Every day, all over the world, animals and insects set about the purposeful tasks of designing their homes, catching their prey, and attracting their mates. In the process they create gorgeous nests, shelters, and habitats. Capturing 120 of these wonders in all their beauty and complexity, Animal Architecture presents a visually arresting tribute to the intersection of nature, science, function, and design. Ingo Arndt's stunning studio photographs and vibrant in-situ shots of nests, forests, and wetlands provide close-up details of these designs, as well as the animals who created them. These ... View More...
Take an excursion through these fun-filled pages to the most fantastic recreational architecture and outdoor-space design of our age.
Designing recreation facilities stretches the creative imagination of architects and site planners to heights unparalleled in other kinds of construction. The examples of theme and amusement park design highlighted in this volume include an aquatic center in Sydney, a biblical zoo in Jerusalem, and a night safari in Singapore. View More...
Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--and why was it built at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic? In this eminently fascinating work, author Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres and brilliantly explores how its construction--and the creation of other Gothic cathedrals--represented a profound and dramatic shift in the way medi... View More...
This publication includes a discussion of the firm's unique architectural 'process' that results in extraordinary buildings. Projects examined include community, education, government, transit, with an emphasis on the 'green' aspects of building design. View More...
The true story of the intimate relationship that gave birth to the Farnsworth House, a masterpiece of twentieth-century architecture--and disintegrated into a bitter feud over love, money, gender, and the very nature of art. "An amazing story, brilliantly told."--Sebastian Smee, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic and author of The Art of Rivalry In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time--unmarried, she was a distinguished medical... View More...
Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series (Part I and Part II) Oscar Wilde compared it to a white goddess, Evelyn Waugh to Stilton cheese. In observers from Lord Byron to Sigmund Freud to Virginia Woolf it met with astonishment, rapture, poetry, even tears--and, always, recognition. Twenty-five hundred years after it first rose above Athens, the Parthenon remains one of the wonders of the world, its beginnings and strange turns of fortune over millennia a perpetual source of curiosity, controversy, and intrigue. At once an entrancing cultural history... View More...
Mary Colter may well be the best-known unknown architect in the world: her buildings at the Grand Canyon National Park-which include Lookout Tower, Hopi House, Bright Angel Lodge, and many others-are admired by almost five million visitors a year. This extraordinary book about an extraordinary woman weaves together three stories-the remarkable career of a woman in a man's profession during the late 19th century; the creation of a building and interior style drawn from regional history and landscape; and the exploitation, largely at the hands of the railroads, of the American Southwest for leis... View More...
The Arts & Crafts bungalow has been reborn, in as rich and full an array of iterations as it was in its heyday -- from tight clusters of similar inexpensive housing opportunities to the grand, and arguably borderline, bungalow scale of the "ultimate bungalows" of the 1910s. The New Bungalow is a celebration of contemporary interpretations of this classic house style -- an art form that symbolizes the best of the good life. It offers an alternative solution to the tract development filled with homes appliqued with various random trim details and contrived architectural components. It is a guide... View More...
Yes is More is the easily accessible but unremittingly radical manifesto of Copenhagen-based architectural practice Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG.Unlike a typical architectural monograph, this book uses the comic book format to express its groundbreaking agenda for contemporary architecture. It is also the first comprehensive documentation of BIG's trailblazing practice--where method, process, instruments, and concepts are constantly questioned and redefined. Or, as the group itself says: "Historically, architecture has been dominated by two opposing extremes: an avant-garde full of crazy ideas,... View More...
Powell/Kleinschmidt, based in Chicago and acclaimed as one of the 20 best interior design firms of the last 25 years, have designed interiors for corporate, legal, educational, retail, hospitality and residential environments. Underlying their work is always the belief that good design is the result of thoughtful planning, careful attention to detail, cost effective budgeting and impeccable execution. This book documents a selection of their most important interior designs, incorporating environments on a variety of scales for a variety of clients. These have ranged from 500,000 square feet of... View More...
A visual journey through the history of landscape design For thousands of years, people have altered the meaning of space by reshaping nature. As an art form, these architectural landscape creations are stamped with societal imprints unique to their environment and place in time. Illustrated History of Landscape Design takes an optical sweep of the iconic landscapes constructed throughout the ages. Organized by century and geographic region, this highly visual reference uses hundreds of masterful pen-and-ink drawings to show how historical context and cultural connections can illuminate today'... View More...
Inspired by Louis Sullivan and given guidance and prominence by Frank Lloyd Wright, the members of the movement sought to achieve a fresh architectural expression. Their designs were characterized by precise, angular forms and highly sophisticated interior arrangements-an approach that proved immensely significant in residential architecture. H. Allen Brooks discusses the entire phenomenon of the Prairie School-not just the masters but also the work of their contemporaries. Drawing on unpublished material and original documentation as well as on interviews, he assesses each architect's contrib... View More...
