Unbuilt tells the stories of the plans, drawings and proposals that emerged during the 20th century in an unparalleled era of optimism in architecture. Many of these grand projects stayed on the drawing board, some were flights of fancy that couldn't be built, and in other cases test structures or parts of buildings did emerge in the real world. The book features the work of Buckminster Fuller, Geoffrey Bawa, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Archigram, as well as contemporary architects such as Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Will Alsop and Rem Koolhaas.
Richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, collages and models from all over the world, it covers everything from Buckminster Fuller's plan for a 'Domed city' in Manhattan to Le Corbusier's utopian dream of skyscraper living in central Paris, from a proposed network of motorways ploughing through central London to a crazy-looking scheme for 'rolling pavements' in post-war Berlin.
This is an important book, not just for the rich stories of what might have been in our built world, but also to give understanding to the motivations and dreams of architects, sometimes to build a better world, but sometimes to pander to egos. It includes plans that pushed the boundaries - from plug-in cities, moving cities, space cities, domes and floating cities to Maglev, teleportation and rockets. Many ideas were just ahead of their time, and some, thankfully, we were always better without.
Nature and architecture have never been more intertwined. As more of the earth´s surface is swallowed up by the built environment, architects are increasingly up to the task of integrating flora and greenery into their creations. There are many ways to express this: green roofs, living walls, indoor courtyards and entire facades filled with plants. But where these are posed as solutions there are yet more questions. How does a skyscraper uphold the weight of hundreds of trees? How do residents keep moss-covered walls alive? Jungle Architecture explores this, and much more.
L'architecte et critique emblématique Michael Sorkin présente un hommage amusé à l'architecture et l'urbanisme, raconté à travers sa liste de choses à savoir. À la fois poétique, pratique et ludique, cet ouvrage rassemble une série de connaissances essentielles que Michael Sorkin a structurées au cours de sa carrière. Les entrées sont associées à 100 photographies, illustrations et images d'archives en couleurs et en noir et blanc.
Espaces poétiques, structures surréalistes et vision théâtrale. Cette monographie passe en revue l'extraordinaire carrière de Ricardo Bofill, à travers son approche inédite de l'architecture. À une époque où les styles architecturaux dominants tendent toujours plus vers l'homogénéité, les créations fantasques de Bofill comblent nos attentes en matière d'originalité, de personnalité et d'idéaux.
This elegant book invites readers to lift up their eyes while strolling throughout Paris s streets and boulevards to pause, discover, and appreciate the facades of its buildings and the delicate artworks that are their windows, doors, and balconies. Innumerable motifs ornament the architecture of the French capital each a minor masterpiece of fine design and ironwork artistry. Exquisite, never-before-published watercolors and ink drawings by French illustrator Dominique Mathez bring each building s beautiful exterior to life. Away from the over-celebrated monuments and landmarks, the city s true, subtle charm emerges, distilled in a striking invitation to take a new look and rediscover its architecture through the ages. Complete with an informative text by one of today s most renowned design experts, Olivier Gabet, this sophisticated volume is the ideal gift for Francophiles and Paris lovers everywhere.
'99. Invisible...is completely wonderful and entertaining and beautifully produced...' Ira Glass, This American Life 'The hugely inventive 99. Invisible treats the design of everyday things like a forensic science.' WIRED This is 99. Invisible. __________ A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99. Invisible podcast Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean? Or stopped to ponder who gets to name the streets we walk along? Or what the story is behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships? 99. Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs. Now, in The 99. Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design , host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99. Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them. __________ You are about to see stories everywhere, you beautiful nerd. Now get out there. 'If you've ever wondered why our world is the way it is, this show has your answers' The Hustle
'Thank god for Richard Sennett ... essential reading for all students of the city' Anna Minton, Prospect 'Constantly stimulating ideas from a veteran of urban thinking' Jonathan Meades, Guardian In Building and Dwelling , Richard Sennett distils a lifetime's thinking and practical experience to explore the relationship between the good built environment and the good life. He argues for, and describes in rich detail, the idea of an open city, one in which people learn to manage complexity. He shows how the design of cities can enrich or diminish the everyday experience of those who dwell in them. The book ranges widely - from London, Paris and Barcelona to Shanghai, Mumbai and Medellin in Colombia - and draws on classic thinkers such as Tocqueville, Heidegger, Max Weber, and Walter Benjamin. It also draws on Sennett's many decades as a practical planner himself, testing what works, what doesn't, and why. He shows what works ethically is often the most practical solution for cities' problems. This is a humane and thrilling book, which allows us to think freshly about how we live in cities. 'Sennett is my kind of urbanist. He sees the modern city. He reads its secrets as he walks down the street, kicking over the detritus of the past ... There is no alternative to the planner, but please a planner who has read Sennett's book' Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times
The latest spectacular celebration from Architizer of the most inspiring contemporary architecture from around the globe.
The Architizer A+Awards represent 2021's best architecture and products, celebrated by a diverse group of influencers within and outside the architectural community. Entries are judged by more than 400 luminaries from ?elds as diverse as fashion, publishing, product design, real-estate development, and technology, and voted on by the public, culminating in a collection of the world's finest buildings.
Each year, winners are honored in this fully illustrated compendium, and on Architizer.com, the largest online architecture community on the planet. Featuring select A+Award winners, this is the definitive guide to the year's best buildings and spaces.
The imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings and models, told through reminiscences, stories, conversations, letters, and monologues.
Even when an architectural drawing does not show any human figures, we can imagine many different characters just off the page: architects, artists, onlookers, clients, builders, developers, philanthropists--working, observing, admiring, arguing. In Stories from Architecture, Philippa Lewis captures some of these personalities through reminiscences, anecdotes, conversations, letters, and monologues that collectively offer the imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings.
Some of these untold stories are factual, like Frank Lloyd Wright's correspondence with a Wisconsin librarian regarding her $5,000 dream home, or letters written by the English architect John Nash to his irascible aristocratic client. Others recount a fictional, if credible, scenario by placing these drawings--and with them their characters--into their immediate social context. For instance, the dilemmas facing a Regency couple who are considering a move to a suburban villa; a request from the office of Richard Neutra for an assistant to measure Josef von Sternberg's Rolls-Royce so that the director's beloved vehicle might fit into the garage being designed by his architect; a teenager dreaming of a life away from parental supervision by gazing at a gadget-filled bachelor pad in Playboy magazine; even a policeman recording the ground plans of the house of a murder scene.
The drawings, reproduced in color, are all sourced from the Drawing Matter collection in Somerset, UK, and are fascinating objects in themselves; but Lewis shifts our attention beyond the image to other possible histories that linger, invisible, beyond the page, and in the process animates not just a series of archival documents but the writing of architectural history.
In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually works on the ground.
The real vitality of cities, argues Jacobs, lies in their diversity, architectural variety, teeming street life and human scale. It is only when we appreciate such fundamental realities that we can hope to create cities that are safe, interesting and economically viable, as well as places that people want to live in.
'Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning... Jacobs has a powerful sense of narrative, a lively wit, a talent for surprise and the ability to touch the emotions as well as the mind' New York Times Book Review
Like a modern-day Jane Jacobs, Janette Sadik-Khan transformed New York City's streets to make room for pedestrians, bikers, buses, and green spaces. Describing the battles she fought to enact change, Streetfight imparts wisdom and practical advice that other cities can follow to make their own streets safer and more vibrant. As New York Citys transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of one of the worlds greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and bikers. Her approach was dramatic and effective: Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved the bottom line of businesses. Real-life experience confirmed that if you know how to read the street, you can make it function better by not totally reconstructing it but by reallocating the space thats already there. Breaking the street into its component parts, Streetfight demonstrates, with step-by-step visuals, how to rewrite the underlying source code of a street, with pointers on how to add protected bike paths, improve crosswalk space, and provide visual cues to reduce speeding. Achieving such a radical overhaul wasnt easy, and Streetfight pulls back the curtain on the battles Sadik-Khan won to make her approach work. She includes examples of how this new way to read the streets has already made its way around the world, from pocket parks in Mexico City and Los Angeles to more pedestrian-friendly streets in Auckland and Buenos Aires, and innovative bike-lane designs and plazas in Austin, Indianapolis, and San Francisco. Many are inspired by the changes taking place in New York City and are based on the same techniques. Streetfight deconstructs, reassembles, and reinvents the street, inviting readers to see it in ways they never imagined.
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR.
Beginning in a tiny hermitage on the remote north Scottish coast, and ending up backstage at the National Theatre, Raw Concrete embarks on a wide-ranging journey through Britain over the past sixty years, stopping to examine how eight extraordinary buildings were made - from commission to construction - why they have been so vilified, and why they are beginning to be loved.