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This immensely popular, witty, and highly provocative book is changing people's attitudes about convenience, decor, and technology in home design and furnishing. 10 black-and-white illustrations.
A bestselling author offers a highly entertaining and insightful look at the meaning and importance of style to architecture. This is a book brimming with sharp observations as it shows the connection between architecture, interior decoration, and fashion. 10 line illustrations.
The Best Tool of the Millennium The seeds of Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying "the best tool of the millennium." The award-winning author of Home, A Clearing in the Distance, and Now I Sit Me Down, Rybczynski once built a house using only hand tools. His intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- serves him beautifully on his quest. One Good Turn is a story starring Archimedes, who invented the water screw and introduced the helix, and Leonardo, who sketched a machine for carving wood screws. It is a story of mechanical discovery and genius that takes readers from ancient Greece to car design in the age of American industry. Rybczynski writes an ode to the screw, without which there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no enlightenment science. One of our finest cultural and architectural historians, Rybczynski renders a graceful, original, and engaging portrait of the tool that changed the course of civilization.
Tracing the development of American cities and city life from early colonial settlements to the familiar downtowns of today, a sweeping cultural history reveals how our urban spaces have been shaped by the land and the American lifestyle. Reprint. 25,000 first printing. NYT.
An inspired, engaging look at what architecture is and how we live and work in it--by the acclaimed author of Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World. Rybczynski discusses buildings like the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, demonstrates how architecture actually works, and more.
A grand tour of the chair through the ages by our foremost writer on design Have you ever wondered where rocking chairs came from, or why cheap plastic chairs are suddenly everywhere? In Now I Sit Me Down, the distinguished architect and writer Witold Rybczynski chronicles the history of the chair from the folding stools of pharaonic Egypt to the ubiquitous stackable monobloc chairs of today. He tells the stories of the inventor of the bentwood chair, Michael Thonet, and of the creators of the first molded-plywood chair, Charles and Ray Eames. He reveals the history of chairs to be a social history—of different ways of sitting, of changing manners and attitudes, and of varying tastes. The ...
In this new work, prizewinning author, professor, and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski returns to the territory he knows best: writing about the way people live, just as he did in the acclaimed bestsellers Home and A Clearing in the Distance. In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique. Makeshift Metropolis describes how current ideas about urban planning evolved from the movements that defined the twentieth century, such as City Beautiful, the Garden City, and the seminal ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs. If the twentieth century...
An essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday lives We spend most of our days and nights in buildings, living and working and sometimes playing. Architecture is both the setting for our everyday lives and a public art form—but it remains mysterious to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, one of our best, most stylish critics and the winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his writing on architecture, answers our most fundamental questions about how good—and not so good—buildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, he reveals how architects as...
In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Home and City Life, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history. We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross. Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.
How Robert Sainsbury and Norman Foster built a great museum. Witold Rybczynski is an architectural writer with a superlative style, a uniquely humanistic approach to his subject, and an enormous reputation. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia was Norman Foster’s first major commission and the project that set him on the road to fame and fortune. It remains highly regarded in the architectural world. This is a remarkable book about a remarkable building. We learn how a major museum is conceived and developed, the role of the sponsor, the nature of collecting, and the experiences of the people who occupy the space. Rybczynski succeeds in telling the whole story of the Sainsbury Centre and the multiple impulses and inspirations that brought it into being.