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...

An essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday livesWe spend most of our days and nights in buildings, living and working and sometimes playing. Architecture is both the setting for our everyday...

This beautiful book brings together 300 of the best architectural drawings from the last century by the world's most prestigious architects, creating both a history of the genre and a survey of twentieth-century architecture.The book is divided into five...

An architect's defense of drawing as a way of thinking, even in an age of electronic media.Why would an architect reach for a pencil when drawing software and AutoCAD are a click away? Use a ruler when 3D-scanners and GPS devices are close at hand? In...

“A glorious piece of prose . . . Pollan leads readers on his adventure with humor and grace.” —Chicago TribuneA captivating personal inquiry into the art of architecture, the craft of building, and the meaning of modern work “A room of one’s own: Is...

Function and meaning in architecture and elsewhere, from tongue-in-cheek instructions for creating a surveillance state to reflections on the architecture of the potato chip.World's Greatest Architect: Making, Meaning, and Network Culture Artifacts...

Everyone knows what modern architecture looks like, but few understand how this revolutionary new form of building emerged little more than a century ago or what its aesthetic, social, even spiritual aspirations were. Through illuminating studies of the...

The allure of mobile, portable architecture is worldwide and centuries old. From the desert tents of the Bedouin to the silvery capsules of the Airstream trailer, mobile architecture has inspired designers with its singular characteristics of lightness,...

On August 19, 1418, a competition concerning Florence's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore--already under construction for more than a century--was announced: "Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main...

A landmark account of architectural theory and practice from acclaimed philosopher Roger ScrutonArchitecture is distinguished from other art forms by its sense of function, its localized quality, its technique, its public and nonpersonal character, and...

With populations decentralizing and cities sprawling ever-outward, twenty-first-century urban planners are challenged by the need to organize not just people but space itself. Hence a new architectural discourse has emerged: landscape urbanism.In The...

The full and definitive biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, influential abolitionist, ardent social reformer and conservationist, and the visionary designer of Central ParkFrederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the...

Sites Unseen examines the complex intertwining of race and architecture in nineteenth and early-twentieth century American culture, the period not only in which American architecture came of age professionally in the U.S. but also in which ideas about...

“Modern Italy”may sound like an oxymoron. For Western civilization,Italian culture represents the classical past and the continuity of canonical tradition,while modernity is understood in contrary terms of rupture and rapid innovation. Charting the...

First published in 1966, and since translated into 16 languages, this remarkable book has become an essential document of architectural literature. A "gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture," Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in...

Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city.In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for...

Wood Planks and Oriental Rugs weren't the only floor coverings found in America's old houses. In fact, a rich array of floor treatments have been used--from brick, tile and linoleum to mats and floorcloths, from rag rugs to ingrain, embroidered and pile...

A strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it representsConcrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of...

In the New York Times bestseller House, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes readers to the heart of the American Dream: the building of a family's first house with all its day-to-day frustrations, crises, tensions, challenges, and triumphs. ...

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Now I Sit Me Down, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.We know...