“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...

The basics of the profession and practice of architecture, presented in illustrated A-Z form.The word "architect" is a noun, but Doug Patt uses it as a verb—coining a term and making a point about using parts of speech and parts of buildings in new ways...

A visual history of this intriguing artistic period, featuring work by Dix, Grosz, Heartfield, Brecht, and more. During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) a distinctive culture evolved from the roots of the Modern Movement. It was a unique effort to bring...

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...

Now in paperback after five printings, a remarkable journey through the built world from the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker critic and "America's foremost interpreter of public architecture" (Tracy Kidder)Why Architecture Matters is not a work of...

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 young architect's search for new architectural values in a time of economic crisis.I paused at the stoop and thought this could be the basis of a good book. The story of a young man who went deep into the bowels of the academy in order to understand...

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...

In De architectura (c.40 BC), Vitruvius discusses in ten encyclopedic chapters aspects of Roman architecture, engineering and city planning. Vitruvius also included a section on human proportions. Because it is the only antique treatise on architecture...

Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments.This...

Tom Wolfe, "America's most skillful satirist" (The Atlantic Monthly), examines the strange saga of American architecture in this sequel to The Painted Word.

Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.Architect Léon Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments in images, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, these...

The work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari has been inspirational for architects and architectural theorists in recent years. It has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Greg Lynn and David Chipperfield, and is regularly cited by...

This highly original and sophisticated look at architecture helps us to understand the cultural significance of the buildings that surround us. It avoids the traditional style-spotting approach and instead gives us an idea of what it is about buildings...

"This new edition ensures that the book will continue to be internationally acknowledged as the standard work on the development of modern architecture." -Walter Gropius"A remarkable accomplishment. . . one of the most valuable reference books for...

A new generation of architects is pushing digital technology to its limits and continues a tradition of "organic" architecture, often labeled "blobitecture." A few architects in the pre-digital era anticipated the shape of today's sleek and supple...

Pulitzer Prize?winning critic Ada Louise Huxtable?s biography of America?s greatest architectRenowned architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography Frank Lloyd Wright looks at the architect and the man, from his tumultuous personal life to his long...