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A House in the Sun describes a number of experiments in solar house heating in the 1940s and 1950s. It shows how resource limitations were seen as an opportunity for design to attain new relevance for social and cultural transformations.
"This book, the product of six years of research, brings new light to Ain's works and ideas, showing that many of his critical contributions remain as relevant and potent as ever. The book also reveals that Ain's architectural priorities were tied to left-wing politics: many of his clients were Communist Party members, and Ain attended meetings himself. In short, there is an extensive unreported history of a Communist subculture in architecture in Los Angeles, which was organized around Ain. The 'Red Scare' of the 1950s effectively ended this underground movement, and Ain pursued a second career in academia."--BOOK JACKET.
“It is now generally accepted that the world’s climate has entered into a phase of warming with potentially disastrous consequences for the planet, but there is no agreement about how to deal with it...” The ‘global energy trap’ refers to the fact that our civilisation has been built on energy derived from fossil fuels – and when these are exhausted, there must be a collapse of some kind. However, long before we have run them down to exhaustion we shall have pushed atmospheric pollution and global warming beyond a tipping point. In this situation there is no rational choice except to develop clean, renewable energy sources with all deliberate haste. How this can be done is The Gl...
This volume presents the discipline’s best thinking on sustainability in written, drawn, and built form, drawing on over fifteen years of peer-reviewed essays and national design awards published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Providing a primer on sustainability, useful to teachers and students alike, the selected essays address a broad range of issues. Combined with design projects that highlight issues holistically, they promote an understanding of the principles of sustainability and further the integration of sustainable methods into architectural projects. Using essays that alternately revise and clarify twentieth century architectural thinking, The Green Braid places sustainability at the centre of excellent architectural design. No other volume addresses sustainability within the context of architectural history, theory, pedagogy and design, making this book an ideal source for architects in framing their practices, and therefore their architectural production, in a sustainable manner.
Architecture and sociology have been fickle friends over the past half century: in the 1960s, architects relied on sociological data for design solutions and sociologists were courted by the most prestigious design schools to lecture and teach. Twenty years later, at the height of postmodernism, it was passe to be concerned with the sociological aspects of architecture. Currently, the rising importance of sustainability in building, not to mention an economical crisis brought on in part by a real-estate bubble, have forced architects to consider themselves in a less autonomous way, perhaps bringing the profession full circle back to a close relationship with sociology. Through all these rises and dips, Robert Gutman was a strong and steady voice for both architecture and sociology. Gutman, a sociologist by training, infiltrated architecture's ranks in the mid-1960s and never looked back. A teacher for over four decades at Princeton's School of Architecture, Gutman wrote about architecture and taught generations of future architects, all while maintaining an "outsider" status that allowed him to see the architectural profession in an insightful, unique way.
A riveting and superbly illustrated account of the enigmatic House Beautiful editor’s profound influence on mid-century American taste From 1941 to 1964, House Beautiful magazine’s crusading editor-in-chief Elizabeth Gordon introduced and promoted her vision of “good design” and “better living” to an extensive middle-class American readership. Her innovative magazine-sponsored initiatives, including House Beautiful’s Pace Setter House Program and the Climate Control Project, popularized a “livable” and decidedly American version of postwar modern architecture. Gordon’s devotion to what she called the American Style attracted the attention of Frank Lloyd Wright, who became...
Building Home is an innovative biography that weaves together three engrossing stories. It is one part corporate and industrial history, using the evolution of mortgage finance as a way to understand larger dynamics in the nation‘s political economy. It is another part urban history, since the extraordinary success of the savings and loan business in Los Angeles reflects much of the cultural and economic history of Southern California. Finally, it is a personal story, a biography of one of the nation‘s most successful entrepreneurs of the managed economy —Howard Fieldstad Ahmanson. Eric John Abrahamson deftly connects these three strands as he chronicles Ahmanson’s rise against the b...
This book presents a series of pedagogical experiments translating climate science, environmental humanities, material research, ecological practices into the architectural curriculum. Balancing the science and humanities, it exposes recent pedagogical experiments from renown educators, while also interrogating a designer’s agency between science and speculation in the face of climate uncertainty. The teaching experiments are presented across four sections: Abstraction, Organization, Building, and Narrative, exposing core parts of an architect’s education and how educators can simultaneously provide fundamental skills and constructive literacy while instigating environmental sensibilitie...
The first comprehensive architectural and cultural history of condominium and cooperative housing in twentieth-century America. Today, one in five homeowners in American cities and suburbs lives in a multifamily home rather than a single-family house. As the American dream evolves, precipitated by rising real estate prices and a renewed interest in urban living, many predict that condos will become the predominant form of housing in the twenty-first century. In this unprecedented study, Matthew Gordon Lasner explores the history of co-owned multifamily housing in the United States, from New York City’s first co-op, in 1881, to contemporary condominium and townhouse complexes coast to coast. Lasner explains the complicated social, economic, and political factors that have increased demand for this way of living, situating the trend within the larger housing market and broad shifts in residential architecture and family life. He contrasts the prevalence and popularity of condos, townhouses, and other privately governed communities with their ambiguous economic, legal, and social standing, as well as their striking absence from urban and architectural history.
The evolution of contemporary environmental architecture has outstripped simple labels. A deeper pattern is emerging where the world's most innovative buildings are a response to place. They resolve the complex intertwining of the site, people and environment, providing a provocative observation of the future of architecture. By starting with the site these projects maximize the natural and cultural resources available and are humancentric. The book explores firsthand how Spain Wraps commercial buildings, Japan Condenses micro homes, and Australia Unfolds aggressive design solutions in a climate of extremes. Germany, Cascadia, Denmark, and Mexico are also featured. 30 selected projects provi...