Why do some places—the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or even the corner of a skyscraper—affect us so mysteriously and yet so forcefully? What tiny changes in our everyday environments can radically alter the quality of our daily...

"These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function." This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the process of design. ...

For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles-douard Jeanneret, 1887?1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher...

The oldest and most influential book ever written on architecture, this volume served as a guide to Bramante, Michelangelo, Palladio, Vignola, and countless others. It describes the classic principles of symmetry, harmony, and proportion as well as the...

Initially produced as the catalog to accompany a controversial and groundbreaking 1932 Museum of Modern Art show of the then new architecture emerging in Europe and America, The International Style quickly became the definitive statement of the...

The authors examine buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia to the state-of-the-art Hartford Civic Arena. Their subjects range from the man-caused destruction of the Parthenon to the earthquake damage of 1989 in Armenia...

The theory of architecture implicit in our world today, Christopher Alexander believes, is bankrupt. More and more people are aware that something is deeply wrong. Yet the power of present-day ideas is so great that many feel uncomfortable, even afraid,...