In Central Asia, Muslim shrines have served as community centers for centuries, particularly the large urban shrines that seem, in many cases, to have served as the inspiration as well for a city's architectural development. In Four Central Asian Shrines: A Socio-Political History of Architecture R. D. McChesney documents the histories of four such long-standing shrines-Gur-i Mir at Samarqand, Khwajah Abu Nasr Parsa Mazar at Balkh, the Noble Rawzah at Mazar-i Sharif, and the Khirqat al-Nabi at Qandahar. In all four cases the creation and evolution of the architecture of these shrines is traced through narratives about their social and political histories and in the past century and a half, through the photographic record.

Great buildings are those that ignite the imagination and elevate us beyond reality, and - by those standards - Coromandel House in South Africa is truly a masterpiece. This unique farmhouse, which sits in a spectacular valley in Lydenburg, 275kms north-east of Pretoria, was built in 1975 and has since developed a cult following for its unusual aesthetic - part building, part ruin, part wilderness - inspiring anyone with an interest in building within a natural context. It is something explored by Creating Coromandel: Marco Zanuso in South Africa. Coromandel House was designed by the Milanese architect Marco Zanuso (1916-2001), who was commissioned by the South African fashion retailer Sydney Arnold Press (1919-97) and Press's wife Victoria de Luria Press (1927-2015). They met in 1969, and their shared design passions sparked a decade-long partnership that yielded not only Coromandel House, a structure on the Press family's vast farm, but also Edgardale (1978), their business headquarters. Creating Coromandel explores the association between the clients, the architect and prominent personalities, including photographers David Goldblatt (1930-2018) and Margaret Courtney-Clarke (born 1949), German-born architect Steffen Ahrends (1907-1992), Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) and Italian landscape architect Pietro Porcinai (1910-1986). Through impressive photos, sketches and testimonials, this monograph narrates and records an unknown period in Zanuso's portfolio. He designed small-scale products (in the field of industrial design) as well as large-scale architecture (warehousing for IBM and Olivetti) but, with Coromandel House, Zanuso competently mediated both scales. Creating Coromandel documents Zanuso's extraordinary responses to landscape and his sensational interiors, but also offers a glimpse into the design process and amount of collaboration it involves. For fans of Coromandel it provides a single reference source; for architects, designers, historians, photographers and anyone interested in design and architecture it provides an inspirational story behind the process of building a legacy.

In recent years, smart cities have been an emerging area of interest across the world. Due to this, numerous technologies and tools, such as building information modeling (BIM) and digital twins, have been developed to help achieve smart cities. To ensure research is continuously up to date and new technologies are considered within the field, further study is required. The Research Anthology on BIM and Digital Twins in Smart Cities considers the uses, challenges, and opportunities of BIM and digital twins within smart cities. Covering key topics such as data, design, urban areas, technology, and sustainability, this major reference work is ideal for industry professionals, government officials, computer scientists, policymakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

In early modern times scholars and architects investigated age-old buildings in order to look for useful sources of inspiration. They too, occasionally misinterpreted younger buildings as proofs of majestic Roman or other ancient glory, such as the buildings of the Carolingian, Ottonian and Stauffer emperors. But even if the correct age of a certain building was known, buildings from c. 800-1200 were sometimes regarded as 'Antique' architecture, since the concept of 'Antiquity' was far more stretched than our modern periodisation allows. This was a Europe-wide phenomenon. The results are rather diverse in style, but they all share an intellectual and artistic strategy: a conscious revival of an 'ancient' architecture - whatever the date and origin of these models. Contributors: Barbara Arciszewska, Lex Bosman, Ian Campbell, Eliana Carrara, Bianca de Divitiis, Krista De Jonge, Emanuela Ferretti, Emanuela Garofalo, Stefaan Grieten, Hubertus Gunther, Stephan Hoppe, Sanne Maekelberg, Kristoffer Neville, Marco Rosario Nobile, Konrad Ottenheym, Stefano Piazza, and Richard Schofield.

In this paradigm shifting study, developed through close textual readings and sensitive analysis of artworks, Clare Lapraik Guest re-evaluates the central role of ornament in pre-modern art and literature. Moving from art and thought in antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, she examines the understandings of ornament arising from the Platonic, Aristotelian and Sophistic traditions, and the tensions which emerged from these varied meanings. The book views the Renaissance as a decisive point in the story of ornament, when its subsequent identification with style and historicism are established. It asserts ornament as a fundamental, not an accessory element in art and presents its restoration to theoretical dignity as essential to historical scholarship and aesthetic reflection.

In Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy, Brian L. McLaren examines the architecture of the late-Fascist era in relation to the various racial constructs that emerged following the occupation of Ethiopia in 1936 and intensified during the wartime. This study is conducted through a wide-ranging investigation of two highly significant state-sponsored exhibitions, the 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma and 1940 Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d'Oltremare. These exhibitions and other related imperial displays are examined over an extended span of time to better understand how architecture, art, and urban space, the politics and culture that encompassed them, the processes that formed them, and the society that experienced them, were racialized in varying and complex ways.