Product Description: Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a ‘Third Ecology’ emerged...read more

Product Description: This is a history of the interactions between buildings, architectural theory and the ideas of public and private space, of the city and society and its relation to the built environment as they have developed since World War II.

Product Description: With Ground-Up City, author Liane Lefaivre has developed a theoretical model for tackling playgrounds as an urban strategy. She starts with a historical overview of play and the ludic in art, architecture and urban design, focusing particularly on postwar playgrounds realized in Amsterdam as joint ventures between Aldo van Eyck, Cornelis van Eesteren and Jakoba Mulder...read more

The enigmatic, polyglot Hypnerotomachia Poliphili -- the inspiration for the bestselling novel The Rule of Four -- has fascinated architects and historians since its publication in 1499. Part fictional narrative and part scholarly treatise, richly illustrated with wood engravings, the book is an extreme case of erotic furor, aimed at everything -- especially architecture -- that the protagonist, Poliphilo, encounters in his quest for his beloved, Polia. Among the instances of the book's manifesto-like character is Polia's tirade defending the right of women to express their own sexuality, probably the first sustained argument of this type, which lifts the book's erotic theme from the realm of ribaldry to the more daring one of sexual politics. Liane Lefaivre offers the closest critical-theoretical reading of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to date, placing it within both the historical context of the quattrocento and the rethinking of the metaphor of the architectural body.Lefaivre is the first to attribute this strange, dreamlike book definitively to none other than the arch-rationalist Leon Battista Alberti. Intended as his final text, she argues, the book is the legacy of a humanist passionate about his life's work, a treatise on the role of dreamwork in design by one of the most creative minds of the Renaissance, and a manifesto in defense of humanism by a man who had been dismissed by an anti-humanist pope after a thirty-year career in the papal service.

Product Description: This richly illustrated and designed book in the "Architecture in Focus" series reconsiders critical regionalism and demonstrates the global viability of one of the most visible trends in contemporary architecture. As globalization increasingly enters every facet of our lives, its homogenizing effects on architecture, urban spaces and the landscape have compelled architects to embrace the principles of critical regionalism, an alternative theory that respects local culture, geography and climate...read more

Product Description: Climbing frames, arches, igloos, tumbling bars, jumping stones, and climbing walls all found their way into unsightly wastelands and boring squares thanks to the visionary help of architect Aldo van Eyck, who transformed urban spaces in Amsterdam into more than 700 playgrounds between 1947 and 1978...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This work, winner of the 1992 American Institute of Architects Award, surveys two and a half decades of architectural projects in Europe. It begins with the completion of the first commissions embodying the ideas that sprang out of the exuberant events of 1968, and ends with the official unification of Europe...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This richly illustrated and designed book in the "Architecture in Focus" series reconsiders critical regionalism and demonstrates the global viability of one of the most visible trends in contemporary architecture. As globalization increasingly enters every facet of our lives, its homogenizing effects on architecture, urban spaces and the landscape have compelled architects to embrace the principles of critical regionalism, an alternative theory that respects local culture, geography and climate...read more

Product Description: The exploration of how movement and stationary form interact is as old as the act of designing itself. The built structure must strive for stability and equilibrium - and yet doors, corridors and stairways, and elevators, train stations and airports all serve, in their many different ways,to facilitate the locomotion of man and things...read more