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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Architectural structure & design
This guide to the designs, technologies and materials that really make green buildings work will help architects, specifiers and clients make informed choices, based on reliable technical information. "Low Impact Building: Housing using Renewable Materials" is about changing the way we build houses to reduce their 'carbon' footprint and to minimise environmental damage. One of the ways this can be done is by reducing the energy and environmental impact of the materials and resources used to construct buildings by choosing alternative products and systems. In particular, we need to recognise the potential for using natural and renewable construction materials as a way to reduce both carbon emissions but also build in a more benign and healthy way. This book is an account of some attempts to introduce this into mainstream house construction and the problems and obstacles that need to be overcome to gain wider acceptance of genuinely environmental construction methods. The book explores the nature of renewable materials in depth: where do they come from, what are they made of and how do they get into the construction supply chain? The difference between artisan and self-build materials like earth and straw, and more highly processed and manufactured products such as wood fibre insulation boards is explored. The author then gives an account of the Renewable House Programme in the UK explaining how it came about and how it was funded and managed by Government agencies. He analyses 12 case studies of projects from the Programme, setting out the design and methods of construction, buildability, environmental assessment tools used in the design, performance in terms of energy, air tightness, carbon footprint and post-occupancy issues. The policy context of energy and sustainability in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is subjected to a critical examination to show how this affects the use of natural and renewable materials in the market for insulation and other construction materials. The debate over energy usage and embodied energy is discussed, as this is central to the reason why even many environmentally progressive people ignore the case for natural and renewable materials. The book offers a discussion of building physics and science, considering energy performance, moisture, durability, health and similar issues. A critical evaluation of assessment, accreditation and labelling of materials and green buildings is central to this as well as a review of some of the key research in the field.
Architecture China focuses on cutting-edge architectural designs with regional characteristics in contemporary China. This issue, Winter 2020, Architecture as Infrastructure, selects a series of pioneering architectural cases in China elaborating on how a new kind of architectural infrastructure can be formulated. It includes two essays respectively written by Zhang Bin and Tan Zheng, and the built projects of the 11th Horticultural Exposition of Jiangsu Province. Another series of built projects "Toilet Revolution" is also included. Both the academic writings and architectural practice in this issue reveal the hidden potential of urban infrastructure in the current construction in China.
Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites--separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources--to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.
The architecture of Michael Hopkins' (b.1935) formative years has evolved into something that defies easy stylistic categorization. In buildings such as Glyndebourne Opera House, the Inland Revenue Centre and the New Parliamentary Building, a new individuality has emerged. These works have the uncompromising quality of certain nineteenth-century industrial buildings, yet they have gained acceptance among some of Britain's most ancient institutions. They are often hybrid creations, juxtaposing strongly contrasting elements, while remaining loyal to a strict code of truth to materials and honesty of expression. Traditional and new forms of construction are combined in unconventional ways, often using innovative prefabrication techniques, but without sacrificing traditional craft virtues. Detailed presentations of 26 buildings and projects analyse the genesis and logic of a unique - and now instantly recognizable - architectural scope. This book's publication coincided with Hopkins' most important commission to date - the New Parliamentary Building in London - which enjoys an extensive presentation and detailed discussion by Patrick Hodgkinson. An essay by respected architecture critic Charles Jencks examines themes and historical precedent in the buildings, whereas an interview with Michael Hopkins himself gives a personal perspective to the momentous work and office of Michael Hopkins and Partners.
The Fundamentals of Architecture, 2nd Edition is an introduction to the basic ideas that inform architecture. It is intended to unravel the complexity of architecture to explain its process and make it more accessible. It guides students through the rich history of the discipline, and introduces aspects of contemporary theory and practice. The book explores the process of architecture starting from the initial ideas and concepts, and how these ideas are informed by understanding site and context. It examines the impact of the physical environment and the historical ideas that have informed and influenced the architectural solution. The second edition has been redesigned and updated with new material, including six case studies, exercise sections and contemporary visuals from students and leading architects.
The book is a guide for students and teachers to understand the need for, the role of and the methods and techniques of freehand analytical sketching in architecture. The presentation focuses on drawing as an approach to and phase of architectural design. The conceptual goal of this approach is to use drawing not as illustration or depiction, but as exploration. The first part of the book discusses underlying concepts of freehand sketching in design education and practice as a complement to digital technologies. The main component is a series of chapters that constitute a typology of fundamental issues in architecture and urban design; for instance, issues of "facade" are illustrated with sketch diagrams that show how facades can be explored and sketched through a series of specific questions and step-by-step procedures. In the expanded and updated edition, a new part explores the questions and experiences of large architectural offices in applying freehand drawing in the practice of architectural design. This book is especially timely in an age in which the false conflict between "traditional vs. digital" gives way to multiple design tools, including sketching. It fosters understanding of the essential human ability to investigate the designed and the natural world through freehand drawing.
Recognising that buildings are a major contributor to global warming and the critical role of embodied versus operational carbon, the book focuses on houses built from materials that either sequester carbon (plants), use materials with very low embodied carbon (earth and stone) or reuse substantial amounts of existing materials. Organised by those materials (wood, bamboo, straw, hemp, cork, earth, brick, stone and re-use), and incorporating life cycle diagrams demonstrating how the raw material is processed into building components, the book shows how the unique properties of each material can transform the ways architects conceive the sections of houses. The house was selected as the vehicle for these investigations due to its scale, its role as a site of architectural experimentation, and its ubiquity. Building on the techniques of the Manual of Section, the book is comprised of newly generated cross-sectional drawings of 55 recent, modestly sized houses from around the world, making legible the tectonics and materials used in their construction. Each house is also shown through exploded axonometric, construction photographs and colour photographs of the exterior and interior. Introductory essays set up the importance of embodied carbon, the role of vernacular plant-based construction and the problems of contemporary house construction. Drawing connections between the architecture of the house, environmental systems and material economies, the book seeks to change how we build now and for the future.
The office has changed forever. Emerging from the pandemic, the workplace has undergone its greatest disruption since the dawn of the service economy. Covid has rewritten the rule book about how, when, where and even why we work. How can investors, developers, designers, operators and users of office buildings navigate this new climate of uncertainty to create successful places to work in the future? Reworking the Workplace delves into this changing landscape. Divided into three sections - People, Purpose and Place - it identifies the emerging trends in the reworking of work culture and offers insights into innovations and ideas that will inform the workplace of tomorrow. In doing so, it recognises the enduring importance of physical place for meaningful human connection and explores how this must be refocussed in an increasingly virtual world. Featuring over 50 international case studies, including Amazon Fresh, Brent Cross Town London, Capita Springs Singapore, Carrefour, Diageo, Disney, King's College London, Mission Rock San Francisco, Salesforce, Virgin Money and WeWork Tackles topical workplace themes: hybrid working, wellbeing, ESG, operationalising working experience, value of place, experience destinations, physical/virtual interface and future cities Combines essential design guidance with up-to-date workplace thinking throughout.
New in the architectural series (previous published in this series: The Fast Guide to Architectural Form) is The Fast Guide to Accessibility Design. Written by Baires Raffaelli, this book explores ways to create a project that focuses on accessibility. It is a reminder that serves as a checklist for those who design everyday spaces we live in. It is a random (but not too random) collection of indications to make cities more accessible. This book wants to remind us that we are not alone and as long as we take this into consideration, we will design welcoming, inclusive and functional spaces.
Since its first publication in 1974, Principles of Structure has established itself at the forefront of introductory texts for students of architecture, building and project management seeking a basic understanding of the behavior and design of building structures. It provides a simple quantitative introduction to structural engineering, while also drawing connections to real buildings that are more complex. Retaining the style and format of earlier editions, this Fifth Edition brings the text and examples into alignment with international practice. It also features six new buildings from around the world, illustrating the principles described in the text. The book begins with a chapter explaining forces and their
effects. Other chapters cover ties and struts, loadings, graphical
statics, bracings, shears and moments, stresses, deflections, and
beam design. There is also an appendix with a fuller explanation of
fundamentals for readers unfamiliar with the basic concepts of
geometry and statics.
Detail-Practice: Dry Construction provides an overview of the most widely used dry construction systems, organized according to the building components wall, ceiling, and floor and their applications. The volume is conceived as a practical manual for design and planning. Dry construction in interior design employs "dry construction systems" in place of moisture-retaining materials such as concrete and plaster. Not only is this construction method cost-effective, since the full range of physical requirements, including thermal, cold, and sound insulation, fire safety, etc., can be satisfied. Thanks to the use of new material technologies, it also affords the designer nearly unlimited freedom, since the surfaces involved are almost infinitely malleable as well as multifunctional, capable of assuming the tasks of lighting, heating, and cooling. The general section is supplemented by examples from existing projects with clearly visible reference details as well as from special constructions, for example, in damp locations. The book shows the potential this construction method obtains from the use of new materials and construction systems. As in the preceding volumes of the series, standard drawings are used to illustrate common construction details. Karsten Tichelmann is the director of the Institut fur Trocken- und Leichtbau (Institute for Dry and Lightweight Construction) at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt (Darmstadt University of Technology). Jochen Pfau is professor of light-tech, dry, and lightweight construction at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt. Both are authors of the Trockenbau Atlas (Dry Construction Manual) published by the R. Muller Verlag (available in German only).
With more than half of the world’s population now living in urbanized areas and the threats of climate change and resource depletion becoming tangible, Sustainable Urban Design is quickly becoming a critical field. The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook gathers the best sustainability practices and latest research from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, development, ecology and environmental engineering and presents them in a graphically rich and easy to access format that is a resource for urban design projects of all scales. The book presents a comprehensive Sustainable Urban Design Framework that organizes the many elements of urban design in relation to four main resource targets: Transportation Based Energy Use, Water, Ecology and Habitat, and Non-Transportation Based Energy Use and Production and four key scales: Regional, Neighborhood/District, Street/Block, and Project/Parcel. The framework allows designers and planners to see the range of elements they should address in any given scale project as well as the related elements that exist at other scales. Each element is broken out in its own section that describes the element and its importance, compares typical practices and recommended approaches, explains the connection to other elements, and ends with a list of ‘Rules of Thumb’ that can be used to directly guide project work. Easy to use and reference, The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook provides both an in depth introduction to topics across sustainable urban design and serves as an on-going desktop reference for anyone involved in the creation of sustainable urban environments.
In 2020, the COVID pandemic unfolded and transformed the lives of billions across the world. As the invisible killer marched across continents, causing unprecedented disruption worldwide, architects and designers began rethinking how to design cities and adapt their practice so that we might continue to live together in the future. Architecture after COVID is the first book to explore the pandemic's transformative impacts upon the architectural profession. It raises new questions about the intertwined natures of architectural production, science, society, and spatial practice - questions which had lain latent in the profession for years, but which the COVID pandemic brought to the fore. The book explores how the pandemic modified the spatial conventions of everyday life in the city, and looks in detail at how it has transformed building typologies. It also shows how the continuing risk of pandemics leads us to rethink the social dimension of architecture and urban design; and ultimately proposes a radical re-evaluation of the conditions of architectural practice - making a compelling argument about the changing agency of architectural design and the importance of designers in re-ordering the post-pandemic world. Packed with interviews and case-studies from a wide range of contemporary design practices, Architecture after COVID will inspire debates among architectural practitioners and theorists alike. The broad view of the approach and the depth of the professional issues at stake mean that this book will offer key insights for the discipline long beyond the scope of the COVID pandemic - as it explores the long-lasting bond between city, science and society as the 'new normal' begins to emerge.
If you love Christmas, you'll love this book! It's the perfect antidote to the traditional tinsel and glitter that shed harmful microplastics, polluting our oceans and waterways. The Eco-Christmas Craft Book is filled with lots of ideas to create your own stylishly beautiful, eco-friendly Christmas. All you need to do is save up some recyclable or foraged items such as cardboard, newspaper, wine bottle corks, twigs and pine cones. You can choose your own colour scheme to match your home and, because the materials are recyclable, you could make new ones every year! Including all the things that make Christmas special, such as tree decorations, advent items, Christmas cards, table decorations, wreaths and many more, there are 30 fabulous projects to make, and ideas for many more. So start collecting and learn how to make gorgeous, professional-looking decorations cheaply, without harming the planet.
Climate change is a threat to humankind, which requires immediate action. The built environment has a vital role to play in responding to the climate and biodiversity emergencies. There is a pressing need for architects and industry professionals to acquire the requisite skills and knowledge to design buildings that deliver holistic sustainable outcomes, meeting the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge and mandatory competence in climate literacy. Equipping you with the key information that built environment professionals require to halt climate change and mitigate its impacts in your day-to-day work, this book is organised around six overarching topics: Human Factors Circular Economy Energy and Carbon Water Ecology and Biodiversity Connectivity and Transport Featuring images and original illustrations, each themed section will guide you through fundamental elements and competencies for creating an integrated sustainable design and delivery framework that can be implemented by you in your practice. Contextualising the climate emergency within the built environment landscape, the book maps out the essential background knowledge around climate science, international agreements, legislations, commitments and roadmaps. It explores shared themes of retrofit, disaster risk resilience and climate justice, among others. A collection of short, building- and urban-scale case studies present key takeaways, illustrating real-life applications of design strategies and industry-wide tools, as well as standards that are deployed in climate-conscious built environments all around the world.
This is a one-stop book for knowing everything important about building structures. Self-contained and with no prerequisites needed, it is suitable for both general readers and building professionals. follow the history of structural understanding; grasp the concepts of structural behaviour via step-by-step explanations; apply these concepts to a simple building; see how these concepts apply to real buildings, from Durham Cathedral to the Bank of China; use these concepts to define the design process; see how these concepts inform design choices; understand how engineering and architecture have diverged, and what effect this had; learn to do simple but relevant numerical calculations for actual structures; understand when dynamics are important; follow the development of progressive collapse prevention; enter the world of modern structural theory; see how computers can be used for structural analysis; learn how to organise and design a successful project. With more than 500 pages and over 1100 user-friendly diagrams, this book is a must for anyone who would like to understand the fascinating world of structures.
Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology. Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, this mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Today, we have slowly come to realize that the legacy of this mythology is haunting us. Designers understand the urgency of reducing humanity's negative environmental impact, yet perpetuate the same mythology of technology that relies on exploiting nature. Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remain inherently unsustainable. Lo-TEK, derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs, countering the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. It is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems. With a foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis and four chapters spanning Mountains, Forests, Deserts, and Wetlands, this book explores thousands of years of human wisdom and ingenuity from 18 countries including Peru, the Philippines, Tanzania, Kenya, Iran, Iraq, India, and Indonesia. We rediscover an ancient mythology in a contemporary context, radicalizing the spirit of human nature. The tactile reading experience of Lo-TEK reflects the ingenuity of carefully selected projects with sophisticated design details: copper highlights the value of ancient knowledge, a cardboard hardcover echoes rawness, and the Swiss binding showcases an open spine and reveals the construction of the book, just as the book discloses hidden technological knowledge.
Increase the photorealism of your 3d visualizations with enhanced toolsets of V-ray in 3ds Max. Full-color, step-by-step tutorials about techniques involved in creating photorealistic renders for interior/exterior scenes. Each tutorial includes a 3d project scene to guide you through, production and post-production. The production chapter shows how to create shaders, fine-tune textures and set up a day/night lighting rig. You will be rendering high-res images with render elements included for the final stage of post-production. The book also includes tips about, pre-production, camera settings, verified views, material editors, shaders, 3ds max scripts, and much more! Key Features This book deals with real world scenes and delivers up to date design direction. This book has professional supporting files ready for the reader to open and explore. This book highlights the processes of making your own content that not only gives images your personal touch, but also through the online content that will be made available for this title. Includes some coverage of VRay. Focuses in depth on separate issues surrounding interior, exterior and product design, which vary wildly.
Ancient architects and artists had a way of striking resonant chords in the viewers of their work. This book points to a possible way of returning a sense of unity to the visual arts through a combination of theoretical ideas and practical methods, of narrative description and visual exercises. Proportion, the use of number and geometry as design tools, is seen in the context of the search for the beautiful. From the theoretic, symbolic mathematics of the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Neo-Platonists, the book proposes an aesthetic theory, a way of approaching beauty, rooted in the idea of psyche and expressed through the ancient sciences of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Topics treated include: an explanation of the concept of symbolic or qualitative number; an introduction to Pythagorean and Platonic numerical philosophy; the nature of beauty and its relation to number; the derivation of the ancient musical octave; the Golden Section, its mathematics, geometry, and relation to philosophy, particularly its role as a geometrical logos; and the connection of these ideas to the numerical-geometrical canons of classical architecture. These concepts are illustrated step by step as applied to the elements and archetypal compositions of classical architecture, such as the order and portico, using arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic ratio methods. The proportional idea is illustrated with reconstructions of exemplary buildings based on the methods described, following through the historical periods of Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle ages, the Italian Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Though the book is focused on architecture, the methods presented may be used by artists and designers in any visual field. The book suggests several pathways on which contemporary designers might move toward creating a sane and beautiful world through a merger of art and science.
Create high-quality photorealistic renders of architectural visualizations using 3ds Max and Vray with the project-based tutorials in this book. Learn how to combine lighting and rendering options to end-up with the most realistic final renders possible at a professional level. The tutorials in this book are filled with beautiful full-color images and they teach you how to light both interiors and exteriors and daytime and nighttime scenes. Learn how to save time without sacrificing the quality of your final renders with tips and tricks on rendering with Vray - the most accurate rendering application for 3ds Max. The downloadable resources include all the project files that you need to recreate each of the projects presented within the book. Please note that this book does not support the current versions of 3ds Max and V-Ray. Topics include:
A Victorian club house in a castle in the West End of London, complete with battlements and turrets. A design for the post-war reconstruction of the capital in 1945. A fantasy landscape featuring Le Corbusier's Capriccio of Notre-Dame du Haut in ruins. This is a treasury of architectural drawing from the 16th century to the present day. Exploring both how and why architects draw, it offers a rich visual history from Palladio, Inigo Jones and Augustus Pugin to Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid, via Sir Christopher Wren, George Gilbert Scott and Erno Goldfinger, and everything else in between. From back-of-envelope concept sketches to painstaking pen-and-ink perspectives, exploded axonometrics and born-digital drawings, this book celebrates the full gamut of architectural representation. With over 200 lush, full-colour reproductions, this is a window into the soul of architectural drawing over the past five hundred years. Includes newly digitised, never-seen-before material from the RIBA Collections, one of the largest architectural archives in the world. Explores rare drawings and designs from John Nash, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Frank Lloyd Wright and many more. Insightful commentary alongside each drawing ensures that each image is as accessible and engaging as possible. Wide-ranging in scope, this book will both inspire and inform.
An evocative chronicle of the power of solitude in the natural world I'm often asked, but have no idea why I chose Iceland, why I first started going, why I still go. In truth I believe Iceland chose me.-from the introduction Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self. Island Zombie is a meditation on being present. It vividly conveys Horn's experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through powerful evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena-the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety-we come to understand the author's abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn's creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While brilliantly portraying nature's sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness. Filled with musings on a secluded region that perpetually encourages a sense of discovery, Island Zombie illuminates a wild and beautiful Iceland that remains essential and new.
This textbook responds to the increasing demand for practical, industry aligned, ethical practices in quantity surveying, construction management and related AEC professions. Professional Ethics for Construction and Surveying addresses how existing ethical standards can be pragmatically applied to both private and contracting practice, with case studies aligned with the ethical requirements of the main professional bodies. After an introduction to ethics, the authors present real-world situations where the minimum legal and contractual requirements necessitate the combination of professional judgement and ethical decision-making. They outline how such situations arise, then address how decisions can and should be made that are in keeping with the moral, contractual and CSR requirements, with cases covering the building lifecycle from procurement to handover. Consequently, the book brings together ethical theory, existing worldwide ethical standards and the requirements of the RICS, the CIOB and the ICES, with the authors' experiences of examining candidates for entry into the professional bodies. The result is a professionally focused textbook aimed at vocational learners (at both undergraduate and postgraduate taught levels) and practitioners in construction, engineering, architecture and the wider built environment.
The richness and diversity of Dutch contributions to the built environment of South Africa remain little-known in the study of twentieth-century architectural history. Between 1902 and 1961 more than seventy Dutch-born émigré architects were active from the Cape to the Highveld, both in major towns and remote areas, and they designed hundreds of buildings and neighborhoods. A sequel to the acclaimed Eclectic ZA Wilhelmiens: A Shared Dutch Built Heritage in South Africa, Common Ground reveals the great variety of styles and building types from this period, ranging from buildings for communities, religious practice, banking, industry, and civil infrastructure to the evolution of the Pretoria dwelling and low-cost housing. These contributions are also contentious as they relate to the time of the entrenchment of apartheid. Yet these architects' extant work is an undeniable part of South Africa today and often still in daily service. |
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