Kategoria BISAC: Architecture >> History - Contemporary (1945 -)

In the early twentieth century, Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts converged in the United States when Chinese students were given scholarships to train as architects at American universities whose design curricula were dominated by Beaux-Arts methods. Upon their return home in the 1920s and 1930s, these graduates began to practice architecture and create China's first architectural schools, often transferring a version of what they had learned in the U.S. to Chinese situations. The resulting complex series of design-related...

For more than twenty years now, Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune has explored how architecture captures our imagination and engages our deepest emotions. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Kamin treats his subjects not only as works of art but also as symbols of the cultural and political forces that inspire them. Terror and Wonder gathers the best of Kamin's writings from the past decade along with new reflections on an era framed by the destruction of the World Trade Center and the opening of the world's tallest skyscraper.
Assessing ordinary commercial...

Among practicing architects today, perhaps only Robert A. M. Stern once contemplated a career as a historian, an interest that has informed both his built work and his writings. Tradition and Invention in Architecture brings together 26 of Stern's essays and conversations from the past five decades. Topics range from modern classicism, American housing, gardens, and New York City to the work of Norman Foster, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, and Robert Moses. Reminders of Stern's own broad career in architecture are found in his thoughts on his PBS television series Pride of Place, his...

"Governing by Design" offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves.

In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters...

The Return of Nature asks you to critique your conception of nature and your approach to architectural sustainability and green design. What do the terms mean? Are they de facto design requirements? Or are they unintended design replacements? The book is divided into five parts giving you multiple viewpoints on the role of the relations between architecture, nature, technology, and culture. A detailed case study of a built project concludes each part to help you translate theory into practice. This holistic approach will allow you to formulate your own theory and to adjust your...

The Return of Nature asks you to critique your conception of nature and your approach to architectural sustainability and green design. What do the terms mean? Are they de facto design requirements? Or are they unintended design replacements? The book is divided into five parts giving you multiple viewpoints on the role of the relations between architecture, nature, technology, and culture. A detailed case study of a built project concludes each part to help you translate theory into practice. This holistic approach will allow you to formulate your own theory and to adjust your...

This book examines the trends and innovations at the cutting edge of office design in the UK today. Selected from British Council for Offices Award winners since 2002 and interpreting empirical analyses by Davis Langdon, the varied and stunningly illustrated case studies presented here demonstrate the latest thinking from the world of workplace design. Taken together, they offer insight and inspiration for architects, developers, clients and anyone interested in getting the very best out of places of work.

Written by the distinguished author and journalist David Littlefield, the...

Who was responsible for the crimes of the Nazis? Party leaders and members? Rank-and-file soldiers and bureaucrats? Ordinary Germans? This question looms over German disputes about the past like few others. It also looms over the art and architecture of postwar Germany in ways that have been surprisingly neglected. In The Nazi Perpetrator, Paul B. Jaskot fundamentally reevaluates pivotal developments in postwar German art and architecture against the backdrop of contentious contemporary debates over the Nazi past and the difficulty of determining who was or was not a Nazi...

The built environment of former socialist countries is often deemed uniform and drab, an apt reflection of a repressive regime. "Building the State "peeks behind the grey fa ade to reveal a colourful struggle over competing meanings of the nation, Europe, modernity and the past in a divided continent.

Examining how social change is closely intertwined with transformations of the built environment, this volume focuses on the relationship between architecture and state politics in postwar Central Europe using examples from Hungary and Germany. Built around four case studies, the book...

Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous--the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Fehervary shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not...