This beautifully illustrated volume presents Ferguson & Shamamian's finest work, including new houses, apartments, alterations and additions, and unbuilt design plans.
The architectural community has had a strong and continuing interest in traditional and vernacular architecture. Lessons from Vernacular Architecture takes lessons directly from traditional and vernacular architecture and offers them to the reader as guidance and inspiration for new buildings. The appropriate technical and social solutions provided by vernacular and traditional architecture are analysed in detail. International case studies focus on environmental design aspects of traditional architecture in a broad range of climatic conditions and building types.
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
For those interested in contemporary permutations of neo-classical architecture, this volume offers a photo essay of the work of 14 architectural firms. Among them are Robert Adam Architects Ltd, Norman Davenport Askins, John Blatteau Associates, Fairfax & Sammons, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, Michael G. Imber, and Porphyrios Associates. The build
This book chronicles the florescence of architecture in the Arabian Gulf after the expulsion of the Portuguese in the early 1600's. It demonstrates how the power vacuum created by the collapse of Portuguese control over the trade routes in the Indian Ocean encouraged a growth in fortified architecture, especially in Oman, that radiated out to the surrounding region and was then slowly replaced by new patterns in domestic and public architecture and town planning throughout the Gulf as the trade lines were secured and the individual countries took the first steps towards the formation of today's modern nation-states.The book documents the buildings and crafts of this era and analyses them within the framework of the political, economic, and social information available through primary sources from the period in a way that is both intelligent and accessible. It considers the settlements as part of a larger-connected network of cities, towns and villages and focuses both on how the buildings provided innovative solutions to the demanding climate and yet incorporated new decorative and functional ideas. Topics are extensively and richly illustrated with colored photographs of the buildings as they are now, black and white and color historic photographs from archival and museum collections, line drawings, and computer-generated reconstructions.The book is therefore attractive to a number of audiences, including those who live in or travel to the Gulf as well as people with an interest in Arab and Islamic design, culture and society, vernacular architecture, and post-colonial approaches to colonial history.
Traditional architecture, which has evolved in harmony with the natural environment and the rhythms of a daily life far removed from industrialized society, is currently inspiring an awakening of interest throughout the world. Nowhere is more deserving of this attention than the islands of the Indonesian archipelago, whose wide range of peoples and terrain have produced the most extraordinary vernacular building. Characteristic of many Indonesian architectural styles are village houses raised on stilts, high above monsoon muds and malarial mosquitoes, where they benefit from cooling breezes. Walls, window frames, posts and pillars are often beautifully carved and painted with images of guardian spirits and ancestors, animal and human figures, spirals, and floral and geometric patterning. Majestic roofs can dwarf the living accommodation; their sweeping slopes dispel tropical rainwater, and their overhanging caves offer shade from the sun. Construction with pegs and wedges instead of nails affords buildings both the strength and the flexibility needed to withstand earthquakes and yet be easily dismantled and transported to a new location. In many communities the house is regarded as a spiritual, almost corporeal entity, whose construction involves many rituals and superstitions. It forms the focal point for a villager's sense of community, ancestry and social standing. Barry Dawson and John Gillow's firsthand research has provided the basis for this detailed examination of Indonesian vernacular building, which analyses the predominant types of each island, and how they relate to the architectural needs of the present and future. Historical photographs, drawings and nearly 200 dazzlingphotographs of villages, houses, barns, meeting halls, places of worship and domestic interiors, vividly illustrate the enormous diversity of traditional styles to be found throughout the islands. From the dignity and grandeur of the Minangkabau houses of Sumatra to the imposing solidity of the Dayak communal longhouses, Java's rich legacy of Hindu-Buddhism or the humble "haystack" houses of the Atoni of Timor, the astounding vernacular architecture of Indonesia is thoroughly and magnificently documented.
Knapp (geography, SUNY) continues the work of his previous books by examining the distinctive characteristics of the common house in Zhejing province. Over 300 original photographs illustrate his discussion of construction techniques, the organization of space, settlement patterns, the expression of
