Product Description: Having won more than one recent poll as Britain’s best-loved building, the appeal of Durham Cathedral appears abiding, which begs the question whether an iconic sacred building can retain meaning and affective pertinence for contemporary, secular visitors...read more

Product Description: In a globalizing world, frontiers may be in flux but they remain as significant as ever. New borders are established even as old borders are erased. Beyond lines on maps, however, borders are spatial zones in which distinctive architectural, graphic, and other design elements are deployed to signal the nature of the space and to guide, if not actually control, behaviour and social relations within it...read more

Architecture and its relationship to its users have a significant influence on life and activities within the built environment. This poses a particular challenge with regard to public buildings such as schools, which have to accommodate the needs of many different people in order to provide them with the best possible environment to support their performance.In this book, following a brief overview of the historical development of school buildings in different countries, contributions from international experts discuss how school buildings can work together with users' own creative responses and result in educational environments that are "alive." The give-and-take relationship between architecture and its users (students, teachers, parents, and the community at large) is emphasized from the point of view of architectural psychology and emerging considerations such as information technology. The "schools for the future" vision is to create spaces that people are pleased to return to, time and again, and that allow options for future modification in line with changing user requirements.Criteria for the assessment of schools are derived from a dual approach. The first is the call for a common language to be used by designers and educators, exemplified by a number of patterns that have been found to be salient in school design. Their common underlying premise is that learning environments should be learner-centered, appropriate to age and developmental stage, safe, comfortable, accessible, flexible, and equitable, in addition to being cost effective.The second approach presents instruments for the systematic assessment of school buildings according to facet theory, a tool that helps to structure the large number of possible influences and subjective indicators such as learning performance, expressions of well-being, and social behavior. Based on descriptions of 23 innovative schools in eleven countries on five continents, a system is developed that enables judgment of school quality. It applies the criteria of functional, esthetic, social-physical, ecological, organizational, and economical aspects to various parts of the overall school complex: Exterior, school building proper, entrance, classrooms, specialty rooms, interior and corridors, court-yards/open spaces and special areas.This book provides an essential resource for educators, architects, and policy makers involved in the planning and running of educational facilities.

*Winner of the Environmental Design Research Association 2016 Place Research Award!* In Cognitive Architecture, the authors review new findings in psychology and neuroscience to help architects and planners better understand their clients as the sophisticated mammals they are, arriving in the world with built-in responses to the environment that have evolved over millennia. The book outlines four main principles---Edges Matter, the fact people are a thigmotactic or a 'wall-hugging' species; Patterns Matter, how we are visually-oriented; Shapes Carry Weight, how our preference for bilateral symmetrical forms is biological; and finally, Storytelling is Key, how our narrative proclivities, unique to our species, play a role in successful place-making. The book takes an inside-out approach to design, arguing that the more we understand human behavior, the better we can design for it. The text suggests new ways to analyze current designs before they are built, allowing the designer to anticipate a user's future experience. More than one hundred photographs and drawings illustrate its key concepts. Six exercises and additional case studies suggest particular topics - from the significance of face-processing in the human brain to our fascination with fractals - for further study.

Product Description: How can we provide good spatial orientation for people with dementia?This question is addressed extensively in a selection of professional essays and projects that also carve out specific requirements for various disciplines. The book is a useful guide to all disciplines involved in design and planning but also to friends and family memebers...read more

In Masonic Temples, William D. Moore introduces readers to the structures American Freemasons erected over the sixty-year period from 1870 to 1930, when these temples became a ubiquitous feature of the American landscape. As representations of King Solomon’s temple in ancient Jerusalem erected in almost every American town and city, Masonic temples provided specially designed spaces for the enactment of this influential fraternity’s secret rituals. Using New York State as a case study, Moore not only analyzes the design and construction of Masonic structures and provides their historical context, but he also links the temples to American concepts of masculinity during this period of profound economic and social transformation. By examining edifices previously overlooked by architectural and social historians, Moore decodes the design and social function of Masonic architecture and offers compelling new insights into the construction of American masculinity. Four distinct sets of Masonic ritual spaces—the Masonic lodge room, the armory and drill room of the Knights Templar, the Scottish Rite Cathedral, and the Shriners’ mosque – form the central focus of this volume. Moore argues that these spaces and their accompanying ceremonies communicated four alternative masculine archetypes to American Freemasons—the heroic artisan, the holy warrior, the adept or wise man, and the frivolous jester or fool. Although not a Freemason, Moore draws from his experience as director of the Chancellor Robert R Livingston Masonic Library in New York City, where heutilized sources previously inaccessible to scholars. His work should prove valuable to readers with interests in vernacular architecture, material culture, American studies, architectural and social history, Freemasonry, and voluntary associations.

Product Description: This praxis-based book explores how an improvisational, creative and embodied practice such as the dérive works to defamiliarise our experience of the late modern built environment, fostering new insight into routinised cultural behaviours...read more

Product Description: Postmodern architecture - with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-culture kitsch - has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs...read more

Product Description: A comprehensive and eloquent argument for “new traditional” architecture that preserves the style and character of historic buildings. With contemporary design being redefined by architects and urbanists who are recovering the historic language associated with traditional architecture and the city, how might preservation change its focus or update its mission? Steven W...read more

Product Description: There is at the present time a continuing interest in relating the behavioral sciences to design disciplines. Sociologists and social psychologists have been added to faculties of architecture schools, where they off er seminars and participate as programming specialists and design critics in studio courses...read more

Product Description: This dazzling journey through the philosophy and psychology of architecture explores the indelible connection between our identities and our locations. Alain de Botton argues that our environment heavily influences who we can be.

A study of architecture examines how we both shape and are shaped by our private homes and public edifices and explains how our stylistic choices can be used to increase our chances of happiness.

This book is about the love and hate relations that humans establish with their habitat, which have been coined by discerning modern thinkers as topophilia and topophobia. Whilst such affiliations with the topos, our manmade as well as natural habitat, have been traced back to antiquity, a wide range of twentieth-century cases are studied here and reflected upon by dwelling on this framework. The book provides a timely reminder that the qualitative aspects of the topos, sensual as well as intellectual, should not be disregarded in the face of rapid technological development and the mass of building that has occurred since the turn of the millennium. Topophilia and Topophobia offers speculative and historical reflections on the human habitat of the century that has just passed, authored by some of the world’s leading scholars and architects, including Joseph Rykwert, Yi-Fu Tuan, Vittorio Gregotti and Jean-Louis Cohen. Human habitats, ranging broadly from the cities of the twentieth century, highbrow modern architecture both in Western countries and in Asia, to non-architect/planner designed vernacular settlements and landscapes are reviewed under the themes of topophilia and topophobia across the disciplines of architecture, landscape studies, philosophy, human geography and urban planning.

Product Description: For the past several years--and with seemingly limitless access--photographer Richard Ross has been making unsettling and thought-provoking pictures of architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them. From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques and diverse civic spaces including a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall and the United Nations, the images in "Architecture of Authority" build to ever harsher manifestations of power: an interrogation room at Guantánamo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital punishment death chamber...read more