You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Beginning from the rise of modern history in the eighteenth century, this book examines how changing ideas in the discipline of history itself has affected architecture from the beginning of modernity up to the present day. It reflects upon history in order to encourage and assist the reader in finding well-founded principles for architectural design. This is not simply another history of architecture, nor a ‘history of histories’. Setting buildings in their contemporaneous ideas about history, it spans from Fischer von Erlach to Venturi and Rossi, and beyond to architects working in the fallout from both the Modern Movement – Aalto, Louis Kahn, Aldo van Eyck – and Post-modernism – such as Rafael Moneo and Peter Zumthor. It shows how Soane, Schinkel and Stirling, amongst others, made a meaningful use of history and contrasts this with how a misreading of Hegel has led to an abuse of history and an uncritical flight to the future. This is not an armchair history but a lively discussion of our place between past and future that promotes thinking for making.
This well-illustrated 'think piece' provides a much needed and topical philosophical introduction to the place of environmental design in architecture. Written by highly respected authors, this is an excellent guide for practitioners, students and academics.
Part of a series of technically informative monographs embracing a broad spectrum of internationally renowned buildings. This work deals with Melsetter House, and includes a comprehensive set of technical drawings and working details.
By the end of the twenty-first century it is thought that three-quarters of the world’s population will be urban; our future is in cities. Making these cities healthy, vibrant and sustainable is an exceptional challenge which this book addresses. It sets out some of the basic principles of the design of our future cities and, through a series of carefully-selected case studies from leading designers’ experience, illustrates how these ideas can be put into practice. Building on the first edition's original format of design guidance and case studies, this new edition updates the ideas and techniques resulting from further research and practice by the contributors. This book emphasises the enormous progress made towards exciting new designs that integrate good design with resource efficiency.
"These structures are all wrought by hands of architects who were well trained and fully cognizant of the relationships between art, architecture, sculpture and craft." - Introduction.
Based on the author’s decipherment of prehistoric carvings and the application of mathematical measurements, The Gods’ Machines shows how “unknown” phenomena from Angkor Wat to Stonehenge to crop circles are actually powerhouses built by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization for tapping electromagnetic energy. The book traces the development of that civilization on Earth over 5,000 years, revealing how all these structures are aligned according to a universal formula: an angle of 135 degrees at which Earth’s energy has been tapped by the alien creators of these monuments. These fascinating theories not only explain our distant past, but also open the door to a future of power t...
The city of Salisbury was built together with the cathedral in the early part of the thirteenth century, shortly after the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome and the signing of Magna Carta in England. This book describes how the bishop and his chapter took advantage of this extraordinary opportunity. The author argues that the political turmoil which affected the development of Old Sarum was replaced at Salisbury by a sacramental vision superimposing ideas of movement and time over a static, partly geometric order. The most significant occasions used by the clergy to reveal this tension were the Rogation processions around Ascension Day which seem to have left an imprint on the layout of the cit...
Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice vigorously engages with the Why? and the How? of prose poetry, a form that is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. With contributions by both practitioners and academics, this volume seeks to explore how its distinctive properties guide both writer and reader, and to address why this form is so well suited to the early twenty-first century. With discussion of both classic and less well- known writers, the essays both illuminate prose poetry’s distinctive features and explore how this "outsider" form can offer a unique way of viewing and describing the uncertainties and instabilities which shape our identities and our relationships with our surroundings in the early twenty-first century. Combining insights on the theory and practice of prose poetry, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice offers a timely and valuable contribution to the development of the form, and its appreciation amongst practitioners and scholars alike. Largely approached from a practitioner perspective, this collection provides vivid snapshots of contemporary debates within the prose poetry field while actively contributing to the poetics and craft of the form.
This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers’ houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author’s private and artistic persona; it also demonstrates how this materialized process of self-fashioning is subsequently appropriated within various strategies and policies of cultural memory.
This classic explores the symbolism of classical architecture. A milestone in relating mysticism to design, it shows the correlation between mythology and the design of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, the Palace of Versailles, and other architectural masterpieces. This delightful book describes the symbolism of real-world architecture, as well as architecture described in fiction, myth and folklore. Lethaby believed that architecture reflected the macrocosm. He speculated that many of the seemingly ornamental details of classical buildings actually represented aspects of the land, the sea and the sky. This is one of those books like the Golden Bough or the White Goddess (albeit shorter and a less challenging read) that will turn you on to the mythopoetic side of reality, no matter whether you agree with its conclusions.