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As the first comprehensive encyclopedic survey of Western architectural theory from Vitruvius to the present, this book is an essential resource for architects, students, teachers, historians, and theorists. Using only original sources, Kruft has undertaken the monumental task of researching, organizing, and analyzing the significant statements put forth by architectural theorists over the last two thousand years. The result is a text that is authoritative and complete, easy to read without being reductive.
The official guide to The Mark Twain House & Museum, this volume tells the dramatic story of the famous author and his family and their Victorian mansion. The history of the house and its residents is illustrated with architectural drawings and period photos as well as dozens of new color images of the building's magnificent exterior and interior.
This award-winning, lavishly illustrated history displays the wide range of North Carolina’s architectural heritage, from colonial times to the beginning of World War II. North Carolina Architecture addresses the state’s grand public and private buildings that have become familiar landmarks, but it also focuses on the quieter beauty of more common structures: farmhouses, barns, urban dwellings, log houses, mills, factories, and churches. These buildings, like the people who created them and who have used them, are central to the character of North Carolina. Now in a convenient new format, this portable edition of North Carolina Architecture retains all of the text of the original edition as well as hundreds of halftones by master photographer Tim Buchman. Catherine Bishir’s narrative analyzes construction and design techniques and locates the structures in their cultural, political, and historical contexts. This extraordinary history of North Carolina’s built world presents a unique and valuable portrait of the state.
The Paris we know today, with its grand boulevards, its bridges and parks, its monumental beauty, was essentially built in only seventeen years, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this brief period, whole neighborhoods of medieval and revolutionary Paris -- over-crowded, dangerous, and filthy -- were razed, and from the rubble a modern city of light and air emerged. This triumphant rebuilding was chiefly the work of one man, Baron Georges Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine. It was Haussmann's task to assert, in stone, the power and permanence of Paris, to show the world that it was the seat of an empire of mythic proportions. To this end, he imposed grand visual perspect...
Why does one talented individual win lasting recognition in a particular field, while another equally talented person does not? While there are many possible reasons, one obvious answer is that something more than talent is requisite to produce fame. The "something more" in the field of architecture, asserts Roxanne Williamson, is the association with a "famous" architect at the moment he or she first receives major publicity or designs the building for which he or she will eventually be celebrated. In this study of more than six hundred American architects who have achieved a place in architectural histories, Williamson finds that only a small minority do not fit the "right person–right t...
This collection reconsiders the life and work of Emile Jean-Horace Vernet (1789-1863), presenting him as a crucial figure for understanding the visual culture of modernity. The book includes work by senior and emerging scholars, showing that Vernet was a multifaceted artist who moved with ease across the thresholds of genre and media to cultivate an image of himself as the embodiment of modern France. In tune with his times, skilled at using modern technologies of visual reproduction to advance his reputation, Vernet appealed to patrons from across the political spectrum and made works that nineteenth-century audiences adored. Even Baudelaire, who reviled Vernet and his art and whose judgment has played a significant role in consigning Vernet to art-historical obscurity, acknowledged that the artist was the most complete representative of his age. For those with an interest in the intersection of art and modern media, politics, imperialism, and fashion, the essays in this volume offer a rich reward.
City Design describes the history and current practice of the four most widely accepted approaches to city design: the Modernist city of towers and highways that, beginning in the 1920s, has come to dominate urban development worldwide but is criticized as mechanical and soul-less; the Traditional organization of cities as streets and public places, scorned by the modernists, but being revived today for its human scale; Green city design, whose history can be traced back thousands of years in Asia, but is becoming increasingly important everywhere as sustainability and the preservation of the planet are recognized as basic issues, and finally Systems city design, which includes infrastructur...
In this study of space and power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s, Rabinow uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how social environment was perceived and described. Ranging from epidemiology to the layout of colonial cities, he shows how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, health and welfare administration, and social legislation.