Author: Robert Powell
Publisher: Watson-Guptill Publications
ISBN: 9780823045532
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
A preview of the twenty-first-century city dweller's world is seen in the work of an architect whose visionary approach to skyscraper design sets new standards for high-rise construction.
Author: Michal Murawski
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253039991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
An exploration of the history and significance of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland. The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was “gifted” to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Framing the Palace’s visual, symbolic, and functional prominence in the everyday life of the Polish capital as a sort of obsession, locals joke that their city suffers from a “Palace of Culture complex.” Despite attempts to privatize it, the Palace remains municipally owned, and continues to play host to a variety of public institutions and services. The Parade Square, which surrounds the building, has resisted attempts to convert it into a money-making commercial center. Author Michal Murawski traces the skyscraper’s powerful impact on twenty-first century Warsaw; on its architectural and urban landscape; on its political, ideological, and cultural lives; and on the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. The Palace Complex explores the many factors that allow Warsaw’s Palace to endure as a still-socialist building in a post-socialist city. “The most brilliant book on a building in many years, making a case for Warsaw’s once-loathed Palace of Culture and Science as the most enduring and successful legacy of Polish state socialism.” —Owen Hatherley, The New Statesman’s“Books of the Year” list (UK) “An ambitious anthropological biography of Poland’s tallest and most infamous building, the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. . . . It is a truly fascinating story that challenges a tenacious stereotype, and Murawski tells it brilliantly, judiciously layering literatures from multiple disciplines, his own ethnographic work, and personal anecdotes.” —Patryk Babiracki, H-Net History
Author: Jason M. Barr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199344388
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 457
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Book Description
The Manhattan skyline is one of the great wonders of the modern world. But how and why did it form? Much has been written about the city's architecture and its general history, but little work has explored the economic forces that created the skyline. In Building the Skyline, Jason Barr chronicles the economic history of the Manhattan skyline. In the process, he debunks some widely held misconceptions about the city's history. Starting with Manhattan's natural and geological history, Barr moves on to how these formations influenced early land use and the development of neighborhoods, including the dense tenement neighborhoods of Five Points and the Lower East Side, and how these early decisions eventually impacted the location of skyscrapers built during the Skyscraper Revolution at the end of the 19th century. Barr then explores the economic history of skyscrapers and the skyline, investigating the reasons for their heights, frequencies, locations, and shapes. He discusses why skyscrapers emerged downtown and why they appeared three miles to the north in midtown-but not in between the two areas. Contrary to popular belief, this was not due to the depths of Manhattan's bedrock, nor the presence of Grand Central Station. Rather, midtown's emergence was a response to the economic and demographic forces that were taking place north of 14th Street after the Civil War. Building the Skyline also presents the first rigorous investigation of the causes of the building boom during the Roaring Twenties. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the boom was largely a rational response to the economic growth of the nation and city. The last chapter investigates the value of Manhattan Island and the relationship between skyscrapers and land prices. Finally, an Epilogue offers policy recommendations for a resilient and robust future skyline.
Author: Davide Ponzini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351847236
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
Transnational Architecture and Urbanism combines urban planning, design, policy, and geography studies to offer place-based and project-oriented insight into relevant case studies of urban transformation in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Since the 1990s, increasingly multinational modes of design have arisen, especially concerning prominent buildings and places. Traditional planning and design disciplines have proven to have limited comprehension of, and little grip on, such transformations. Public and scholarly discussions argue that these projects and transformations derive from socioeconomic, political, cultural trends or conditions of globalization. The author suggests that general urban theories are relevant as background, but of limited efficacy when dealing with such context-bound projects and policies. This book critically investigates emerging problematic issues such as the spectacularization of the urban environment, the decontextualization of design practice, and the global circulation of plans and projects. The book portends new conceptualizations, evidence-based explanations, and practical understanding for architects, planners, and policy makers to critically learn from practice, to cope with these transnational issues, and to put better planning in place.
Author: Adam Sharr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113412029X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Informing the designs of architects as diverse as Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, Hans Scharoun and Colin St. John Wilson, the work of Martin Heidegger has proved of great interest to architects and architectural theorists. The first introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy written specifically for architects and students of architecture introduces key themes in his thinking, which has proved highly influential among architects as well as architectural historians and theorists. This guide familiarizes readers with significant texts and helps to decodes terms as well as providing quick referencing for further reading. This concise introduction is ideal for students of architecture in design studio at all levels; students of architecture pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in architectural theory; academics and interested architectural practitioners. Heidegger for Architects is the second book in the new Thinkers for Architects series.
Author: Almantas Samalavičius
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443878693
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
This volume is a passionate scholarly inquiry focused on some of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary architectural practice, urbanism, and city-making. Presented in the form of conversations with leading architects, urbanists, and internationally renowned architectural historians and urban thinkers, this concise book reviews and critiques the legacy of Modernism and its impact on global urbanisation. Timely, thoughtful and thought-provoking, these conversations, conducted by the editor during the last few years, urge the rejection of some of the most widespread dogmas and often dangerously limiting and misguided intellectual legacies of urban and architectural thinking. The contributors recommend a search instead for more enlightened architectural practices, urban planning, and city-making in the new millennium, when environmental problems have become particularly pressing. In this volume, readers will find not only glimpses into possible urban futures, but a thorough review of what now often appear as the shackles of the not-so-distant Modernist past.
Author: David Anton Spurr
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472900803
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related to the discourses of being, dwelling, and homelessness.
Author: Adrienne Brown
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421423839
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.
Author: Wendy Lesser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374713316
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life. Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Kahn, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American architect, was a “public” architect. Rather than focusing on corporate commissions, he devoted himself to designing research facilities, government centers, museums, libraries, and other structures that would serve the public good. But this warm, captivating person, beloved by students and admired by colleagues, was also a secretive man hiding under a series of masks. Kahn himself, however, is not the only complex subject that comes vividly to life in these pages. His signature achievements—like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad—can at first seem as enigmatic and beguiling as the man who designed them. In attempts to describe these structures, we are often forced to speak in contradictions and paradoxes: structures that seem at once unmistakably modern and ancient; enormous built spaces that offer a sense of intimate containment; designs in which light itself seems tangible, a raw material as tactile as travertine or Kahn’s beloved concrete. This is where Lesser’s talents as one of our most original and gifted cultural critics come into play. Interspersed throughout her account of Kahn’s life and career are exhilarating “in situ” descriptions of what it feels like to move through his built structures. Drawing on extensive original research, lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students, and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive genius, revealing the mind behind some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated architecture.
Author: Robert Powell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Plants in architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
