"Pelli focuses on the unique position of architecture among the arts. He analyzes eight "connections" that influence both the artistic and practical aspects of architecture: time, construction, place, purpose, culture, design process, constituency, and oneself. Pelli discusses each connection, drawing on historic and contemporary examples, and then turns to first-person commentary, illustrating his experiences with his own buildings and projects, including such important buildings as Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (the world's tallest buildings), the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, and Washington National Airport."--Jacket.
THE MASTER ARCHITECT SERIES is a series of monographs on some of the greatest architects and architectural firms of our time. Each monograph will contain 256 pages displaying several hundred color photographs, drawings, sketches and renderings. Although primarily a pictorial essay, the books will contain selected projects described in concise detail, along with a critique or overview of the firm, a resume of the partners, and a comprehensive bibliography.
As it was being constructed, the Terminal at Washington National Airport endured intense scrutiny by Congress, planning and public interest groups, and air carriers. But solving the complex problem of creating a gateway to the nation's capital, while simultaneously maintaining and enhancing operations at one of the country's busiest airports, was a challenge capably managed by Cesar Pelli & Associates Architects. This firm created a spectacular three-level terminal, approximately one million square feet, to accommodate sixteen million passengers each year. Readers will be thrilled and inspired with this closer look at the new Terminal that has caught the admiring eye and earned the appreciation of thousands who put it to the test each day. Cesar Pelli & Associates is based in Washington, D.C.
Glass offers a wide variety of possible applications for the realization of even the most ambitious designs in architecture, and in the past two decades it has experienced an unparalleled burst of innovation. For planners, this means working constantly with this high-performance material. In compact and appealing form, the completely revised Glass Construction Manual presents the current state of the art on planning and building with glass, from the history through the technical foundations all the way to the most innovative applications. Astonishing perspectives on thermal insulation and solar protection and the addition of thoughtfully selected new practical examples round off this comprehensive reference work.
Delivers the inside story on 6,000 years of personal and public space. John Pile acknowledges that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries, in which construction, architecture, the arts and crafts, technology and product design all overlap.
We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these 'subnatural forces' are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice. The exhilarating and at times unsettling work featured in Subnature suggests an alternative view of natural processes and ecosystems and their relationships to human society and architecture. R&Sie(n)'s Mosquito Bottleneck house in Trinidad uses a skin that actually attracts mosquitoes and moves them through the building, while keeping them separate from the occupants. In his building designs the architect Philippe Rahm draws the dank air from the earth and the gasses and moisture from our breath to define new forms of spatial experience. In his Underground House, Mollier House, and Omnisport Hall, Rahm forces us to consider the odor of soil and the emissions from our body as the natural context of a future architecture. [Cero 9]'s design for the Magic Mountain captures excess heat emitted from a power generator in Ames, Iowa, to fuel a rose garden that embellishes the industrial site and creates a natural mountain rising above the city's skyline. Subnature looks beyond LEED ratings, green roofs, and solar panels toward a progressive architecture based on a radical new conception of nature.
Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products, 2nd Edition provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to urban design, defining the field and addressing the controversies and goals of urban design. Including over 50 updated international case studies, this new edition presents a three-dimensional model with which to categorize the processes and products involved: product type, paradigm type, and procedural type. The case studies not only illuminate the typology but provide information that designers can use as precedents in their own work. Uniquely, these case study projects are framed by the design paradigm employed, categorized by procedural type instead of instrumental or land use function. The categories used here are Total Urban Design, All-of-a-piece Urban Design, Plug-in Urban Design, and Piece-by-piece Urban Design. Written for both professionals and those encountering urban design in their day-to-day life, Urban Design is an essential introduction to the field and practice, considering the future direction of the field and what can be learned from the past.
A classic book authored by the foremost architectural historian in America, this fully illustrated history of American architecture and city planning is based on Vincent Scully's conviction that architecture and city planning are inseparably linked and must therefore be treated together. He defines architecture as a continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time. This definitive survey extends beyond the cities themselves to the American scene as a whole, which has inspired the reasonable balanced, closed and ordered forms, and above all the probity, that he feels typifies American architecture.