A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)
by Christopher Alexander
from Oxford University Press, USA
The second of three books published by the Center for Environmental Structure to provide a "working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning," A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning based on natural considerations. The reader is given an overview of some 250 patterns that are the units of this language, each consisting of a design problem, discussion, illustration, and solution. By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design.
"Brilliant....Here's how to design or redesign any space you're living or working in--from metropolis to room. Consider what you want to happen in the space, and then page through this book. Its radically conservative observations will spark, enhance, organize your best ideas, and a wondrous home, workplace, town will result"--San Francisco Chronicle. This classic handbook presents a language which ordinary people can use to express themselves in their own communities or homes, and to better communicate with each other.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)
from Modern Library
Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context.  It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.  It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.  The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.
The Image of the City
by Kevin Lynch
from The MIT Press
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion--imageability--and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities.
The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
Time-Saver Standards for Interior Design and Space Planning, 2nd Edition
by Joseph DeChiara
from McGraw-Hill Professional
The "Silver Bible" -- thoroughly revised, updated and redesigned
Interior designers, architects, and other design professionals can still turn to the field’s beloved "Silver Bible" for a wealth of information related to the design and planning of residential and commercial interiors. But now, Time-Saver Standards for Interior Design and Space Planning, Second Edition goes even further to truly make the classic interior design reference the standard in its field.
From standard furniture dimensions to architectural woodwork details, you’ll find a vast array of time-saving data and details. Editors Joseph DeChiara, Julius Panero, and Martin Zelnik have brought together contributions from well-known architectural and interior design firms to give you details derived from actual designs and working drawings, showing various solutions for typical design problems encountered in interior architecture.
You get a wide range of typical layouts and residential spaces, offices, conference rooms, and reception areas, in addition to details of bars, restaurants, and public toilets. This exciting new edition includes new international examples and metrification – and provides you with full coverage of healthcare spaces, educational spaces; home offices; videoconferencing spaces; green design; project forms and schedules. Two outstanding sections cover historic styles and woodworking.
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
by Andres Duany
from North Point Press
There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that sprawl is ecologically and economically unsustainable but also from a growing awareness of sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; the middle class, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day.
Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of this movement, and in Suburban Nation they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. It is a lively, thorough, critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia-characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots-and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course until mid-century. It is an indictment of the entire development community, including governments, for the fact that America no longer builds towns. Most important, though, it is that rare book that also offers solutions.
Hotel Design, Planning, and Development, New Edition
by Walter A. Rutes
from W. W. Norton & Company
A new edition of the "bible" for design, planning, and development in the hospitality industry. As its predecessor has done for the last fifteen years, this book will serve as the "go-to" guide for architects, planners, and developers involved in hotel projects. It offers an overview of the industry; in-depth analysis of emerging trends; the latest how-to; and essential design, planning, and development criteria. 250 illustrations. The previous edition was published under the title Hotel Planning and Design.
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
by Juhani Pallasmaa
from Academy Press
Since the book's first publication, interest in the role of the body and the senses has been emerging in both architectural philosophy and teaching. This new, revised and extended edition of this seminal work will not only inspire architects and students to design more holistic architecture, but will enrich the general reader's perception of the world around them.
The Eyes of the Skin has become a classic of architectural theory and consists of two extended essays. The first surveys the historical development of the ocular-centric paradigm in western culture since the Greeks, and its impact on the experience of the world and the nature of architecture. The second examines the role of the other senses in authentic architectural experiences, and points the way towards a multi-sensory architecture which facilitates a sense of belonging and integration.
Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
by Peter Hall
from Wiley-Blackwell
Cities of Tomorrow is a critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it.
- A critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it.
- Trenchant, perceptive, global in coverage, this book is an unrivalled account of its crucial subject.
- Comprehensively revised to take account of abundant new literature published since its original appearance, and to view the 1990s in historical perspective.
- Reviews the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the twentieth century.
Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
by Rem Koolhaas
from Monacelli
In this fanciful volume, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.), both analyzes and celebrates New York City. By suggesting the city as the site for an infinite variety of human activities and events--both real and imagined--the essence of the metropolitan lifestyle, its "culture of congestion" and its architecture are revealed in a brilliant new light. "Manhattan," Koolhaas writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Filled with fascinating facts, as well as photographs, postcards, maps, watercolors, and drawings, the vibrancy of Koolhaas's poignant exploration of Gotham equals the heady, frenetic energy of the city itself. Anyone who loves New York will want to own this book.
Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle -- "the culture of congestion" -- and its architecture.
"Manhattan," he writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York's history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.
The Timeless Way of Building
by Christopher Alexander
from Oxford University Press
This volume provides the opening work in Christopher Alexander's seminal trilogy on architecture (continued in A Pattern Language and The Oregon Experiment). Here he provides a fascinating introduction to the ideas behind the succeeding two books.
+++
