Hans Dieter Schaal is already something of a cultural institution in Germany. Trained as an architect, he always operates outside the "main stream", designing and realizing stage sets, sculptures, cemeteries, parks, squares, spatial installations or book projects, which are often trendsetting in their own field. In the last ten years Schaal has established a focal point that seems to be the sum of all his themes: exhibition architecture. He has provided expansive installations for the broadest possible range of exhibition subjects in such high-volume buildings as the Martin-Gropius-Bau or the Zeughaus in Berlin, the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, the Kunstvereinsgebaude in Stuttgart, the Deutsches Postmuseum or the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. His work was never mere exhibition design in these cases. Instead of this he was always concerned to tell spatial stories about the exhibits or their historical background. Of course he was able to draw on his experience in stage-set design here. Admittedly Schaal would not be Schaal, if he were not to use the whole stock of ideas from his decades of lateral thinking or his insatiable search for archetypes and images. On occasions this has meant that Schaal's exhibitions were ad-mired simply of their spatial sensations. It was only the very few people who were prepared to analyse the extraordinarily extensive and complex work more profoundly who found a carefully established subliminal relationship network of selected motifs running through all his exhibition installations like a central theme. Sometimes they come from his own early work, sometimes from literary or cinematic finds, then again from psychological-philosophical footnotes or even private obsessions. Such image particles constitute a thought-edifice perhaps comparable only with Aby Warburg's legendary picture archive which breaks right through the bounds of traditional exhibition architecture. Frank R. Werner has been director of the Institut fur Architektur-geschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universitat in Wuppertal since 1993. He studied painting, architecture and architectural history at the Kunstakademie in Mainz, the Technische Hochschule in Hanover and Stuttgart University.

Barns of New York explores and celebrates the agricultural and architectural diversity of the Empire State from Long Island to Lake Erie, the Southern Tier to the North Country providing a unique compendium of the vernacular architecture of rural New York. Through descriptions of the appearance and working of representative historic farm buildings, Barns of New York also serves as an authoritative reference for historic preservation efforts across the state.

Cynthia G. Falk connects agricultural buildings both extant examples and those long gone with the products and processes they made and make possible. Great attention is paid not only to main barns but also to agricultural outbuildings such as chicken coops, smokehouses, and windmills. Falk further emphasizes the types of buildings used to support the cultivation of products specifically associated with the Empire State, including hops, apples, cheese, and maple syrup.

Enhanced by more than two hundred contemporary and historic photographs and other images, this book provides historical, cultural, and economic context for understanding the rural landscape. In an appendix are lists of historic farm buildings open to the public at living history museums and historic sites. Through a greater awareness of the buildings found on farms throughout New York, readers will come away with an increased appreciation for the state's rich agricultural and architectural legacy."

Intent on realising her late husband's vision, Dorothy de Rothschild first offered to provide funding for a new building housing the Supreme Court of Israel in the 1960s. In 1983 the offer was seriously considered and accepted. Renowned architects from Israel and from all over the world entered into a two-stage competition in 1986. Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi, siblings their own architecture practices, were asked to compete as a team. Their contribution stood out clearly against the other entries. Instead of proposing a formal and monumental scheme, the Karmis came up with a coherent site-specific building which roots itself into the land, continues the stone language of Jerusalem, and relates to its unique vibrant light. Pure geometrical volumes are arranged to form a balanced composition and complex whole. A careful equilibrium is created between the gravity of local stone-masonry walls and the immaterial play of light and shadow in the voids and volumes of the structure. The Supreme Court acts as part of a larger civic urban ensemble and forms a gateway to Government Hill offering a pedestrian walkway to the Knesset. While referred to as a single building, in reality the Supreme Court building is an ensemble applying urban principles to the interior, thus producing public spaces throughout. Half architecture, half landscape architecture, the building is deeply anchored in its site and reaches out further than its own walls. Four main functions are manifested in four distinct geometric volumes organised by two cardinal axes. These axes separate the four main program elements: the library, the judges' chambers, the courtrooms and the parking area. The allocation of the various volumes within the building allows for a sequence of in-between spaces which are used for circulation, for the penetration of natural light and for the transition between the public and private domains. Paul Goldberger stated in The New York Times in 1995 that "the sharpness of the Mediterranean architectural tradition and the dignity of law are here married with remarkable grace.

A new perspective on a beloved cultural icon, its place in our history, and its meaning in the American imagination This elegantly written appreciation of the Empire State Building opens up the building's richness and importance as an icon of America. The book leads us through the facts surrounding the skyscraper's conception and construction, then enters into a provocative theoretical discussion of its function as an icon, its representation in pictures, literature, and film, and the implications of its iconic status as New York's most important architectural monument to ambition and optimism. The Empire State Building literally cannot be seen in its totality, from any perspective. And paradoxically, this building of unmistakable solidity has been made invisible by familiarity and reproduction through imagery. Mark Kingwell encourages us to look beneath the strong physical presence of the building, to become aware of its evolving layers of meaning, and to see how the building lives within a unique imaginative space in the landscape of the American consciousness. He offers new ways of understanding the Empire State Building in all its complexity and surprising insights into its special role as an American icon.

Presenting a critical and theoretical dimension to retail design, Boutiques and Other Retail Spaces links the ideas behind it to real practice in this innovative and important contribution to architectural/interior theory literature.

Retail structure has been subject to a dramatic and ongoing transformation over the past thirty years, materializing in the emergence of large-scale out-of-town shopping centres and new specialized shops in city centres. These specialized boutiques are highly designed, involving well-known architectural firms such as OMA/Rem Koolhaas, David Chipperfield, Herzog + de Meuron amongst others.

With case studies and over 100 black and white images, Vernet and de Wit set forth original and well-grounded theory to accompany this popular and lucrative area of work.

Based on a lifelong professional and personal interest, "Traditional Buildings" presents a unique survey of vernacular architecture across the globe. The reader is taken on a fascinating tour of traditional building around the world, which includes the loess cave homes of central China, the stilt houses on the shores of Dahomey, the housebarns of Europe and North America, the wind towers of Iran, the Bohio houses of the Arawak Indians of the Caribbean, and much more. Professor's Noble's extensive travels have allowed him to examine many of the building at close quarters and the richly illustrated text includes photographs from his personal collection. With its comprehensive and detailed bibliography, the work will be welcomed by experts and non-specialists alike.

The new building for the Alfred-Wegener-Institut fur Polar und Meeresforschung, named after Alfred Wegener, the famous geo-scientific pioneer, is near the city centre by the commercial harbor, not far from warehouses and other industrial buildings. What is striking is the unusual facade: a pattern is made with glazed tiles in white, grey and black, seeming more regular than it actually is. The architects--pictorially speaking--have set up poles at the corners of the plot and stretched fabric between them.

"The Delirious Museum" gives a new interpretation of the relationship between the museum and the city in the twenty-first century. It presents an original view of the idea of the museum, proposing that it is, or should be, both a repository of the artefacts of the past and a continuation of the city street in the present. Storrie reviews our experience of the city and of the museum taking a journey that begins in the Louvre and continues through Paris, London, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, re-imagining the possibilities for museums and their displays and reexamining the blurred boundaries between museums and the cities around them. On his quest for "The Delirious Museum", he visits the museum architecture of Soane and Libeskind, the exhibitions of Lissitsky and Kiesler and the work of such artists as Duchamp and Warhol. Calum Storrie's premise is that the museum and the city street are continuous with one another: the city is a delirious museum, overlaid with levels of history and multiple objects open to many interpretations just as museums and their contents are. In support of his theme, he draws on multiple sources, from Walter Benjamin, Daniel Libeskind & Greil Marcus through Paul Auster and Peter Ackroyd, to Stephen Bayley, Norman Bryson & Sadie Plant and takes readers on a stimulating journey through cities and museums worldwide. Serious general readers interested in urban culture, design and architecture, as well as professional architects, cultural studies and museology academics will enjoy the book, which is beautifully illustrated in black and white.

Transport buildings--railway stations, airport terminals, bus and coach stations, motorway service areas, filling stations, and garages--are such a part of everyday scenery they are easily overlooked. This book is the first to take a close look at the architecture of British transport buildings of the twentieth century, a period during which transportation systems, methods, and even purposes underwent enormous change.

The contributors to the book consider transport buildings both well known and unfamiliar from a variety of intriguing viewpoints. They explore the design and promotion of the London Underground, the battle between road and rail, the intentions of architects--to glamorize travel, to calm fears, to accommodate huge numbers of travelers--and the political and cultural significance of the transport buildings that have become a major part of modern life.

Text in English and German. Linking art and architecture is one of the great Utopias of our century. Art has been released from its traditional bonds and sees itself faced with a world that has made systems independent to the extent that a link between art and building based on the idea of unity is no longer admissible. The collapse of our 'world into pieces' also typifies that situation of the arts looking for new orders. Now artist-architect Johannes Peter Holzinger, in co-operation with artists Eberhard Fiebig, Ottmar Horl/Formalhaut, Leonardo Mosso, Norbert Muller-Everling, Ansgar Nierhoff and Andreas Sobeck, working on the government buildings on the Hardthohe in Bonn, has succeeded in creating 'an avant-garde landmark that shows in the interplay of the arts that the avant-garde can also work positively in a team', as Dieter Ronte, director of the Stadtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, put it in a contribution to this book. Holzinger links heterogeneous artistic positions in attempting an order of the different. The art in the outer areas of the complex mediates between the surroundings and the buildings. The visual signing system leads further into the centres, which are the same shape, of the existing administrative buildings, and creates some thing that is unmistakable there. The special structures designed by Holzinger, an intermediate form of architecture and landscape developed from the relief, include the earth itself, and in the casino architecture and art combine to form an indissoluble unit.

How did a Roman waterworks work? How were the aqueducts planned and built? What happened to the water before it arrived in the aqueduct and after it left, in catchment, urban distribution and drainage? What were the hydraulics and drainage involved?In a comprehensive, generously illustrated study ranging through the Roman aqueducts of France, Germany, Spain, North Africa, Turkey and Israel as well as the Roman heartland of Italy, A. Trevor Hodge introduces us to these often neglected aspects of what the Romans themselves regarded as one of the greatest glories of their civilisation. "Roman Aqueducts" is now available for the first time in paperback, brought completely up-to-date with a new Preface and additional Bibliography.

Air pollution resulting from high energy consumption is a major factor threatening our environment. Heating buildings accounts for about 40 per cent of Germany's total energy consumption.Current heat-insulation regulations for buildings aimed at reducing energy consumption have become considerably more stringent. However, greater heat insulation and energy saving necessarily restrict the exchange of air between outside and inside the building. This means that air quality in the building deteriorates and CO(2) and other pollutant contents increase.

For this reason, when planning the district headquarters for the Berufsgenossenschaft Gesundheitsdienst und Wohlfahrtspflege (Professional Association for Health and Welfare) in Dresden the aim was to produce an economical, environment-friendly building with a high proportion of solar heating and workplaces designed ergonomically and with an eye to health requirements.

The main architectural features of the building are a glass wall running the full length of the south side, large glazed areas on the east and west sides and solid walls enclosing the building on the east, west and north sides. The curved roof opens to the south, thus establishing the building's relation to the sun. The building is conceived in such a way that the solar energy is used first and foremost passively via the building's outer sheath. Special glass converts light into warmth even when light radiation is diffuse. In this way solar energy meets 50 per cent of the building's total energy needs.

The atmosphere inside the building is determined mainly by the subtropical plants used to improve and condition the air. This creates interesting, pleasant workplaces that make a different impression as the seasons change. The offices are divided up by shelf units, which makes it possible to adapt flexibly to changing needs.

After the global success of Yes is More, one of the best-selling architecture books of its generation, BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group presents Hot to Cold, an Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation. The book coincides with the Hot to Cold show at the National Building Museum in Washington DC and presents 60 case studies in harsh climate conditions in order to examine where and how we live on our planet. As we travel from one end of the spectrum to its opposite we will see that the more harsh the climate gets, the more intense its impact on the architecture. The central challenge is to mitigate the climatic extremes for hospitable human life, while finding solutions that can be both economically and environmentally profitable. Architecture is the art and science of accommodating the lives we want to live. Our cities and buildings aren't givens; they are the way they are because that is as far as we have gotten to date. They are the best efforts of our ancestors and fellow planetizens, and if they have shortcomings, it is up to us to continue that effort, pick up where they left off. Hot to Cold stays true to BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group's grand mission to find a pragmatic utopia, shaping not only a particular structural entity, but the kind of world we wish to inhabit. The book features: Design from award-winning artists Sagmeister & Walsh Previously unpublished essays by Bjarke Ingels. A convertible dust jacket-poster.

Text in English and German. Despite their usually very large volumes, works by Eckhard Gerber's Dortmund practice are structurally light and transparent, precise in their detail, and make an unmistakable impact on the urban space. Presenting the new exhibition centre in Karlsruhe, this Opus volume is devoted to a building complex with all the self-confidence of a city-within-a-city. Admittedly visitors are not aware of that until they have passed a breath-taking exhibition loggia whose daring roof, protruding powerfully along the whole length of the building, attracts attention even from a distance. The basic concept, tailored to the urban landscape, the functional ground-plan arrangement, the unusually subtle use of structures and materials for a large building of this kind, and not least the high design quality of all structural parts will certainly mean a high level of acceptance and a long future for the Neue Messe in Karlsruhe.