Architecture

“A house must be a living, organic entity that develops and constantly changes,” stated Friedensreich Hundertwasser in one of his arguments for his nature- and human-oriented architecture. Success vindicated his vision: roof afforestation, organic forms, colorful façades, uneven floors, irregularly positioned windows, gilded onion domes—Hundertwasser’s architecture is unmistakable. From the beginning of his artistic career in the ’50s, Hundertwasser was preoccupied with architecture in his painting. Then began his engagement with manifestos, essays, and demonstrations; later followed architectural models in which he illustrated, for example, his ideas on roof afforestation and an individual’s right to his very own window. As an “architectural doctor” he created unregimented irregularities and realized exemplary architectural projects.This comprehensive directory of Hundertwasser’s architectural works presents all his buildings and projects, whether realized or not, tracing them from the first sketches through to models and completion. Dr. Andrea Christa Fürst, a longtime employee of the Hundertwasser Archive, made a major contribution to this publication.

In 1956, TIME magazine called him one of the defining “form-givers of the 20th century.” Today, Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) remains a locus classicus of modernism for architects and designers alike. As a Bauhaus pioneer, even his earliest work was marked by a material restraint; the balance of texture, color, and shape; and a symbiosis of local and global, big and small, rough and smooth. In this essential introductory monograph, we survey Breuer’s complete career through some of his most influential projects and ideas, from his landmark tubular furniture to the MoMA Research House to his innovation of “binuclear” housing, splitting living and sleeping areas into separate wings. Along the way, we follow Hungarian-born Breuer’s journey to international acclaim, with featured projects from Germany, France, England, Switzerland, and across the United States contributing to his global status as a modernist maestro.

In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation.

As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a “total” work of art across different practices and media.

This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.

Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) made a unique modernist mark. Influenced by both the landscape and the political independence of his native Finland, he designed warm, curving, compassionate buildings, wholly set apart from the slick, mechanistic, geometric designs that characterized much contemporary European practice.

Whether a church, a villa, a sauna, or a public library, Aalto’s organic structures tended to replace plaster and steel with brick and wood, often incorporating undulating, wave-like forms, which would also appear in his chair, glassware, and lamp designs. An adherent to detail, Aalto insisted upon the humanity of his work stating: “Modern architecture does not mean using immature new materials; the main thing is to work with materials towards a more human line.”

Many of Aalto’s public buildings such as Säynätsalo Town Hall, the lecture theatre at Otaniemi Technical University, the Helsinki National Pensions Institute and the Helsinki House of Culture may be seen as psychological as well as physical landmarks in the rebuilding of Finland after the ravages of war.

Discover the completely unique aesthetic of Tadao Ando, the only architect ever to have won the discipline’s four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg, Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prize. Philippe Starck defines him as a “mystic in a country which is no longer mystic.” Philip Drew calls his buildings “land art” as they “struggle to emerge from the earth.” His designs have been described as haiku crafted from concrete, water, light, and space. But to Ando, true architecture is not expressed in metaphysics or beauty, but rather through space that embodies physical wisdom. This thoroughly updated edition spans the breadth of his entire career, including such stunning new projects as the Shanghai Poly Theater and the Clark Center at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Each project is profiled through photographs and architectural drawings to explore Ando’s unprecedented use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and natural forms. Based on the massive XXL monograph, this edition brings the architect’s definitive career overview to an accessible format.

With almost 300 entries, this architectural A to Z offers an indispensable overview of the key players in the creation of modern space. Covering modern architecture from the 19th into the 21st century, pioneering architects are each featured with a portrait and a concise biography, as well as a description of his or her important work.

Like a bespoke global architecture tour, this book will allow you to travel from Manhattan skyscrapers to a Japanese concert hall, from Antoni Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona to Lina Bo Bardi’s sports and leisure center on a former factory site in São Paulo. You’ll take in Gio Ponti’s colored geometries, Zaha Hadid’s free-flowing futurism, the luminous interiors of SANAA, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s unique blend of Scottish tradition and elegant japonisme.

The book’s A to Z entries also cover groups, movements, and styles to position these leading individual architects within broader building trends across time and geography, including International Style, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and much more. With illustrations including some of the best architectural photography of the modern era, this is a comprehensive resource for any architecture professional, student, or devotee.

In the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892–1970), inside and outside find their perfect modernist harmony. As the Californian sun glints off sleek building surfaces, vast glass panel walls allow panoramic views over mountains, gardens, palm trees, and pools.

Neutra moved to the United States from his native Vienna in 1923 and settled in Los Angeles. He displayed his affinity with architectural settings early on with the Lovell House, set on a landscaped hill with views of the Pacific Ocean and Santa Monica Mountains. Later projects such as the Kaufmann House and Nesbitt House would continue this blend of art, landscape, and living comfort, with Neutra’s clients often receiving detailed questionnaires to define their precise needs.

This richly illustrated architect introduction presents the defining projects of Neutra’s career. As crisp structures nestle amid natural wonders, we celebrate a particularly holistic brand of modernism which incorporated the ragged lines and changing colors of nature as much as the pared down geometries of the International Style.

Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements, and vision of particular personalities becomes priority. The delicate task is to translate all the emotive associations and practical requirements of “home” into a workable, constructed reality.

This publication rounds up 100 of the world’s most interesting and pioneering homes designed in the past two decades, featuring a host of talents both new and established, including John Pawson,Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza, and Peter Zumthor. Accommodating daily routines of eating, sleeping, and shelter, as well as offering the space for personal experience and relationships, this is architecture at its most elementary and its most intimate.

In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus School of Art and Design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, sculpture to ceramics.

This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world’s largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 550 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a “total” work of art.

Updated on the occasion of Bauhaus' centennial, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich.

Though it lies just across the Mediterranean from Europe, barely a stone’s throw from Spain’s southernmost tip, Morocco couldn’t possibly be farther away.

With its mountainous and desert landscapes, labyrinthine souks, delectable cuisine, exquisite rugs and textiles, vibrant mosaics, fragrant odors, mesmerizing music, and welcoming people, Morocco is a most alluring and tantalizingly exotic destination. Digging a little deeper into the myth of Morocco, Barbara and René Stoeltie bring us this eclectic selection of homes to demonstrate all that is most wonderful about the Moroccan style: from tiled, turquoise swimming pools and lavish gardens to carved wooden furniture and jade-colored marble fountains.

With more than 500 pages featuring stunning, inspiring photographs, flipping through these fairy tale-like visions of exotic havens (ideally while sipping a steaming cup of sweet, fragrant mint tea) will instantly whisk you away.

In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation.

As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a “total” work of art across different practices and media.

This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.

Founded in 1928 as a “living diary” by the great Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti, domus has been hailed as the world’s most influential architecture and design journal. With style and rigor, it has reported on the major themes and stylistic movements in industrial, interior, product, and structural design.

This fresh reprint of domus' 1950s coverage brings together the most important features from an era of post-war optimism. As memories of conflict receded, architecture and design sought new forms, materials, and applications, as well as increasing international dialogue.

Highlights include Le Corbusier’s design of the United Nations Building in New York; the Case Study Houses of Charles and Ray Eames; Richard Neutra in California, office machines by Olivetti, furniture by Ray and Charles Eames, ceramics and tables by Ettore Sottsass, and the Herman Miller Showroom by Alexander Girard in San Francisco.

domus distilled Seven volumes spanning 1928 to 1999 Over 4,000 pages featuring influential projects by the most important designers and architects Original layouts and all covers, with captions providing navigation and context Introductory essays by renowned architects and designers Each edition comes with an appendix featuring texts translated into English, many of which were previously only available in Italian A comprehensive index in each volume listing both designers’ and manufacturers’ names

Over the years, talented architects have occasionally indulged themselves with the challenge of designing small but perfectly formed buildings. Today, with reduced budgets, many architects have turned in a more focused way to creating works that may be diminutive in their dimensions, but are definitely big when it comes to trendsetting ideas. Whether in Japanese cities, where large sites are hard to come by, or at the frontier between art and architecture, small buildings present many advantages, and push their designers to do more with less. A dollhouse for Calvin Klein in New York, a playhouse for children in Trondheim, vacation cabins, and housing for victims of natural disasters are all part of the new rush to develop the great small architecture of the moment. The 2013 Pritzker Prize winner Toyo Ito is here, but so are emergent architects from Portugal, Chile, England, and New Zealand. From world-famous names to the freshest new talent, come discover architectural invention on a whole new, small scale.

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect, who for many years built almost nothing, despite winning critical acclaim. Some even said her audacious, futuristic designs were unbuildable.

During the latter years of her life, Hadid’s daring visions became a reality, bringing a unique new architectural language to cities and structures as varied as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, hailed by The New York Times as “the most important new building in America since the Cold War”; the MAXXI Museum in Rome; the Guangzhou Opera House in China; and the London 2012 Olympics Aquatics Centre.

At the time of her unexpected death in 2016, Hadid was firmly established among the elite of world architecture, recognized as the first woman to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, but above all as a giver of new forms, the first great architect of the noughties.

From her early sharply angled buildings to later more fluid architecture that made floors, ceilings, walls, and furniture part of an overall design, this essential introduction presents key examples of Hadid’s pioneering practice. She was an artist, as much as an architect, who fought to break the old rules and crafted her own 21st-century universe.

Jean Nouvel, winner of the 2008 Pritzker Prize, is widely regarded as France’s most original and important contemporary architect. From 1967 to 1970, he assisted the influential architects Claude Parent and Paul Virilio before creating his own practice in Paris. His first largely acclaimed project was the Arab World Institute in Paris (1981–87). Since then, he has completed such grand projects as the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Philharmonie de Paris, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. His recent work includes the 82-story 53W53 Tower in New York, the Duo Towers in Paris, and the Shanghai Pudong Art Museum.

Based on the massive XXL monograph from 2008, this widely updated edition brings the architect’s definitive career overview to one volume. The result is a nearly 800-page tome with more than 25 recent projects and new photos commensurate with Jean Nouvel’s inimitable talent, which highlights milestone projects, among them his Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, as well as works in progress such as the spectacular Sharaan Desert Resort, a hotel carved into sandstone rock in the Al-'Ula desert in Saudi Arabia. The collection’s graphic design and images were conceived and selected by the architect himself, making this publication a genuine Nouvel by Nouvel, inside and out.

Zaha Hadid (1950 - 2016) was a revolutionary architect. For years, she was widely acclaimed and won numerous prizes despite building practically nothing. Some even said her work was simply impossible to build. Yet, during the latter years of her life, Hadid’s daring visions became a reality, bringing a new and unique architectural language to cities and structures such as the Port House in Antwerp, the Al Janoub Stadium near Doha, Qatar, and the spectacular new airport terminal in Beijing.

By her untimely death in 2016, Hadid was firmly established among architecture’s finest elite, working on projects in Europe, China, the Middle East, and the United States. She was the first female architect to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the prestigious RIBA Royal Gold Medal, with her long-time Partner Patrik Schumacher now the leader of Zaha Hadid Architects and in charge of many new projects.

Based on the massive TASCHEN monograph, this book is now available in an accessible edition covering Hadid’s complete works, including ongoing projects. With abundant photographs, in-depth sketches, and Hadid’s own drawings, the volume traces the evolution of her career, spanning not only her most pioneering buildings but also the furniture and interior designs that were integrated into her unique, and distinctly 21st-century, universe.

“A celebration of all that is brave and audacious in her work.”
— Australian Financial Review

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887–1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures, but of entire concepts of modern living.

Le Corbusier’s work made distinct developments over the years, from early vernacular houses in Switzerland through dazzling white, purist villas to dynamic syntheses of art and architecture such as the chapel at Ronchamp and the civic buildings in Chandigarh, India. A hallmark throughout was his ability to combine functionalist aspirations with a strong sense of expressionism, as well as a broader and empathetic understanding of urban planning. He was a founding member of the Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM), which championed “architecture as a social art.”

This book presents some of Le Corbusier’s landmark projects to introduce an architect, thinker, and modern pioneer who, even in his unrealized projects, offered discussion and inspiration for generations to come.

Concrete? That characterless stuff of parking lots or Communist tower blocks, right? Well, yes. And no. Concrete is actually a name applied to a remarkably wide range of building substances, and, when properly handled, is one of the noble materials of contemporary architecture. A kind of “liquid stone” at the outset, it is malleable, durable, and capable of prodigious feats of engineering. This Bibliotheca Universalis edition highlights the best work done in concrete of recent years. It includes such stars as Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, and Steven Holl, but also surprising new architects like the Russians SPEECH and artists such as James Turrell, who turned the famous concrete spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York into the setting of one of his most remarkable pieces.

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887–1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures, but of entire concepts of modern living.

Le Corbusier’s work made distinct developments over the years, from early vernacular houses in Switzerland through dazzling white, purist villas to dynamic syntheses of art and architecture such as the chapel at Ronchamp and the civic buildings in Chandigarh, India. A hallmark throughout was his ability to combine functionalist aspirations with a strong sense of expressionism, as well as a broader and empathetic understanding of urban planning. He was a founding member of the Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM), which championed “architecture as a social art.”

This book presents some of Le Corbusier’s landmark projects to introduce an architect, thinker, and modern pioneer who, even in his unrealized projects, offered discussion and inspiration for generations to come.

The Case Study House program (1945–1966) was an exceptional, innovative event in the history of American architecture and remains to this day unique. The program, which concentrated on the Los Angeles area and oversaw the design of 36 prototype homes, sought to make available plans for modern residences that could be easily and cheaply constructed during the postwar building boom.

The program’s chief motivating force was Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza, a champion of modernism who had all the right connections to attract some of architecture’s greatest talents, such as Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eero Saarinen. Highly experimental, the program generated houses that were designed to redefine the modern home, and had a pronounced influence on architecture—American and international—both during the program’s existence and even to this day.

TASCHEN brings you a retrospective of the entire program with comprehensive documentation, brilliant photographs from the period and, for the houses still in existence, contemporary photos, as well as extensive floor plans and sketches.

From the end of World War II until the mid-1960s, exciting things were happening in American architecture. Emerging talents were focusing on innovative projects that integrated at once modern design and low-cost materials. The trend was most notably embodied in the famous Case Study House Program, a blueprint for modern habitation championed by the era’s leading American journal, Arts & Architecture.

The complete facsimile of the ambitious and groundbreaking Arts & Architecture was published by TASCHEN in 2008 as a limited edition. This new curation—directed and produced by Benedikt Taschen—brings together all the covers and the highlights from the first five years of the legendary magazine, with a special focus on the Case Study House Program and its luminary pioneers including Neutra, Schindler, Saarinen, Ellwood, Lautner, Eames, and Koenig.

A celebration of the first brave years of a politically, socially and culturally engaged publication, this special selection is also a testimony to one of the most unique and influential events in the history of American architecture.

The architecture of the 20th century is distinguished by an astonishing diversity. Just as the clash of aesthetic and commercial ambitions nevertheless produced many a happy symbiosis, so the purist and the expressive, the monumental and the picturesque came face to face. From lofty “starchitects” to lesser-known names around the world, this chronological overview takes you to the heart of the ideas, trends, and transitions that defined the 1900s.

From Frank Lloyd Wright to Antoni Gaudí, Frank O. Gehry to Shigeru Ban and all the best stuff in-between, it’s all here. Organized chronologically, the 31 chapters put it all into perspective, illustrated by hundreds of large-format photos as well as a plenitude of drawings and floor plans. The biographical appendix covers all of the century’s greatest architects while celebrating today’s new talents, and the lavish illustrations include some of the best architectural photography in the modern era.

For anyone interested in the zeitgeist and building design of the 20th century, this is your be-all-end-all reference work. The collection covers not only the architects but also the groups, the movements, and the styles that defined an era of construction. A must for all lovers of architecture!

Discover the unique aesthetic of Tadao Ando, the only architect ever to have won the discipline’s four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg, Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prize.

This collection spans the breadth of Ando’s entire career, including such stunning new projects as the Shanghai Poly Grand Theater and the Roberto Garza Sada Center in Monterrey, Mexico. Each project is profiled through photographs and architectural drawings that explore Ando’s unprecedented use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and natural forms.

Featuring designs from award-winning private homes, churches, museums, and apartment complexes to cultural spaces throughout Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the USA, this compact edition brings you up close and personal with a Modernist master.

The Case Study House program (1945–1966) was a unique event in the history of American architecture. Sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, the program sought to respond to the postwar building boom with prototype modern homes that could be both easily replicated and readily affordable to the average American.

Concentrated on the Los Angeles area, the Case Study Houses included 36 model homes commissioned from such major architects of the day as Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, A. Quincy Jones, and Ralph Rapson. Their criteria included “using, as far as is practicable, many war-born techniques and materials best suited to the expression of man’s life in the modern world.”

The results of the program would redefine the modern home and extend influence not only across the United States but around the world. This compact guide includes all of the Case Study Houses with over 150 photos and plans, as well as a map showing locations of all sites, including those that no longer exist.

Across small cottages and lavish villas, beach houses and forest refuges, discover the world’s finest crop of new homes. This cutting-edge global digest features such talents as Shigeru Ban and Marcio Kogan alongside up-and-coming names like Aires Mateus, Xu Fu-Min, Vo Trong Nghia, Desai Chia, and Shunri Nishizawa. Here, there are homes in Australia and New Zealand, from China and Vietnam, in the United States and Mexico, and on to less expected places like Ecuador and Costa Rica. The result is a sweeping survey of the contemporary house and a revelation that homes across the globe may have more in common than expected.

Among guava trees and abandoned forts in Western India is a sanctuary designed for and by Kamal Malik of Malik Architecture. The House of Three Streams is a sprawling spectacle with high ceilings, verandas, and pavilions, perched atop a ridge overlooking two ravines. A medley of steel, glass, wood, and stone, the house weaves along the contour of the landscape, almost as an extension of the forest. Encina House by Aranguren & Gallegos, an elegant, sloping structure reminiscent of a gazebo, similarly inhabits its surrounding vista. Ensconced in a pine forest north of Madrid, the lower level is embedded in rock and connected to the upper by a natural stone wall. Shinichi Ogawa’s Seaside House is an immaculate two-story minimalist marvel in Kanagawa that overlooks the Pacific. Its living area spills onto a cantilevered terrace and infinity pool, almost dissolving into the ocean as one seamless entity. In Vietnam, Shunri Nishizawa’s House in Chau Doc exudes tropical sophistication with exposed timber beams, woven bamboo, plants, concrete panels, and inner balconies and terraces. Its corrugated iron panels act as moveable walls and shutters, ushering in views of surrounding rice fields.

These homes—along with more than 50 others—are each remarkably distinct in design. They all, however, toe the line between inside and outside, each one symbiotic with its surroundings.

Ever since Henry David Thoreau’s described his two years, two months, and two days of refuge existence at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, in Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854), the idea of a cabin dwelling has seduced the modern psyche. In the past decade, as our material existence and environmental footprint has grown exponentially, architects around the globe have become particularly interested in the possibilities of the minimal, low-impact, and isolated abode.

Cabins combines insightful text, rich photography, and bright, contemporary illustrations by Marie-Laure Cruschi to show how this particular architectural type presents special opportunities for creative thinking. In eschewing excess, the cabin limits actual spatial intrusion to the bare essentials of living requirements, while in responding to its typically rustic setting, it foregrounds eco-friendly solutions. The cabin comes to showcase some of the most inventive and forward-looking practices of contemporary architecture, including Renzo Piano, Terunobu Fujimori, and Tom Kundig, all embracing such distilled sanctuary spaces.

The book showcases the variety of cabins in use and geography. From an artist studio on the Suffolk coast in England to a bamboo bungalow in Sri Lanka, this collection is as exciting in its international reach as it is in its array of briefs, clients, and situations. Constant throughout, however, is architectural innovation, and an inspiring sense of contemplation and coexistence as people return to nature and to a less destructive model of being in the world.

Discover the completely unique aesthetic of Tadao Ando, the only architect ever to have won the discipline’s four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg, Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prize.

Philippe Starck defines him as a “mystic in a country which is no longer mystic.” Philip Drew calls his buildings “land art” as they “struggle to emerge from the earth.” His designs have been described as haiku crafted from concrete, water, light, and space. But to Ando, true architecture is not expressed in metaphysics or beauty, but rather through space that embodies physical wisdom.

This thoroughly updated edition spans the breadth of his entire career, including such acclaimed new projects as the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and the Nakanoshima Children’s Book Forest in Osaka. Each project is profiled through photographs and architectural drawings to explore Ando’s unprecedented use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and natural forms.

Featuring designs from award-winning private homes, churches, museums, and apartment complexes to cultural spaces throughout Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the USA, this XXL-edition brings you up close and personal with a Modernist master.

If you’ve ever wondered what goes through architects’ minds when they design buildings, you’ll be happy to know that there’s no shortage of brilliant reading material to satisfy your curiosity. Wading through the archives at your local library may prove fruitful to your endeavor, but it won’t give you the instant gratification that Architectural Theory will.This book brings together all of the most important and influential essays about architecture written since the Renaissance, copiously illustrated and neatly organized chronologically by country. From Alberti and Palladio to Le Corbusier and Koolhaas, the best treatises by architecture’s greatest masters are gathered here, each accompanied by an essay discussing its historical context and significance. This is the all-in-one, must-have book for anyone interested in what architects have to say about their craft.The comprehensive overview that will help transform even the most uninformed novices into well-informed connoisseurs!

Building is one of very few endeavours that are physically connected to the surface of the earth, fixed and enduring. Nevertheless, for centuries, especially in the West, we have considered ourselves separate and above nature, drifting away, defining our own systems and order, and using the ground as a nothing more than a passive foundation. Other times we sought connection, drawing on nature for ritual and religion, fortified protection, and ecological balance.

This global compendium of nearly 1,400 pages brings architecture back in harmony with Earth’s surface. For years, Bjarne Mastenbroek and his architectural firm, SeARCH, have delved into the relationship architecture has, had, and will have with its surroundings, seeing buildings as landscapes that fit into their site without dominating or disturbing it. For Dig It!, they have dug deep into the history of building culture and brought to light fascinating examples of this philosophy—some well known, some previously overlooked.

From African churches chiseled from rock and Chinese villages dug into terrains to Parisian housing vibrantly overgrown and a villa built into the cliffs of Capri (famously featured in the film Le Mépris starring Brigitte Bardot), this book dissects structures from the past millennia. Part atlas, part encyclopedia, it highlights traditional vernacular practices, reconsiders all-time favorites, and celebrates contemporary examples across the globe. Designed by Mevis & Van Deursen, the extensive collection features analytical drawings from SeARCH and photo essays by Iwan Baan.

Dig It! acknowledges an effort to reconnect architecture and landscape and merge building with ground. Separated into six chapters (or “strategies”)—Bury, Embed, Absorb, Spiral, Carve, and Mimic—this remarkable survey reveals humanity’s connection to the earth through building culture: clever and utterly relevant for the challenges that we have and will face in both urban and natural environments.

Erased by bombing during the Korean War, North Korea’s trophy capital of Pyongyang was entirely rebuilt from scratch from 1953, in line with the vision of the nation’s founder, Kim Il Sung. Designed as an imposing stage set, it is a place of grand axial boulevards linking gargantuan monuments, lined with stately piles of distinctly Korean flavor, to be “national in form and socialist in content.”

Under the present leader, Kim Jong Un, construction has ramped up apace—“Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland,” declares one of his official patriotic slogans. He is rapidly transforming Pyongyang into a playground, conjuring a flimsy fantasy of prosperity and using architecture as a powerful anesthetic, numbing the population from the stark reality of his authoritarian regime.

Guardian journalist and photographer Oliver Wainwright takes us on an eye-opening tour behind closed doors in the most secretive country in the world, revealing that past the grand stone façades lie lavish wonder-worlds of marble and mosaic, coffered ceilings, and crystal chandeliers, along with new interiors in dazzling color palettes. Discover the palatial reading rooms of the Grand People’s Study House, and peer inside the locker rooms of the recently renovated Rungrado May Day Stadium, ready to host a FIFA World Cup that will never come.

This collection features about 200 photographs with insightful captions, as well as an introductory essay where Wainwright charts the history and development of Pyongyang, explaining how the architecture and interiors embody the national “Juche” ideology and questioning what the future holds for the architectural ambitions of this enigmatic country.

The art of ancient Egypt that has been handed down to us bears no names of its creators, and yet we value the creations of these unknown masters no less than the works of later centuries, such as statues by Michelangelo or the paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. This book introduces some of the most important masterpieces, ranging from the Old Kingdom during the Third millennium BC to the Roman Period.

The works encompass sculptures, reliefs, sarcophagi, murals, masks, and decorative items, most of them now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but some occupying places of honor as part of the World Cultural Heritage in museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Featured works include: Seated statue of King Djoser Wood relief of Hesire on a dining table Statue of a scribe made of various materials Funerary relief of Aschait Sphinx of Sesostris III Robed statue of Cherihotep Reliefs from the Temple at Carnac Sarcophagus of Queen Hatshepsut Murals from Thebes Seated figure of the goddess Sachmet Statue of Queen Teje Head of Akhenaten (Amenophis IV) Queen Nefertiti Golden mask of Tutankhamun Ramses II from Abu Simbel Horus falcon made of granite Stone relief from the temple ambulatory at Edfu

The creative duo Charles Eames (1907–1978) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912–1988) transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film. The Eameses’ work defined a new, multifunctional modernity, exemplary for its integration of craft and design, as well as for the use of modern materials, notably plywood and plastics.
The Eames Lounge Chair Wood, designed with molded plywood technology, became a defining furniture piece of the 20th century, while the couple’s contribution to the Case Study Houses project not only made inventive use of industrial materials but also developed an adaptable floor plan of multipurpose spaces which would become a hallmark of postwar modern architecture.

From the couple’s earliest furniture experiments to their seminal short film Powers of Ten, this book covers all the aspects of the illustrious Eames repertoire and its revolutionary impact on middle-class American living.

From emergency relief shelters to a cardboard cathedral and exhibition spaces in shipping containers, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban has made his name with his restlessly inventive response to material and situation, as much as with his humanitarian work at the sites of natural and man-made disasters. According to scholar Riichi Miyake, Ban’s work represents “an architectural iteration of Doctors Without Borders.” In the spirit of three-dimensional poetry, Ban uses materials as an integral part of his design, selected not for their cutting-edge credentials but rather for their expressive ability, their capacity to convey the building’s overall concept. In particular, Ban has made regular use of paper tubing in projects as varied as the Japanese Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover and emergency shelters for Rwanda’s Byumba Refugee Camp. This essential introduction, compiled with Ban’s own collaboration, presents his most important projects to date, surveying the full reach and importance of, in the words of the Pritzker Prize jury, a “committed teacher who is not only a role model for younger generations, but also an inspiration.”

Founded in 1928 as a “living diary” by the great Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti, domus has been hailed as the world’s most influential architecture and design journal. With both style and rigor, it has offered consistent coverage of major themes and stylistic movements in product, structure, interior, and industrial design.

This fresh reprint features the highlights from the 1960s issues and documents the daring, practical, and beautiful projects of a decade of futuristic thrill and booming pop culture. Synthetics and plastics hit the stage, leading to radical new design, while conventional notions of elegance give way to fresh exploratory forms.

For work to be featured in the magazine it had to offer function, spatial clarity, intellectual persuasion, relevant originality, and/or grace. Those projects and practitioners that made the grade include Ray and Charles Eames, Gae Aulenti, Kenzo Tange, Verner Panton, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Ettore Sottsass, Carlo Scarpa, Angelo Mangiarotti, Cesare Maria Casati, and Eero Saarinen.

domus distilled Seven volumes spanning 1928 to 1999 Over 4,000 pages featuring influential projects by the most important designers and architects Original layouts and all covers, with captions providing navigation and context Introductory essays by renowned architects and designers Each edition comes with an appendix featuring texts translated into English, many of which were previously only available in Italian A comprehensive index in each volume listing both designers’ and manufacturers’ names

Japan's contemporary architecture has long been among the most inventive in the world, recognized for sustainability and infinite creativity. No fewer than eight Japanese architects have won the Pritzker Prize.

Since Osaka World Expo ’70 highlighted contemporary forms, Japan has been a key player in global architecture. Tadao Ando's geometry put Japanese building on the map, bridging East and West. After his concrete buildings, figures like Kengo Kuma, Shigeru Ban, and Kazuyo Sejima pioneered a more sustainable approach. Younger generations have taken new directions, in harmony with nature, traditional building, and an endless search for forms.

Presenting the latest in Japanese building, this book links this unique creativity to Japan's high population density, modern economy, long history, and continual disasters in the form of earthquakes. Accepting ambiguity, constant change, and catastrophe is a key to understanding how Japanese architecture differs from that of Europe or America.

This compact edition highlights 37 architects and 53 exceptional projects by Japanese masters—from Tadao Ando’s Shanghai Poly Theater, Shigeru Ban’s concert hall La Seine Musical, SANAA’s Grace Farms, Fumihiko Maki’s 4 World Trade Center to Takashi Suo’s much smaller sustainable dental clinic. An elaborate essay traces the building scene from the Metabolists to today, showing how the interaction of past, present, and future has earned contemporary Japanese architecture worldwide recognition.

Famed for his motto “less is more,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a hotly-debated tastemaker of twentieth-century aesthetics and urban experience.

Mies van der Rohe’s philosophy was one of underlying truth in pure forms and proportions. With the help of contemporary technological and material developments, he sought a stripped-down purity to architecture, showcased by the likes of the Seagram Building and Farnsworth House. Some spoke out against this stark approach as the precursor to bland, generic cityscapes. Others cite Mies van der Rohe as the ultimate master of an abidingly elegant essence.

This book presents more than 20 of Mies van der Rohe’s projects from the period 1906–1967 to introduce his groundbreaking practise and influence in both America and Europe.

Renzo Piano rose to international prominence with his co-design of the Pompidou Center in Paris, described by The New York Times as a building that “turned the architecture world upside down.” Since then, he has continued to craft such iconic cultural spaces as the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago and, most recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art, an asymmetric nine-story structure in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with both indoor and outdoor galleries. In London, the Piano touch has also transformed the skyline with the Shard, the tallest building in the European Union.

At the age of 81, the Italian maestro retains all of his enthusiasm and kindness—and his recent roster is more impressive than ever. As he confided to the author, “I think at a certain age, one can discover that there is what the French call the ‘fil rouge,’ a kind of red thread that relates one building to another over time. In my case, I believe it is about lightness and the art of building.” From freshly built museums in Athens and Santander; ongoing works in Los Angeles, Moscow, Beirut, and Istanbul; to such humanitarian projects as the Emergency Children’s Surgery Center in Entebbe, Uganda, and the Children’s Hospice in Bologna, Italy, Piano’s career is a thrilling journey through the beauty and very essence of architecture.

This XXL-sized monograph, jam-packed with more than 200 new pages illustrated by photographs, sketches, and plans, spans Piano’s entire career to date and the many existences of his singular aesthetic.

Ever since Henry David Thoreau’s described his two years, two months, and two days of refuge existence at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, in Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854), the idea of a cabin dwelling has seduced the modern psyche. In the past decade, as our material existence and environmental footprint has grown exponentially, architects around the globe have become particularly interested in the possibilities of the minimal, low-impact, and isolated abode. This Bibliotheca Universalis edition of Cabins combines insightful text, rich photography, and bright, contemporary illustrations by Marie-Laure Cruschi to show how this particular architectural type presents special opportunities for creative thinking. In eschewing excess, the cabin limits actual spatial intrusion to the bare essentials of living requirements, while in responding to its typically rustic setting, it foregrounds eco-friendly solutions. The cabin comes to showcase some of the most inventive and forward-looking practices of contemporary architecture, with Renzo Piano, Terunobu Fujimori, Tom Kundig, and many fresh young professionals all embracing such distilled sanctuary spaces. The book showcases the variety of cabins in use and geography. From an artist studio on the Suffolk coast in England to eco-home huts in the Western Ghats region of India, this collection is as exciting in its international reach as it is in its array of briefs, clients, and situations. Constant throughout, however, is architectural innovation, and an inspiring sense of contemplation and coexistence as people return to nature and to a less destructive model of being in the world.

The creator of the ubiquitous Knoll “Tulip” chairs and tables, Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) was one of the 20th century’s most prominent space shapers, merging dynamic forms with a modernist sensibility across architecture and design. Among Saarinen’s greatest accomplishments are Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport, the very sculptural and fluid TWA terminal at JFK Airport in New York, and the 630 ft. (192 m) high Gateway Arch of St. Louis, Missouri, each of them defining structures of postwar America. Catenary curves were present in many of his structural designs. During his long association with Knoll, Saarinen’s other famous furniture pieces included the “Grasshopper” lounge chair and the “Womb” settee. Married to Aline Bernstein Saarinen, a well-known critic of art and architecture, Saarinen also collaborated with Charles Eames, with whom he designed his first prize-winning chair. With rich illustration tracing his life and career, this introduction follows Saarinen from his studies across his training all the way to his most prestigious projects, and explores how each of his designs brought a new dimension to the modernist landscape.

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901–1974) treated each building like a temple. Across the United States, in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Israel, his designs combined the sleek, utilitarian surfaces of modernism with a devotion to geometric forms and a reverence for natural light that suffused his stuctures with a monumental and breathtaking spirituality. This essential introduction brings together 17 of Kahn’s most important buildings across his cultural, governmental, religious, and residential repertoire. Plans, views, descriptions, and quality photographs trace the context and development of each project, while an introductory essay explores Kahn’s unique architectural ideology and his legacy as one of the most important 20th-century American architects since Frank Lloyd Wright. Through Kahn masterworks, such as the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, or Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, we’ll explore Kahn’s his “back to basics” grammar inspired by ancient sites in Italy, Greece, and Egypt; and his unique vocabulary of mass, void, and light that suffused the International Style with a near-celestial luminescence.

The Wiener Werkstätte (“Vienna Workshop”) bears many hallmarks of a modern creative movement. Founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Fritz Waerndorfer, this progressive alliance of artists and designers was particularly interested in challenging industrialised society with individual handcraftsmanship, and in bringing different facets of life into one unified, elegant artwork. The workshop began life in three small rooms, but soon expanded to fill a three storey building with special departments for metalwork, leatherwork, and woodwork, as well as a book binder and a paint shop. Artists experimented with various materials such as gold, precious stones, and papier mâché and applied their simple, often geometric, designs across ceramics, textiles, typography, interior design, furniture, and fashion. In architectural commissions such as the Purkersdorf Sanatorium and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, the group was able to realize its ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”), in which every detail of an environment was designed as an integral part of a coordinated whole. Though the workshop lasted only 30 years, it enjoyed major commercial success, with outlets in Karlsbad, Marienbad, Zurich, New York, and Berlin. It also garnered designs from many of the leading artists of the epoch, including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka,and Egon Schiele. Today, the Vienna Workshop is recognized for its comprehensive approach to artistic practice and its stylistic influence on Art Deco and Bauhaus.

From emergency relief shelters to a cardboard cathedral and exhibition spaces in shipping containers, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban has made his name with his restlessly inventive response to material and situation, as much as with his humanitarian work at the sites of natural and man-made disasters. According to scholar Riichi Miyake, Ban’s work represents “an architectural iteration of Doctors Without Borders.” In the spirit of three-dimensional poetry, Ban uses materials as an integral part of his design, selected not for their cutting-edge credentials but rather for their expressive ability, their capacity to convey the building’s overall concept. In particular, Ban has made regular use of paper tubing in projects as varied as the Japanese Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover and emergency shelters for Rwanda’s Byumba Refugee Camp. This essential introduction, compiled with Ban’s own collaboration, presents his most important projects to date, surveying the full reach and importance of, in the words of the Pritzker Prize jury, a “committed teacher who is not only a role model for younger generations, but also an inspiration.”

Of all building materials in the world, brick is one of the most enduring and ubiquitous. Traces of brickmaking date back to 7500 BC and fired brick first made its appearance in about 3500 BC. Since then, the trusty brick has shown amazing resilience and remains one of the mainstays of contemporary architecture. Rooted in tradition in countries as different as China and the Netherlands, it is inexpensive, flexible in use, and can also be ecologically fabricated. This comprehensive two-volume set tours the world to cover the most exciting and innovative brick buildings of the past 15 years, from Argentina to New Zealand. True to all TASCHEN architecture tomes, it includes new talents like Argentina’s Diego Arraigada and Vietnam’s Nguyen Hai Long as well as established starchitects such as Tadao Ando and Peter Zumthor. Featured buildings showcase the variety of brick applications across cultural, domestic, infrastructure, and leisure spaces, including Tate Modern Switch House by Herzog & De Meuron, Tidy Architects’ Amorio Restaurant in Santiago, and Mass Design Group’s Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu, Malawi.

With almost 300 entries, this architectural A to Z offers an indispensable overview of the key players in the creation of modern space. Covering modern architecture from the 19th into the 21st century, pioneering architects are each featured with a portrait and a concise biography, as well as a description of his or her important work.

Like a bespoke global architecture tour, this book will allow you to travel from Manhattan skyscrapers to a Japanese concert hall, from Antoni Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona to Lina Bo Bardi’s sports and leisure center on a former factory site in São Paulo. You’ll take in Gio Ponti’s colored geometries, Zaha Hadid’s free-flowing futurism, the luminous interiors of SANAA, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s unique blend of Scottish tradition and elegant japonisme.

The book’s A to Z entries also cover groups, movements, and styles to position these leading individual architects within broader building trends across time and geography, including International Style, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and much more. With illustrations including some of the best architectural photography of the modern era, this is a comprehensive resource for any architecture professional, student, or devotee.

Architect Albert Frey (1903–1998) saw a modernist utopia in the desert. Born in Zurich, he studied in Europe with Le Corbusier before moving to the United States in 1930, convinced it was the land of architectural opportunity. On a visit to Palm Springs, he fell under the desert spell. It was here, amid the arid and empty landscape, that he could truly envisage a perfect modern future.

Like fellow Californian luminary, John Lautner, Frey would spend the rest of his career nurturing the consonance of architecture and nature: studying the fall of sunlight and rain, and merging aluminum, steel, and glass with the boulders and sands of the West Coast wilds. His vision centered in particular on Palm Springs, capitalizing on the city’s postwar population boom to create a bastion of the sleek, leisurely modernism that defines midcentury California.

In this dependable architect introduction, we follow Frey’s long and prestigious career from his European beginnings through to the apogee of his Californian practice, taking in his notes on De Stijl, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus, and exploring the stylistic, material, and geographic makings of his unique “desert modernism.”

The creative duo Charles Eames (1907–1978) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912–1988) transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film. The Eameses’ work defined a new, multifunctional modernity, exemplary for its integration of craft and design, as well as for the use of modern materials, notably plywood and plastics.
The Eames Lounge Chair Wood, designed with molded plywood technology, became a defining furniture piece of the 20th century, while the couple’s contribution to the Case Study Houses project not only made inventive use of industrial materials but also developed an adaptable floor plan of multipurpose spaces which would become a hallmark of postwar modern architecture.

From the couple’s earliest furniture experiments to their seminal short film Powers of Ten, this book covers all the aspects of the illustrious Eames repertoire and its revolutionary impact on middle-class American living.

With a career spanning across continents and over six decades, the work of the renowned architect Norman Foster is nothing short of extraordinary. His creative innovation and holistic approach have made him one of the world’s most influential and well-known architects. From the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, to the Reichstag in Berlin, the enclosed court of the British Museum in London to the Millau Viaduct in France, with his practice of Foster + Partners, he has created celebrated landmarks that stand out for their inventive modernity and for what he calls “a sustainable approach to the design of the built environment.”

This is the first time Foster’s complete body of work has been published in one edition on such a grand scale. Giving a rare insight into the inner workings of his creative practice. It details his personal approach to his work, his inspirations, the link between art and architecture, and the significance and correlation to his other passions, such as being an avid aviator.

The monograph encompasses a lifetime of achievement and originality in two volumes. The first presents his architectural œuvre and is filled with numerous unpublished images and sketches handpicked by Foster from his archives. Paired with nearly 1000 illustrations, the second book contains eight essays he wrote explaining his sources of inspiration.

Aside from the 1999 Pritzker Prize, Norman Foster has won the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for Architecture, the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, and the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture. This is a magnificent visual journey not only through significant buildings of our time but also into the mind of a genius. Norman Foster sketched every page of this book and spent countless hours with the author and the graphic designer to make it one of the most remarkable architecture books ever published.

Also available as an Art Edition of 300 copies with a 1-meter-wide signed print of a drawing by Norman Foster, picturing the upcoming multifunctional community and business center InnHub in La Punt, Switzerland. The two volumes of this edition are collected in a custom-designed slipcase that folds into a book stand.

So rich and unique is traditional Japanese architecture that it’s nearly impossible to improve upon. Yet contemporary Japanese designers and architects keep finding fresh approaches to refurbish and take inspiration from the ways of old. Whether it’s a pristinely preserved traditional house or a sleek modern apartment, the best Japanese homes share a love of cleverly designed spaces and warm materials like wood, brick, and bamboo.

From a thatched roof farmhouse occupied by a Zen priest to Tadao Ando’s experimental 4x4 House, from Shigeru Ban’s conceptual Shutter House to a beautiful domestic homage to bamboo, this elegant compendium traverses the multifaceted landscape of Japanese living today.

Enriched by 170 brand new, unpublished photographs, this edition takes you on breathtaking journey through the Land of the Rising Sun—complete with a list of addresses, should you wish to undertake this journey to Japan’s most fascinating inns and homes yourself. An insightful glossary of key terms, such as tatami, shoji, and noren, will also help you come to grips with all elements of Japan’s unique aesthetic of Eastern minimalism.

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887–1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures, but of entire concepts of modern living.

Le Corbusier’s work made distinct developments over the years, from early vernacular houses in Switzerland through dazzling white, purist villas to dynamic syntheses of art and architecture such as the chapel at Ronchamp and the civic buildings in Chandigarh, India. A hallmark throughout was his ability to combine functionalist aspirations with a strong sense of expressionism, as well as a broader and empathetic understanding of urban planning. He was a founding member of the Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM), which championed “architecture as a social art.”

This book presents some of Le Corbusier’s landmark projects to introduce an architect, thinker, and modern pioneer who, even in his unrealized projects, offered discussion and inspiration for generations to come.

Under the burning Tuscan sun roll marvelous hills, vineyards, and olive groves—all postcard-perfect landscapes nestling centuries-old towns, rural villas, and contadino farmhouses. We’ve tracked down the best examples of such havens to paint a warm-hued picture of the look and feel of Tuscan living.

Follow in Michelangelo’s footsteps to the Eremo Santa Maria Maddalena, a medieval hermitage nestled in the steep Arezzo hillside. Or take a dip in the California-style pool of Roberto Budini Gattai, the architect who turned a modest winegrower’s house into a dazzling homage to David Hockney.

This collection gathers the region’s most remarkable homes and interiors, complete with insightful captions and enthralling double spreads. Across contemporary architecture and traditional craftsmanship, minimal earthenware and decadent furniture, we discover all the natural tones and sun-kissed textures of Tuscany.

Peeking behind the scenes of innovative homes, Philip Jodidio illustrates the evolution of today’s global architecture—from Samira Rathod’s House of Concrete Experiments in India to Tetro’s Açucena House in Brazil, which adapts to its natural terrain.

The houses featured in this book may be the first full generation to take advantage of the ubiquity of computing power—from design to fabrication—yet this high-tech approach has in no way diminished their variety and originality. In Italy, Mario Cucinella built TECLA – Technology and Clay, a 3D-printed house created entirely with raw earth. The unique house, printed in 200 hours with 60 cubic meters of natural materials, unveils potential low-cost, environmentally responsible approaches to architecture. In Hyderabad, India, Kanan Modi designed her House of Gardens not only to diffuse and reduce heat within the structure but also to invite the beauty of nature indoors—both essential in the face of rising temperatures and increasing urbanization.

These forward-thinking buildings were designed by capitalizing on technological advances such as video conferencing and 3D printing, fostering inventiveness and imagination, and yielding sustainable, site-specific homes. Atelier Bow-Wow virtually directed the construction of their Peninsula House on the Greek island of Antiporos during the COVID-19 pandemic; Mariko Mori’s Yuputira unifies her artistic and architectural aesthetics; and Anne Fougeron’s Suspension House breathes new life into a remarkable natural setting.

Detailing 59 cutting-edge projects from 25 countries—ranging from Guatemala and Slovenia to Norway and Vietnam—the third volume of the Homes for Our Time series takes readers on an illustrated visit of contemporary architectural gems, discovering the architects who are driving change in the field now, and in the future. These homes are the beating heart of creativity that will inspire architecture for decades to come.

Hailing from Vienna, Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887–1953) emigrated to Chicago in 1914, like his lifelong friend and rival Richard Neutra. Eventually hired by Frank Lloyd Wright to work in Los Angeles, Schindler took cues from notions found in Cubism and the International Style to shape his unique vision: a style he called “space architecture,” combining geometrical shapes, bold lines, and materials such as wood and concrete, with space as a medium in its own right, one to be controlled just like color or mass. This radical approach earned Schindler little recognition in his lifetime—but today, he is hailed as one of America’s most important Modernist pioneers. Discover such key projects as the Wolfe House, nestled in a steep hillside; the tree house-like Falk Apartment Building; the Lovell Beach House, recognized as one of the foremost examples of the Modernist canon in America; the Schindler/Chace House, Schindler’s most crucial work and his personal practice and home, which he shared with his family and that of Neutra. From private homes to small commercial buildings, Schindler’s groundbreaking designs heralded a new era of contemporary construction. This collection is complete with a map locating all of the architect’s most renowned projects, detailed entries, floor plans, as well as crisp photography of each structure and its interiors.

In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, and sculpture to ceramics.

This best-selling reference work is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world’s largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 575 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a “total” work of art.

This is a defining account of Bauhaus' energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in Modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. The handy edition features artists Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and many more.

The contemporary architecture of Japan has long been among the most inventive in the world, recognized for sustainability and infinite creativity. No fewer than seven Japanese architects have won the Pritzker Prize.

Since Osaka World Expo ’70 brought contemporary forms center stage, Japan has been a key player in global architecture. With his intentionally limited vocabulary of geometric forms, Tadao Ando has since then put Japanese building on the world’s cultural map, establishing a bridge between East and West. In the wake of Ando’s mostly concrete buildings, figures like Kengo Kuma (Japan National Stadium intended for the Olympic Games), Shigeru Ban (Mount Fuji World Heritage Center), and Kazuyo Sejima (Kanazawa Museum of 21st Century Art of Contemporary Art) pioneered a more sustainable approach. Younger generations have successfully developed new directions in Japanese architecture that are in harmony with nature and connected to traditional building. Rather than planning on the drawing board, the architects presented in this collection stand out for their endless search for forms, truly reacting on their environment.

Presenting the latest in Japanese building, this book reveals how this unique creativity is a fruit of Japan’s very particular situation that includes high population density, a modern, efficient economy, a long history, and the continual risk of disasters in the form of earthquakes. Accepting ambiguity, as seen in the evanescent reflections of Sejima’s Kanazawa Museum, or constant change and the threat of catastrophe is a key to understanding what makes Japanese architecture different from that of Europe or America.

This XL-sized book highlights 39 architects and 55 exceptional projects by Japanese masters—from Tadao Ando’s Shanghai Poly Theater, Shigeru Ban’s concert hall La Seine Musical, SANAA’S Grace Farms, Fumihiko Maki’s 4 World Trade Center, to Takashi Suo’s much smaller sustainable dental clinic. Each project is introduced with photos, original floor plans and technical drawings, as well as insightful descriptions and brief biographies. An elaborate essay traces the country’s building scene from the Metabolists to today and shows how the interaction of past, present, and future has earned contemporary Japanese architecture worldwide recognition.

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect, who for many years built almost nothing, despite winning critical acclaim. Some even said her audacious, futuristic designs were unbuildable.

During the latter years of her life, Hadid’s daring visions became a reality, bringing a unique new architectural language to cities and structures as varied as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, hailed by The New York Times as “the most important new building in America since the Cold War”; the MAXXI Museum in Rome; the Guangzhou Opera House in China; and the London 2012 Olympics Aquatics Centre.

At the time of her unexpected death in 2016, Hadid was firmly established among the elite of world architecture, recognized as the first woman to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, but above all as a giver of new forms, the first great architect of the noughties.

From her early sharply angled buildings to later more fluid architecture that made floors, ceilings, walls, and furniture part of an overall design, this essential introduction presents key examples of Hadid’s pioneering practice. She was an artist, as much as an architect, who fought to break the old rules and crafted her own 21st-century universe.

Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was a flamboyant character whose presence in the cultural hotbed of early 1900s Vienna galvanized the country’s architectural landscape. An early, impassioned advocate of modernism, he all-out rejected the grand Secessionist aesthetic prevalent at the time, as well as any hallmarks of the European fin de siècle. Instead, in lectures and essays, such as the milestone Ornament and Crime of 1908, Loos articulated his “passion for smooth and precious surfaces.” He advocated that architectural ornamentation was, by its nature, ephemeral—locked into current trends and styles, and therefore quickly dated. Loos, himself a Classicist at heart, argued instead for simple, timeless designs with time-honored aesthetic and structural qualities. In this essential introduction, we explore Loos’s writings, projects, and legacy, from his key concept of “spatial plan” architecture to his rejection of decorative fripperies in favor of opulent, fine-quality materials and crisp lines. Featured projects include Vienna’s Café Museum (1899), the fashion store Knize (1913), and the controversial Loos House (1912), which Emperor Franz Joseph I would refuse to travel past, bristling with rage at its insolently minimalist aesthetic.

Small Houses is a tribute to the endless artistic inventiveness of architects and ingenuity of perception of the familiar and known concepts. It is also a conscious pivot towards sustainability and reduction of impact on the environment as well as a daring attitude of change in lifestyle. As humanity faces inevitable pressures such as climate change, an increase in population, and strain on resources, these solutions are helping shape what the world may look like in the future.
Whether in the dense urban areas of Tokyo, the wilderness of Australia, the woods of Canada, or a rooftop in Ecuador, this is the world of Small Houses. The one common point they share, is that they all have an area of no more than 100 square meters. Spanning 25 countries such as Brazil, Hungary, South Korea, Netherlands, USA, Japan, and Australia, described here there are houses designed by 57 architects, including Takeshi Hosaka’s Love2 House, Aranza de Ariño’s Casa Tiny, and the work of Jakub Szczęsny, Charles Pictet, Lada Hršak, BIG, and Fran Silvestre. This is a journey not only through recent evolutions in architectural design and creativity, but it is also a step toward a more sustainable world.

While some architects have a signature style, Renzo Piano seeks to apply coherent ideas to extraordinarily different projects. His buildings impress as much for their individual impact as for their diversity of scale, material, and form.

Piano rose to international prominence with his codesign of the Pompidou Center in Paris, described by The New York Times as a building that “turned the architecture world upside down.” Since then, he has continued to craft many high-profile cultural spaces, including the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Morgan Library Renovation and Expansion in New York; and, most recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art, an asymmetric nine-story structure in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with both indoor and outdoor galleries. In New York and London, the Renzo touch has also transformed the skyline with the towers of the New York Times Building and the Shard, the tallest building in the European Union.

This essential introduction travels from Osaka, Japan, to Bern, Switzerland, and through many cities, structures, and islands in between, to explore the staggering scope of the Renzo Piano repertoire. From the “inside-out” Pompidou to the airy shells of the Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, this is a thrilling journey through the beauty of architecture, where, in Piano’s own words, “each time, it is like life starting all over again.”

Concrete? That characterless stuff of parking lots or Communist tower blocks, right? Well, yes. And no. Concrete is actually a name applied to a remarkably wide range of building substances, and, when properly handled, is one of the noble materials of contemporary architecture. A kind of “liquid stone” at the outset, it is malleable, durable, and capable of prodigious feats of engineering.

This collection highlights the best work done in concrete of recent years. It includes such stars as Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, and Steven Holl, but also surprising new architects like the Russians SPEECH and artists such as James Turrell, who turned the famous concrete spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York into the setting of one of his most remarkable pieces.

In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, and sculpture to ceramics.

This best-selling reference work is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world’s largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 575 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a “total” work of art.

This is a defining account of Bauhaus' energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in Modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. The handy edition features artists Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and many more.

This book documents a revolution. With photos, plans, and descriptions, it explores new approaches in building and presents resourceful and green private homes. Rejecting “stardom” but celebrating diversity, talents such as Suzuko Yamada, Gurjit Matharoo, and the collective Frankie Pappas truly build our future.

A building by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is at once unmistakably individual and evocative of an entire era. Notable for their exceptional harmony with their environment, as well as for their use of steel and glass to revolutionize the interface of indoor and outdoor, Wright’s designs helped announce the age of modernity, as much as they secured his place in the annals of architectural genius.

This meticulous compilation from TASCHEN’s previous monograph assembles the most important works from Wright’s extensive, paradigm-shifting oeuvre into one authoritative overview of America’s most famous architect. Based on unlimited access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s archives at Taliesin West in Arizona, the collection spans the length and breadth of Wright’s projects, both realized and unrealized, from his early prairie houses, the Usonian concept homes, and the extraordinary Fallingwater to the Tokyo years, his designs for administrative buildings and places of worship, and later high-profile projects like the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as his fantastic visions for a better tomorrow with “The Living City.”

Most art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the Salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions.

After this first assault on the artistic establishment, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, abstract art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and conceptual practice.

This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards and broke down barriers. Introductory essays outline the most significant and influential movements alongside explanatory texts for each major work and its artist.

The art of ancient Egypt that has been handed down to us bears no names of its creators, and yet we value the creations of these unknown masters no less than the works of later centuries, such as statues by Michelangelo or the paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. This book introduces some of the most important masterpieces, ranging from the Old Kingdom during the Third millennium BC to the Roman Period.

The works encompass sculptures, reliefs, sarcophagi, murals, masks, and decorative items, most of them now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but some occupying places of honor as part of the World Cultural Heritage in museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Featured works include: Seated statue of King Djoser Wood relief of Hesire on a dining table Statue of a scribe made of various materials Funerary relief of Aschait Sphinx of Sesostris III Robed statue of Cherihotep Reliefs from the Temple at Carnac Sarcophagus of Queen Hatshepsut Murals from Thebes Seated figure of the goddess Sachmet Statue of Queen Teje Head of Akhenaten (Amenophis IV) Queen Nefertiti Golden mask of Tutankhamun Ramses II from Abu Simbel Horus falcon made of granite Stone relief from the temple ambulatory at Edfu

Santiago Calatrava is a world-renowned architect, structural engineer, sculptor, and artist. From the Athens 2004 Olympic Sports Complex to the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in Manhattan, he exhibits a remarkable aesthetic and engineering prowess with a simultaneous sensitivity for both the appearance and the anatomy of a structure.

With influences ranging from NASA space design to da Vinci’s nature studies, Calatrava’s creations are at once aerodynamic and organic in their associations. Natural forms and human movements inform a number of his projects, with a particular interest in the meeting point of equilibrium and dynamism.

This updated monograph gathers detailed entries, photography, and the original watercolor sketches that set Calatrava aside as a unique creative master. It includes all of Calatrava’s original input, as well as new projects such as the Mediopadana Station in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, and recent works like the UAE Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai.

Art Nouveau was deliberately nouveau. With a spirit of willful reform, this “New Art” style between the 1880s and the First World War inflected architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts, and illustration with a radical rejection of imitative historicism and a new undulating aesthetic of flowing lines and organic forms, ripe with linear freedom and a liberation from artistic tradition and expectation. Within this repertoire of sensual contours and natural motifs, Art Nouveau also followed the example of the English Arts and Crafts movement to emphasize a return to handcraftsmanship and the synthesis of artistic media and practices into a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. In this, as in its turn to nature, Art Nouveau is often seen as an aesthetic response to the Industrial Revolution, a recoil from the mass-produced and mechanic, and an elevation of the human hand and wonders of the great outdoors. This fresh TASCHEN edition considers Art Nouveau as a broad historical phenomenon with distinct local features. We consider the style’s wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavor in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity. The result is a vivid portrait of the age and a movement that is as much entrenched in our imagination of the fin de siècle as it is in the trajectory of modernism.

Until his death at age 104, Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) was something of an unstoppable architectural force. Over seven decades of work, he designed approximately 600 buildings, transforming skylines from Bab-Ezzouar, Algeria, to his homeland masterpiece Brasília.

Niemeyer’s work took the reduced forms of modernism and infused them with free-flowing grace. In place of pared-down starkness, his structures rippled with sinuous and seductive lines. In buildings such as the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, Edifício Copan, or the Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasília, he brought curvaceousness to the concrete jungle. In the futuristic federal capital of Brasília, he designed almost all public buildings, and thus became integral to the global image of Brazil.

With rich illustrations documenting highlights from his prolific career, this book introduces Niemeyer’s unique vision and its transformative influence on buildings of business, faith, culture, and the public imagination of Brazil.

Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements and vision of particular personalities becomes priority. The delicate task is to translate all the emotive associations and practical requirements of “home” into a workable, constructed reality. This publication rounds up 100 of the world’s most interesting and pioneering homes designed in the past two decades, featuring a host of talents both new and established, including John Pawson, Richard Meier, Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza, and Peter Zumthor. Accommodating daily routines of eating, sleeping, and shelter, as well as offering the space for personal experience and relationships, this is architecture at its most elementary and its most intimate.

Art Nouveau was deliberately nouveau. With a spirit of willful reform, this “New Art” style between the 1880s and the First World War inflected architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts, and illustration with a radical rejection of imitative historicism and a new undulating aesthetic of flowing lines and organic forms, ripe with linear freedom and a liberation from artistic tradition and expectation. Within this repertoire of sensual contours and natural motifs, Art Nouveau also followed the example of the English Arts and Crafts movement to emphasize a return to handcraftsmanship and the synthesis of artistic media and practices into a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. In this, as in its turn to nature, Art Nouveau is often seen as an aesthetic response to the Industrial Revolution, a recoil from the mass-produced and mechanic, and an elevation of the human hand and wonders of the great outdoors. This fresh TASCHEN edition considers Art Nouveau as a broad historical phenomenon with distinct local features. We consider the style’s wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavor in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity. The result is a vivid portrait of the age and a movement that is as much entrenched in our imagination of the fin de siècle as it is in the trajectory of modernism.

Not so very long ago, some might have considered wood a material of the past, long since replaced by more modern components such as concrete and steel. The truth is radically different. Bolstered by new manufacturing techniques and ecological benefits, wood has seen a fabulous resurgence in contemporary construction.

This Bibliotheca Universalis edition explores how architects around the world have created and invented with this elementary material. Featuring follies, very large buildings, and ambitious urban renewal schemes, it celebrates the diverse deployment of wood by architects around the world. We see how wood can at once transform urban spaces, as in the Metropol Parasol in Seville by Jürgen Mayer H., and allow for sensitive interventions in natural environments, such as at the Termas Geométricas Hot Springs Complex in Pucón, Chile, by Germán del Sol.

True to all TASCHEN architecture titles, the book pays tribute to many emerging international talents as well as to such renowned figures as Tadao Ando and Renzo Piano. It celebrates each architect’s vision and innovation, as well as investigating the techniques, trends, and principles that have informed their work with wood. It examines the computer-guided milling that has allowed for novel new forms, the responsible harvesting that allows wood to align with our environmental concerns, and, above all, wood’s enduring appeal to our senses and psyche, comforting hectic modern lives with a sense of Arcadian simplicity.

Zaha Hadid (1950 - 2016) was a revolutionary architect. For years, she was widely acclaimed and won numerous prizes despite building practically nothing. Some even said her work was simply impossible to build. Yet, during the latter years of her life, Hadid’s daring visions became a reality, bringing a new and unique architectural language to cities and structures such as the Port House in Antwerp, the Al Janoub Stadium near Doha, Qatar, and the spectacular new airport terminal in Beijing.

By her untimely death in 2016, Hadid was firmly established among architecture’s finest elite, working on projects in Europe, China, the Middle East, and the United States. She was the first female architect to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the prestigious RIBA Royal Gold Medal, with her long-time Partner Patrik Schumacher now the leader of Zaha Hadid Architects and in charge of many new projects.

Based on the massive TASCHEN monograph, this book is now available in an accessible edition covering Hadid’s complete works, including ongoing projects. With abundant photographs, in-depth sketches, and Hadid’s own drawings, the volume traces the evolution of her career, spanning not only her most pioneering buildings but also the furniture and interior designs that were integrated into her unique, and distinctly 21st-century, universe.

“A celebration of all that is brave and audacious in her work.”
— Australian Financial Review

Scottish architect, designer, and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) was one of the earliest pioneers of modern architecture and design. While he did not receive much recognition in his hometown of Glasgow during his lifetime, his bold new blend of simplicity and poetic detail inspired modernists across Europe. Mackintosh’s avant-garde approach embraced a variety of media as well as fresh stylistic devices. His multi-faceted oeuvre incorporated architecture, furniture, graphic design, landscapes, and flower studies. He embraced strong lines, elegant proportions, and natural motifs, combining an adventurous dose of japonisme with a modernist sensibility for function. He preferred bold black typography, restrained shapes, and tall, generous windows suffusing rooms with light. Much of his work was collaborative practice with his wife, fellow artist Margaret Macdonald. The couple made up half of the loose Glasgow collective known as “The Four”; the other two were Margaret’s sister, Frances, and her husband, Herbert MacNair. On the continent, the “Glasgow Style” was met with delight. In Italy, Germany, and, in particular, Austria, artists of the Viennese Secession and Art Nouveau drew much from its rectilinear yet lyrical forms. In this introductory book, we take in Mackintosh’s practice across art, architecture, and design to explore his particular combination of the statuesque and sensual and its vital influence on modernist expression across Europe. Featured projects include his complete scheme for the Willow Tea Rooms and the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, widely considered Mackintosh’s masterwork.

The photography of Julius Shulman (1910–2009) transported a West Coast dream around the world. His images of midcentury Southern Californian architecture captured not only the distinctive structural, functional, and design elements of a building but also the context of its surroundings and inhabitants in a holistic, evocative sense of lifestyle. Over time, Shulman’s talents would take him around the world, steadily crafting one of the most compelling chronologies of modern architecture.

Offering an immense cultural cache for an even lower price, this fresh edition of TASCHEN’s Modernism Rediscovered features over 400 architectural treasures from the Shulman archives. Each project and photograph was personally selected from over 260,000 photographs by publisher Benedikt Taschen, who enjoyed a close relationship with Shulman and his work since first publishing Julius Shulman: Architecture and Its Photography (1998). Documenting the reach of modernist aesthetics, the projects span not only the West Coast but also the rest of the United States, as well as Mexico, Israel, and Hong Kong, all captured with Shulman’s characteristic understanding of space and situation, as well as his brilliant and intuitive sense of composition.

The pictures are contextualized with an introduction by photography critic Owen Edwards, an extensive biography by University of Southern California historian Philip J. Ethington, captions on decorative elements by Los Angeles Modern Auctions founder Peter Loughrey, and biographies of key architects. In addition, the book includes personal reflections from Shulman himself, with an oral history and portrait of the period crafted via months of interviews with arts writer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp.

Though it lies just across the Mediterranean from Europe, barely a stone’s throw from Spain’s southernmost tip, Morocco couldn’t possibly be farther away.

With its mountainous and desert landscapes, labyrinthine souks, delectable cuisine, exquisite rugs and textiles, vibrant mosaics, fragrant odors, mesmerizing music, and welcoming people, Morocco is a most alluring and tantalizingly exotic destination. Digging a little deeper into the myth of Morocco, Barbara and René Stoeltie bring us this eclectic selection of homes to demonstrate all that is most wonderful about the Moroccan style: from tiled, turquoise swimming pools and lavish gardens to carved wooden furniture and jade-colored marble fountains.

With more than 500 pages featuring stunning, inspiring photographs, flipping through these fairy tale-like visions of exotic havens (ideally while sipping a steaming cup of sweet, fragrant mint tea) will instantly whisk you away.

With an inspirational richness and diversity of styles, these homes, residences, hideaways, and studios will astound and astonish, no matter the taste; be it rustic country cottage, New York–style loft, or bohemian bungalow. This survey of contemporary interior design carefully curates homes from all over the world—from Auckland, New Zealand, to Avignon, France.

Mapped out through hundreds of images by renowned interior photographers, these gorgeous houses offer inspiration and ideas for your next renovation. Many of the selected homes are owned by creatives—designers, filmmakers, and collectors—whose eye for the perfect synthesis of interior elements is impressive, to say the least. Bringing together wallpaper, furniture, textiles, and objet d’art while cautiously balancing color, texture, and form, the creators of these dynamic spaces practice an art form of their own.

Eclectic or minimal, antique or extra-modern, this variety of decor locates contemporary style in all its manifestations, showcasing the endless possibilities and home-making magic of interior design.

Across small cottages and lavish villas, beach houses and forest refuges, discover the world’s finest crop of new homes. This cutting-edge global digest features such talents as Shigeru Ban, MVRDV, and Marcio Kogan alongside up-and-coming names like Aires Mateus, Xu Fu-Min, Vo Trong Nghia, Desai Chia, and Shunri Nishizawa.

Here, there are homes in Australia and New Zealand, from China and Vietnam, in the United States and Mexico, and on to less expected places like Ecuador and Costa Rica. The result is a sweeping survey of the contemporary house and a revelation that homes across the globe may have more in common than expected.

Among guava trees and abandoned forts in Western India is a sanctuary designed for and by Kamal Malik of Malik Architecture. The House of Three Streams is a sprawling spectacle with high ceilings, verandas, and pavilions, perched atop a ridge overlooking two ravines. A medley of steel, glass, wood, and stone, the house weaves along the contour of the landscape, almost as an extension of the forest.

Encina House by Aranguren & Gallegos, an elegant, sloping structure reminiscent of a gazebo, similarly inhabits its surrounding vista. Ensconced in a pine forest north of Madrid, the lower level is embedded in rock and connected to the upper by a natural stone wall.

Shinichi Ogawa’s Seaside House is an immaculate two-story minimalist marvel in Kanagawa that overlooks the Pacific. Its living area spills onto a cantilevered terrace and infinity pool, almost dissolving into the ocean as one seamless entity.

In Vietnam, Shunri Nishizawa’s House in Chau Doc exudes tropical sophistication with exposed timber beams, woven bamboo, plants, concrete panels, and inner balconies and terraces. Its corrugated iron panels act as moveable walls and shutters, ushering in views of surrounding rice fields.

These homes—along with more than 50 others—are each remarkably distinct in design. They all, however, toe the line between inside and outside, each one symbiotic with its surroundings.

The creative duo Charles Eames (1907–1978) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912–1988) transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film. The Eameses’ work defined a new, multifunctional modernity, exemplary for its integration of craft and design, as well as for the use of modern materials, notably plywood and plastics.
The Eames Lounge Chair Wood, designed with molded plywood technology, became a defining furniture piece of the 20th century, while the couple’s contribution to the Case Study Houses project not only made inventive use of industrial materials but also developed an adaptable floor plan of multipurpose spaces which would become a hallmark of postwar modern architecture.

From the couple’s earliest furniture experiments to their seminal short film Powers of Ten, this book covers all the aspects of the illustrious Eames repertoire and its revolutionary impact on middle-class American living.

The life of Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) was full of complexity and contradictions. As a young man he joined the Catalonian nationalist movement and was critical of the church; toward the end of his life he devoted himself completely to the construction of one single spectacular church, La Sagrada Familia. In his youth, he courted a glamorous social life and the demeanor of a dandy. By the time of his death in a tram accident on the streets of Barcelona his clothes were so shabby passersby assumed he was a beggar.

Gaudí’s incomparable architecture channels much of this multifaceted intricacy. From the shimmering textures and skeletal forms of Casa Batlló to the Hispano-Arabic matrix of Casa Vicens, his work merged the influences of Orientalism, natural forms, new materials, and religious faith into a unique Modernista aesthetic. Today, his unique aesthetic enjoys global popularity and acclaim. His magnum opus, the Sagrada Familia, is the most-visited monument in Spain, and seven of his works are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Through brand-new photography, plans and drawings by Gaudí himself, historical photos, as well as an appendix detailing all his works—from buildings to furniture, decor to unfinished projects—this book presents Gaudí’s universe like never before. Like a personal tour through Barcelona, we discover how the “Dante of architecture” was a builder in the truest sense of the word, crafting extraordinary constructions out of minute and mesmerizing details, and transforming fantastical visions into realities on the city streets.

Successful interiors tell stories - be they of an industrial loft, a luxury penthouse, or a grand old villa. When presented together, as in this book, they tell us much more besides, providing insights into how the world of the early 21st century chooses to live. What does a Zurich dining room look like? Or a bathroom in Niigata, Japan? How might a Miami art collector paint his bungalow's walls? And what awaits you in a St. Petersburg apartment? We went inside a hundred homes around the globe and found answers that amazed, intrigued, and enchanted us.The locations could hardly be more diverse - nor could the views. They range from the urban skyline seen from a Singapore tower block to the idyllic island landscape of rocks, pine trees, and water surrounding one family's holiday home near Stockholm. Whatever the topography, the external environment inevitably influences the ambience inside. It's with good reason, for example, that Sylvia Avontuur describes her windows overlooking Amsterdam's docklands as the most important picture in her apartment. Just as crucial to the character of an interior is the era of its architecture.From Instanbul via Paris to Barcelona, a great many of the spaces featured are in apartments dating from the late 19th century, whose occupats-cum-curators have breathed new life into old walls. Elsewhere, we find others taking similar care of Modernist houses built in the revolutionary spirit of the International Style. And then there are the contemporary homes, with all their clever technical innovations, designed to meet the specific needs of their owners -such as the riverside villa in Dresden of the house on stilts in Nagano. But whether their shells are historic or brand-new, interiors all over the world exhibit the effects of an aesthetic evolution that has been shaping our built world for over a hundred years. Includes interiors in Argentina, Brazil, China, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the UK, the USA, and many more countries.

From the end of World War II until the mid-1960s, exciting things were happening in American architecture. Emerging talents were focusing on innovative projects that integrated at once modern design and low-cost materials. The trend was most notably embodied in the famous Case Study House Program, a blueprint for modern habitation championed by the era’s leading American journal, Arts & Architecture.

The complete facsimile of the ambitious and groundbreaking Arts & Architecture was published by TASCHEN in 2008 as a limited edition. This new curation—directed and produced by Benedikt Taschen—brings together the magazine’s highlights from 1950 to 1954, with a special focus on mid-century American architecture and its luminary pioneers including Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, and Charles & Ray Eames.

A celebration of a politically, socially and culturally engaged publication, this special selection is also a testimony to one of the most unique and influential eras in the history of American architecture.

Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) made a unique modernist mark. Influenced by both the landscape and the political independence of his native Finland, he designed warm, curving, compassionate buildings, wholly set apart from the slick, mechanistic, geometric designs that characterized much contemporary European practice.

Whether a church, a villa, a sauna, or a public library, Aalto’s organic structures tended to replace plaster and steel with brick and wood, often incorporating undulating, wave-like forms, which would also appear in his chair, glassware, and lamp designs. An adherent to detail, Aalto insisted upon the humanity of his work stating: “Modern architecture does not mean using immature new materials; the main thing is to work with materials towards a more human line.”

Many of Aalto’s public buildings such as Säynätsalo Town Hall, the lecture theatre at Otaniemi Technical University, the Helsinki National Pensions Institute and the Helsinki House of Culture may be seen as psychological as well as physical landmarks in the rebuilding of Finland after the ravages of war.

Offering an unrivaled record of architecture and design, the “living diary” of domus was founded by Gio Ponti in 1928. Through the years and decades that followed, the journal charted the major themes and movements of industrial, interior, product, and structural design with an eye for creative excellence as much as editorial rigor.

This fresh reprint features domus’ coverage from the transformative years between 1928 and 1939. It is an era famed for the emergence of the International Style when the likes of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto, and Richard Neutra channeled modernist ideals into rectilinear forms, restrained surfaces, and open, luminous interiors. The domus coverage of this decisive decade spanned the details and the grand designs. From soaring steel skyscrapers to tubular furniture, its coverage is a definitive record of how light, form, and pared-down aesthetics combined in the pursuit of an honest and utilitarian form for the modern and rapidly industrializing age.

domus distilled Seven volumes spanning 1928 to 1999 Over 4,000 pages featuring influential projects by the most important designers and architects Original layouts and all covers, with captions providing navigation and context Introductory essays by renowned architects and designers Each edition comes with an appendix featuring texts translated into English, many of which were previously only available in Italian A comprehensive index in each volume listing both designers’ and manufacturers’ names

The architecture of the 20th century is distinguished by an astonishing diversity. Just as the clash of aesthetic and commercial ambitions nevertheless produced many a happy symbiosis, so the purist and the expressive, the monumental and the picturesque came face to face. From lofty “starchitects” to lesser-known names around the world, this chronological overview takes you to the heart of the ideas, trends, and transitions that defined the 1900s.

From Frank Lloyd Wright to Antoni Gaudí, Frank O. Gehry to Shigeru Ban and all the best stuff in-between, it’s all here. Organized chronologically, the 31 chapters put it all into perspective, illustrated by hundreds of large-format photos as well as a plenitude of drawings and floor plans. The biographical appendix covers all of the century’s greatest architects while celebrating today’s new talents, and the lavish illustrations include some of the best architectural photography in the modern era.

For anyone interested in the zeitgeist and building design of the 20th century, this is your be-all-end-all reference work. The collection covers not only the architects but also the groups, the movements, and the styles that defined an era of construction. A must for all lovers of architecture!

Walter Gropius (1883–1969) set out to build for the future. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, the Berlin-born architect had an inestimable influence on our aesthetic environment, championing a bold new hybrid of light, geometry, and industrial design, as dazzling today as it was a century ago. In this essential architect introduction, we survey Gropius’ evolution and influence with 20 of his most significant projects, from the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany, to the Chicago Tribune Tower and Harvard University Graduate Center, completed after Gropius’s exodus to the United States in 1937. We explore his role both as an architectural practitioner, and as a writer and educator, not only as a Bauhaus pioneer, but also, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as a leading proponent of the International Style. Along the way, we see how many of Gropius’s tenets remain benchmarks for architects, designers, and urbanists today. Whether in his emphasis on a functional beauty or his interest in housing and city planning, Gropius astounds in the agility of his thinking as much as in the luminous precision of his work.

Discover the completely unique aesthetic of Tadao Ando, the only architect ever to have won the discipline’s four most prestigious prizes: the Pritzker, Carlsberg, Praemium Imperiale, and Kyoto Prize.

Philippe Starck defines him as a “mystic in a country which is no longer mystic.” Philip Drew calls his buildings “land art” as they “struggle to emerge from the earth.” His designs have been described as haiku crafted from concrete, water, light, and space. But to Ando, true architecture is not expressed in metaphysics or beauty, but rather through space that embodies physical wisdom.

This thoroughly updated edition spans the breadth of his entire career, including such acclaimed new projects as the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and the Nakanoshima Children’s Book Forest in Osaka. Each project is profiled through photographs and architectural drawings to explore Ando’s unprecedented use of concrete, wood, water, light, space, and natural forms.
Featuring designs from award-winning private homes, churches, museums, and apartment complexes to cultural spaces throughout Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the USA, this edition brings you up close and personal with a Modernist master.

Successful interiors tell stories - be they of an industrial loft, a luxury penthouse, or a grand old villa. When presented together, as in this book, they tell us much more besides, providing insights into how the world of the early 21st century chooses to live. What does a Zurich dining room look like? Or a bathroom in Niigata, Japan? How might a Miami art collector paint his bungalow's walls? And what awaits you in a St. Petersburg apartment? We went inside a hundred homes around the globe and found answers that amazed, intrigued, and enchanted us.

The locations could hardly be more diverse - nor could the views. They range from the urban skyline seen from a Singapore tower block to the idyllic island landscape of rocks, pine trees, and water surrounding one family's holiday home near Stockholm. Whatever the topography, the external environment inevitably influences the ambience inside. It's with good reason, for example, that Sylvia Avontuur describes her windows overlooking Amsterdam's docklands as the most important picture in her apartment. Just as crucial to the character of an interior is the era of its architecture.

From Instanbul via Paris to Barcelona, a great many of the spaces featured are in apartments dating from the late 19th century, whose occupats-cum-curators have breathed new life into old walls. Elsewhere, we find others taking similar care of Modernist houses built in the revolutionary spirit of the International Style. And then there are the contemporary homes, with all their clever technical innovations, designed to meet the specific needs of their owners -such as the riverside villa in Dresden of the house on stilts in Nagano. But whether their shells are historic or brand-new, interiors all over the world exhibit the effects of an aesthetic evolution that has been shaping our built world for over a hundred years.

Includes interiors in Argentina, Brazil, China, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the UK, the USA, and many more countries.

A building by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is at once unmistakably individual, and evocative of an entire era. Notable for their exceptional understanding of an organic environment, as well as for their use of steel and glass to revolutionize the interface of indoor and outdoor, Wright’s designs helped announce the age of modernity, as much as they secured his own name in the annals of architectural genius.

This meticulous compilation from TASCHEN’s previous three-volume monograph assembles the most important works from Wright’s extensive, paradigm-shifting oeuvre into one authoritative and accessibly priced overview of America's most famous architect. Based on unlimited access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives in Taliesin, Arizona, the collection spans the length and breadth of Wright’s projects, both realized and unrealized, from his early Prairie Houses, through the Usonian concept home, epitomized by Fallingwater, the Tokyo years, his progressive “living architecture” buildings, right through to later schemes like the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and fantastic visions for a better tomorrow in the “living city.”

Author Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, who served as Wright’s apprentice during the 1950s, discusses recent research on Wright and gives his own insights on these game-changing buildings.

Not so very long ago, some might have considered wood a material of the past, long since replaced by more modern components such as concrete and steel. The truth is radically different. Bolstered by new manufacturing techniques and ecological benefits, wood has seen a fabulous resurgence in contemporary construction.

This book explores how architects around the world have created and invented with this elementary material. Featuring follies, very large buildings, and ambitious urban renewal schemes, it celebrates the diverse deployment of wood by architects around the world. We see how wood can at once transform urban spaces, as in the Metropol Parasol in Seville by Jürgen Mayer H., and allow for sensitive interventions in natural environments, such as at the Termas Geométricas Hot Springs Complex in Pucón, Chile, by Germán del Sol.

True to all TASCHEN architecture titles, the book pays tribute to many emerging international talents as well as to such renowned figures as Tadao Ando and Renzo Piano. It celebrates each architect’s vision and innovation, as well as investigating the techniques, trends, and principles that have informed their work with wood. It examines the computer-guided milling that has allowed for novel new forms, the responsible harvesting that allows wood to align with our environmental concerns, and, above all, wood’s enduring appeal to our senses and psyche, comforting hectic modern lives with a sense of Arcadian simplicity.

With more than 280 entries, this architectural A–Z, now part of our Bibliotheca Universalis series, offers an indispensable overview of the key players in the creation of modern space. From the period spanning the 19th to the 21st century, pioneering architects are featured with a portrait, concise biography, as well as a description of her or his important work.

Like a bespoke global architecture tour, you’ll travel from Manhattan skyscrapers to a Japanese concert hall, from Gaudí’s Palau Güell in Barcelona to Lina Bo Bardi’s sports and leisure center in a former factory site in São Paulo. You’ll take in Gio Ponti’s colored geometries, Zaha Hadid’s free-flowing futurism, the luminous interiors of SANAA, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s unique blend of Scottish tradition and elegant japonisme.

The book’s A to Z entries also cover groups, movements, and styles to position these leading individual architects within broader building trends across time and geography, including International Style, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and much more. Featuring modern architectural photography, this is a comprehensive source book for any architecture professional, student, or devotee.

Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti (1891–1979) is difficult to pin down. With an extraordinarily prolific output and eclectic style, his oeuvre remains one of the most diverse and groundbreaking in design history. Trained initially in architecture, Ponti soon moved into industrial and interior design, experimenting with ceramics, silverware, and glass. Ponti’s key works are spread throughout this extensive overview, including structures of all kinds, from small residential dwellings to high-rise buildings, schools, and office blocks.

The home was one of Ponti’s recurring interests and central areas of innovation. His talent for total design—a careful consideration of both interior and exterior space—is charted in the glossy reproductions, floor plans, and drawings featured in this edition. Ponti’s colorful, carefree, and elegant spaces blended an expressive neoclassicism with emerging modernist sensibility.

The founder and nearly lifelong editor of domus magazine never ceased to develop and reinvent his style. From the Denver Art Museum to his collection of churches, from bespoke homeware to the symbol of modern Milan, the Pirelli Tower, this monograph provides an introduction to Ponti’s exuberant creativity and illustrious career.

The idea of climbing a tree for shelter, or just to see the earth from another perspective, is as old as humanity. In this neat TASCHEN edition, take a tour of some of our finest arboreal adventures with the most beautiful, inventive, and enchanting tree houses around the world.

From romantic to contemporary, from famed architects to little-known craftsmen, you’ll scale the heights to visit all manner of treetop structures, from a teahouse, restaurant, hotel, and children’s playhouse to simple perches from which to contemplate life, enjoy the view, and discover that tree houses take as many forms as the imagination can offer. With an abundance of gorgeous photographs and illustrations, this is an ode to alternative living, where playful imagination meets eco-sensitive finesse.

It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich’s rising star in theater and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and thought.

This book immerses readers in the freewheeling spirit of Berlin’s Weimar age. Through exemplary works in painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design, photography, and film, we uncover the innovations, ideas, and precious dreams that characterized this unique cultural window. We take in the jazz bars and dance halls; the crowded kinos and flapper fashion; the advances in technology and transport; the radio towers and rumbling trams and trains; the soaring buildings; the cinematic masterworks; and the newly independent women who smoked cigarettes, wore their hair short, and earned their own money.

Featured works in this vivid cultural portrait include Hannah Höch's The Journalists; Lotte Jacobi’s Hands on Typewriter; Otto Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden; Peter Behrens's project of theAlexanderplatz; and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, starring Dietrich as cabaret performer Lola Lola. Along the way, we explore both the utopian yearnings and the more ominous economic and political realities which fueled the era's escapist, idealistic, or reactionary masterworks. Behind the bright lights and glitter dresses, we see the inflation, factory labor, and fragile political consensus that lurked beneath this golden era and would eventually spell its savage end with the rise of National Socialism.

With an inspirational richness and diversity of styles, these homes, residences, hideaways, and studios will astound and astonish, no matter the taste; be it rustic country cottage, New York–style loft, or bohemian bungalow. This survey of contemporary interior design carefully curates homes from all over the world—from Auckland, New Zealand, to Avignon, France.

Mapped out through hundreds of images by renowned interior photographers, these gorgeous houses offer inspiration and ideas for your next renovation. Many of the selected homes are owned by creatives—designers, filmmakers, and collectors—whose eye for the perfect synthesis of interior elements is impressive, to say the least. Bringing together wallpaper, furniture, textiles, and objet d’art while cautiously balancing color, texture, and form, the creators of these dynamic spaces practice an art form of their own.

Eclectic or minimal, antique or extra-modern, this variety of decor locates contemporary style in all its manifestations, showcasing the endless possibilities and home-making magic of interior design.

Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti (1891–1979) is difficult to pin down. With an extraordinarily prolific output and eclectic style, his oeuvre remains one of the most diverse and groundbreaking in design history. Trained initially in architecture, Ponti soon moved into industrial and interior design, experimenting with ceramics, silverware, and glass. Ponti’s key works are spread throughout this extensive overview, including structures of all kinds, from small residential dwellings to high-rise buildings, schools, and office blocks.

The home was one of Ponti’s recurring interests and central areas of innovation. His talent for total design—a careful consideration of both interior and exterior space—is charted in the glossy reproductions, floor plans, and drawings featured in this edition. Ponti’s colorful, carefree, and elegant spaces blended an expressive neoclassicism with emerging modernist sensibility.

The founder and nearly lifelong editor of domus magazine never ceased to develop and reinvent his style. From the Denver Art Museum to his collection of churches, from bespoke homeware to the symbol of modern Milan, the Pirelli Tower, this monograph provides an introduction to Ponti’s exuberant creativity and illustrious career.

So rich and unique is traditional Japanese architecture that it’s nearly impossible to improve upon. Yet contemporary Japanese designers and architects keep finding fresh approaches to refurbish and take inspiration from the ways of old. Whether it’s a pristinely preserved traditional house or a sleek modern apartment, the best Japanese homes share a love of cleverly designed spaces and warm materials like wood, brick, and bamboo.

From a thatched roof farmhouse occupied by a Zen priest to Tadao Ando’s experimental 4x4 House, from Shigeru Ban’s conceptual Shutter House to a beautiful domestic homage to bamboo, this elegant compendium traverses the multifaceted landscape of Japanese living today.

Enriched by 170 brand new, unpublished photographs, this edition takes you on breathtaking journey through the Land of the Rising Sun—complete with a list of addresses, should you wish to undertake this journey to Japan’s most fascinating inns and homes yourself. An insightful glossary of key terms, such as tatami, shoji, and noren, will also help you come to grips with all elements of Japan’s unique aesthetic of Eastern minimalism.

While some architects have a signature style, Renzo Piano seeks to apply coherent ideas to extraordinarily different projects. His buildings impress as much for their individual impact as for their diversity of scale, material, and form.

Piano rose to international prominence with his codesign of the Pompidou Center in Paris, described by The New York Times as a building that “turned the architecture world upside down.” Since then, he has continued to craft many high-profile cultural spaces, including the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Morgan Library Renovation and Expansion in New York; and, most recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art, an asymmetric nine-story structure in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with both indoor and outdoor galleries. In New York and London, the Renzo touch has also transformed the skyline with the towers of the New York Times Building and the Shard, the tallest building in the European Union.

This essential introduction travels from Osaka, Japan, to Bern, Switzerland, and through many cities, structures, and islands in between, to explore the staggering scope of the Renzo Piano repertoire. From the “inside-out” Pompidou to the airy shells of the Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, this is a thrilling journey through the beauty of architecture, where, in Piano’s own words, “each time, it is like life starting all over again.”

If you’ve ever wondered what goes through architects’ minds when they design buildings, you’ll be happy to know that there’s no shortage of brilliant reading material to satisfy your curiosity. Wading through the archives at your local library may prove fruitful to your endeavor, but it won’t give you the instant gratification that Architectural Theory will.This book brings together all of the most important and influential essays about architecture written since the Renaissance, copiously illustrated and neatly organized chronologically by country. From Alberti and Palladio to Le Corbusier and Koolhaas, the best treatises by architecture’s greatest masters are gathered here, each accompanied by an essay discussing its historical context and significance. This is the all-in-one, must-have book for anyone interested in what architects have to say about their craft.The comprehensive overview that will help transform even the most uninformed novices into well-informed connoisseurs!