightweight and breathable alternative to manufactured insulations. Essential Hempcrete Construction is a fully illustrated practical guide to this affordable, renewable method, from procurement to finishing.

Going well beyond the scope of many natural building books, this indispensable manual includes a complete introduction to hempcrete, packed with all the information you need to determine whether it's the right choice for your project. It covers:

• Material specifications, testing and building code references and climate data
• Detail drawings for design reference
• Tool lists, and complete step-by-step instructions for mixing and placing hempcrete
• Finishing and maintenance techniques
• Budgeting and labor estimates
• Additional resources.

Essential Hempcrete Construction is part of New Society's Sustainable Building Essentials Series. Series editors Chris Magwood and Jen Feigin have scoured the world of sustainable building to bring you the techniques and systems that deliver measureable benefits in terms of greater energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Written by the world's leading sustainable builders, designers and engineers, these succinct, user-friendly handbooks are indispensable tools for any project where accurate and reliable information are key to success. Get the Essentials!

Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism - negotiating the relationship between cities and the natural world

In contemporary Western society, urban development is regarded as an unfortunate blight from which nature provides a much-needed respite. This apparent dichotomy ignores the interdependence between human settlement and the natural world. In fact, one of the most pressing problems facing urban theorists today is determining how to resolve the tension between the built and natural environments, in the process creating truly sustainable cities.

Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents is a collection of essays exploring the debate over urban reform, now polarized around the two competing paradigms of Landscape Urbanism and the New Urbanism. Landscape Urbanism is conceived as a more ecologically based approach, while New Urbanism is more concerned with the built form. Well-known and influential urban theorists such as Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler delve into the impact of the tension between the two perspectives on:

• Smart growth
• Neighborhood design
• Sustainable development
• Creating cities that are in balance with nature

While there is significant overlap between Landscape Urbanism and the New Urbanism, the former has assumed prominence amongst most critical theorists, whereas the latter's proponents are more practically oriented. Given that these two sets of ideas are at the forefront of sustainable urban design, the analysis– and potential reconciliation—offered by Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents is long overdue.

Andrés Duany is a leading proponent of the New Urbanism and is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Emily Talen is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of four previous books on urban design.

Soak up carbon into beautiful, healthy buildings that heal the climate

"Green buildings" that slash energy use and carbon emissions are all the rage, but they aren't enough. The hidden culprit is embodied carbon — the carbon emitted when materials are mined, manufactured, and transported — comprising some 10% of global emissions. With the built environment doubling by 2030, buildings are a carbon juggernaut threatening to overwhelm the climate.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Like never before in history, buildings can become part of the climate solution. With biomimicry and innovation, we can pull huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it up as walls, roofs, foundations, and insulation. We can literally make buildings out of the sky with a massive positive impact.

The New Carbon Architecture is a paradigm-shifting tour of the innovations in architecture and construction that are making this happen. Office towers built from advanced wood products; affordable, low-carbon concrete alternatives; plastic cleaned from the oceans and turned into building blocks. We can even grow insulation from mycelium.

A tour de force by the leaders in the field, The New Carbon Architecture will fire the imagination of architects, engineers, builders, policy makers, and everyone else captivated by the possibility of architecture to heal the climate and produce safer, healthier, and more beautiful buildings.

The first highly illustrated, comprehensive guide to light straw clay - a high performance, low-impact, durable building material

Light straw clay - straw mixed with clay slip - is a versatile, easy-to-use wall building material. Also called "slip-straw", its durability has been proven in beautiful, centuries-old buildings across Northern Europe and in modern high-performance buildings in North America.

Building code compliant in the US and using "waste" materials with high insulation value and excellent moisture handling qualities, it's both high-performance and low-impact. Yet until now, there has been no practical guide to using the material in a wide variety of construction and renovation projects.

Distilling decades of experience, Essential Light Straw Clay Construction is a fully illustrated step-by-step guide, ideal for both the DIYer and professional designer and builder alike. It covers:

• Material specifications, performance, and when and where to use it
• Estimating quantities, costs, and sourcing
• Illustrated, step-by-step guidance for mixing and installation, including "slip-chip" variations
• Detail drawings for various wall systems including stud, timber, and pole framing, Larsen trusses, I-joists, plus retrofits
• Code references, compliance, and best practice
• Finishing and maintenance techniques
• Additional resources.

Lydia Doleman , a licenced contractor, taught carpentry and natural building at Solar Energy International in Colorado and was lead ecological builder for Portland's City Repair project. She's created beautiful, high-performance, low-impact buildings across the Northwest, from Portland's first permitted straw bale home and The Rebuilding Center's cob entryway, to a 3,300-sq. f light clay straw brewery. She's written for The Last Straw Journal and Permaculture Activist and appeared on NBC News and HGTV's Off Beat America . Lydia lives in southern Oregon.

Sustainable building from the ground up - the pros and cons of the latest green and natural materials and technologies

From foundation to finish, a wealth of information is available on sustainable construction methods-entire volumes have been published on individual green and natural building techniques. But with so many different ideas to choose from, there is no single resource that allows an owner or builder to quickly and objectively compare the merits of each system for their particular project.

Making Better Buildings cuts through the hype and provides the unvarnished facts about the upsides and downsides of the most widely discussed materials and technologies. Drawing on the real-world experiences of designer/builders, this comparative guide systematically and comprehensively examines each approach in terms of:

• Cost, sourcing, labor intensity, and ease of construction
• Energy efficiency, embodied energy, and environmental impacts
• Availability/accessibility
• Viable applications and future potential.

Each chapter is rounded out by a chart which summarizes the material in a quick and accessible manner.

Whether you are an owner preparing to build a green or natural home, or a conventional contractor determined to integrate sustainable alternatives into your existing construction practices, this up-to-the minute resource will help you make the best decisions for your project, while meeting your energy, efficiency, budgetary, and site-specific needs.

Home heating that's safe, clean, efficient, and uses 70 to 90 percent less fuel than a typical woodstove

A rocket mass heater is an earthen masonry heating system which provides clean, safe and efficient warmth for your home, all while using 70-90% less fuel than a traditional woodstove.

These unique and beautiful installations provide luxurious comfort year-round. In cold weather a few hours of clean, hot burning can provide 20 or more hours of steady warmth, while the unit's large thermal mass acts as a heat sink, cooling your home on sizzling summer days. Packed with hard-to-find information, The Rocket Mass Heater Builder's Guide includes:

• Comprehensive design, construction and installation instructions combined with detailed maintenance and troubleshooting advice
• Brick-by-brick layouts, diagrams, and architectural plans augmented with detailed parts drawings and photographs for clarity
• Relevant and up-to-date code information and standards to help you navigate the approval process with local building departments.

Earthen masonry heating systems are well-suited for natural and conventional builders alike. A super-efficient, wood-burning, rocket mass heater can help you dramatically reduce your energy costs while enhancing the beauty, value and comfort of your home.

The original, complete, user-friendly introduction to natural building, now fully revised and updated

The popularity of natural building has grown by leaps and bounds, spurred by a grassroots desire for housing that is healthy, affordable, and environmentally responsible. While there are many books available on specific methods such as straw-bale construction, cob, or timber framing, there are few resources which introduce the reader to the entire scope of this burgeoning field.

Fully revised and updated, The Art of Natural Building is the complete and user-friendly introduction to natural building for everyone from the do-it-yourselfer to architects and designers. This collection of articles from over fifty leaders in the field is now stunningly illustrated with over two-hundred full-color photographs of natural buildings from around the world. Learn about:

• The case for building with natural materials, from the perspectives of sustainability, lifestyle, and health
• What you need to know to plan and design your own beautiful and efficient natural home
• Explanations of thirty versatile materials and techniques, with resources on where to go for further information on each
• How these techniques are being used to address housing crises around the world.

Clearly written, logically organized, and beautifully illustrated, The Art of Natural Building is the encyclopedia of natural building.

Joseph F. Kennedy is a designer, builder, writer, artist, educator, and co-founder of Builders Without Borders. Michael G. Smith is a respected workshop instructor, consultant, and co-author of the best-selling book The Hand-Sculpted House . Catherine Wanek is a co-founder of Builders Without Borders and author/photographer of The Hybrid House and The New Straw Bale Home .

Most of the world's population now lives in cities. So if we are to address the problems of environmental deterioration and peak oil adequately, the city has to be a major focus of attention.

EcoCities is about re-building cities and towns based on ecological principles for the long term sustainability, cultural vitality and health of the Earth's biosphere. Unique in the literature is the book's insight that the form of the city really matters-and that it is within our ability to change it, and crucial that we do. Further, that the ecocity within its bioregion is comprehensible and do-able, and can produce a healthy and potentially happy future.

EcoCities describes the place of the city in evolution, nature and history. It pays special attention to the key question of accessibility and transportation, and outlines design principles for the ecocity. The reader is encouraged to plunge in to its economics and politics: the kinds of businesses, planning and leadership required. The book then outlines the tools by which a gradual transition to the ecocity could be accomplished. Throughout, this new edition is generously illustrated with the author's own inspired visions of what such rebuilt cities might actually look like.

The original, complete, user-friendly introduction to natural building, now fully revised and updated

The popularity of natural building has grown by leaps and bounds, spurred by a grassroots desire for housing that is healthy, affordable, and environmentally responsible. While there are many books available on specific methods such as straw-bale construction, cob, or timber framing, there are few resources which introduce the reader to the entire scope of this burgeoning field.

Fully revised and updated, The Art of Natural Building is the complete and user-friendly introduction to natural building for everyone from the do-it-yourselfer to architects and designers. This collection of articles from over fifty leaders in the field is now stunningly illustrated with over two-hundred full-color photographs of natural buildings from around the world. Learn about:

• The case for building with natural materials, from the perspectives of sustainability, lifestyle, and health
• What you need to know to plan and design your own beautiful and efficient natural home
• Explanations of thirty versatile materials and techniques, with resources on where to go for further information on each
• How these techniques are being used to address housing crises around the world.

Clearly written, logically organized, and beautifully illustrated, The Art of Natural Building is the encyclopedia of natural building.

Joseph F. Kennedy is a designer, builder, writer, artist, educator, and co-founder of Builders Without Borders. Michael G. Smith is a respected workshop instructor, consultant, and co-author of the best-selling book The Hand-Sculpted House . Catherine Wanek is a co-founder of Builders Without Borders and author/photographer of The Hybrid House and The New Straw Bale Home .