New Books — September 2008
Architectural Excellence in a Diverse World Culture
By: William T. Baker
From the publisher: Provides a unifying theory for architectural design with a decidedly culturally neutral approach.
Beijing: The New City
By: Claudio Greco
From the publisher: Over the past fifteen years Beijing has experienced unprecedented change–a change more dramatic and profound than ever before. Contemporary skyscrapers and architectural forms are gradually enclosing the historic city centre. Steel and glass structures, constructions reminiscent of distant metropolises, highways, viaducts, and sports facilities have given Beijing a new face. Speed, combined with ever-changing rules and regulations, are the main characteristics of contemporary Beijing's transformation. Understanding this process means arranging intermediate and transitional phases into a logical sequence, in a historical and urban context of reference.
Embracing Watershed Politics
By: Edella Schlager and William Blomquist
From the publisher: In Embracing Watershed Politics, political scientists Edella Schlager and William Blomquist provide timely illustrations and thought-provoking explanations of why political considerations are essential, unavoidable, and in some ways even desirable elements of decision making about water and watersheds. With decades of combined study of water management in the United States, they focus on the many contending interests and communities found in America's watersheds, the fundamental dimensions of decision making, and the impacts of science, complexity, and uncertainty on watershed management.
Energy Systems Engineering
By: Francis M. Vanek
From the publisher: Energy Systems Engineering provides a balanced analytical approach to assessing all the major energy systems likely to be used throughout this century: carbon-based, nuclear, and renewable energy. Emphasizing a "portfolio" approach to energy systems in which a wide range of energy options are employed rather than depending on just one, the author offers an extensive collection of equations and example problems to analyze the performance of each system and assess future use.
Follies of Europe: Architectural Extravaganzas
By: Nic Barlow
From the publisher: Traces the development of Follies in Western Europe from the Baroque to the I.M. Pei Pyramid near Marlborough.
Gardens, City Life and Culture: A World Tour
By: Michel Conan and Chen Wangheng, eds.
From the publisher: Gardens have exerted a deep influence on the culture of cities. Considering each city as a whole, this book presents the profoundly different roles of gardens in cultural development and social life. Private and princely gardens, from Roman antiquity to approximately 1850, are considered, whether in China, India, the Ottoman Empire, Europe, or the United States. Turning to the subject of planning, the dire lack of a municipal garden policy is examined in contemporary Marrakech. In-depth evaluations of parks and garden planning reveal the successes and limitations of different policies in Stockholm, Tokyo, Kerala (India), historic Suzhou (China), and the U.S. New Towns of the 1960s. This book unveils an exciting domain of interplay between public and private action that is little known by citizen groups, city planners, and managers.
Green Belt: Modern Landscape Design
By: Daniel Schulz
From the publisher: Located in the urban structure, green belts run the gamut of forms and styles, united by the aim of finding new innovative solutions for our living environment. Organized according to the different functions of the designs, this collection surveys the current state of creative landscape architecture. Architects from all over the world, including Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan and the United States have been invited to show their work in this volume.
Instant Asia: Fast Forward through the Architecture of a Changing Continent
By: Joseph Grima
From the publisher: The Asian continent today acts as a theatre to some of the most rapid changes in the urban environment ever to occur anywhere in the world. As cities—and economies—expand at an almost immeasurable pace, Asian architects face new challenges and opportunities. Through interviews, conversations, and visits to architecture studios across the continent, Instant Asia documents the most recent built projects of the emerging generation of designers shaping the architectural identity of Asia today.
Josep Lluis Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969
By: Eric Mumford and Hashim Sarkis, eds.
From the publisher: This book examines the emergence and evolution of the discipline of urban design as articulated through the work of Josep Lluís Sert (1902–1983), one of its most influential practitioners. Sert was noted for his city planning and urban development projects in Europe, South America, and the United States, and the master plans of his later career were significant for their integration of natural landscape features into the urban building scheme.
Land in Transition: Reform and Poverty in Rural Vietnam
By: Martin Ravillion and Dominique van de Walle
From the publisher: This book is a case study of Vietnam's efforts to fight poverty using marketoriented land reforms. In the 1980s and 1990s, the country undertook major institutional reforms, and an impressive reduction in poverty followed. But what role did the reforms play? Did the efficiency gains from reform come at a cost to equity? Were there both winners and losers? Was rising rural landlessness in the wake of reforms a sign of success or failure?
Loblolly House: Elements of a New Architecture
By: Stephen Kieran & James Timberlake
From the publisher: Known for their in-depth research and innovative, inventive, and meticulously constructed architecture, KieranTimberlake Associates put its ideas about streamlining the making of architecture to the test. The results took the form of a fully modular and award-winning house, featuring an active and adjustable double-skin facade so advanced that no client would consider it.
Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis
By: David W. Jones
From the publisher: A fresh perspective on the decline and future of mass transit.
Museums, Libraries and Urban Vitality: A Handbook
By: Rober L. Kemp & Marcia Trotta, eds.
From the publisher: This volume documents the growing trend for cities and towns throughout America to use museums and libraries as vehicles for economic development. Museums of all types and sizes, and libraries from main street behemoths to neighborhood branches, are being used to stimulate inner-city revitalization as well as neighborhood renewal programs. These public amenities draw citizens, tourists and new development to a city's venues, providing a public place for people to focus and gather. In short, the small public investment paid for these cultural centers is much less than the dollars returned to taxpayers from tourism and economic development.
Public Housing that Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century
By: Nicholas Dagan Bloom
From the publisher: Public Housing That Worked shows how New York's administrators, beginning in the 1930s, developed a rigorous system of public housing management that weathered a variety of social and political challenges. A key element in the long-term viability of New York's public housing has been the constant search for better methods in fields such as tenant selection, policing, renovation, community affairs, and landscape design.
Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel, and Pivot
By: Chad Randl
From the publisher: Alternately lauded as the future of architecture or dismissed as pure folly, revolving buildings are a fascinating missing chapter in architectural history with surprising relevance to issues in contemporary architectural design. Rotating structures have been employed to solve problems and create effects that stationary buildings can't achieve. This book explores the history of this unique building type, investigating the cultural forces that have driven people to design and inhabit them.
Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties
By: Alastair Gordon
From the publisher: The utopian sixties inspired revolutionary and alternative ways to live, love, and entertain—and equally radical spaces to do it in. Stimulated by the psychedelic drug culture, rebel designers and architects distorted space to create womblike coves and isolation chambers, forging a spatial vocabulary that still reverberates today. At the same time, the tune-in-turn-on-drop-out message lured youths into far-flung communes, often under the roofs of brightly painted geodesic domes draped and tie-dyed fabric. Idealistic and anarchic enclaves with names like Drop City and Morning Star redefined the concept of community, inventing a wildly spontaneous way of building and dwelling. For the first time, these ephemeral spaces are brought together in Spaced Out.
Tadao Ando: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
By: Phisip Jodidio and Tadao Ando
From the publisher: A self-taught architect, Tadao Ando combines the influences of Japanese building traditions with the elegance of modernism. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is comprised of five pavilions that seem to float on a pool of water. Inside, diffuse and reflected natural light bathe the interior and the art in an even glow. This book thoroughly and luxuriously documents Ando's most recent masterpiece with glorious new color photography of the building, the reflecting pools, the grand interior spaces, and the galleries.
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Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000
By: Peter Eisenman
From the publisher: Peter Eisenman, renowned for his own controversial and influential body of work, looks at ten leading architects of the twentieth century and their theoretical positions, technological innovations, and design contributions. Eisenman identifies a project within the oeuvre of each of these architects — Luigi Moretti, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, James Stirling, Aldo Rossi, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry—that has profoundly affected architectural discourse and practice. With drawings, diagrams, and always-incisive text, he presents each architect's theoretical position, and then offers detailed critical analysis of the project.
What is Biodiversity?
By: James Maclaurin and Kim Sterelny
From the publisher: Arguing that we cannot make rational decisions about what it is to be protected without knowing what biodiversity is, James Maclaurin and Kim Sterelny offer in What Is Biodiversity? a theoretical and conceptual exploration of the biological world and how diversity is valued. Here, Maclaurin and Sterelny explore not only the origins of the concept of biodiversity, but also how that concept has been shaped by ecology and more recently by conservation biology. They explain the different types of biodiversity important in evolutionary theory, developmental biology, ecology, morphology and taxonomy and conclude that biological heritage is rich in not just one biodiversity but many.
