This study examines the hundreds of secular and religious buildings, urban residential and commercial foundations, and public monuments commissioned in Lucknow and Oudh between 1722 and 1856 by the fabulously rich Nawabs of Oudh and their Court, the English East India Company, and others.

A deluxe, large-format edition of this beautifully illustrated introduction to Utagawa Hiroshige, thought to be the most successful ukiyo-e artist of Japan’s Edo period.

From the author of Hokusai: A Life in Drawing comes an illuminating account of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), the last great artist of the ukiyo-e tradition. Ukiyo-e, meaning ‘images of the floating world’, was a ubiquitous genre of Japanese woodblock prints during Japan’s Edo period, often depicting popular actors, sumo wrestlers, beautiful women and majestic landscapes. Hiroshige’s serene, atmospheric prints stood out from his predecessors, capturing the essence of the world around him, and eventually gained widespread acclaim in Europe and America, influencing western European artists like Manet, Monet and van Gogh.

This book offers a fascinating look at Hiroshige’s life and work, tracing the journey of a fire warden who turned to printmaking later in life. It invites readers to follow in Hiroshige’s footsteps through 19th-century Tokyo, discovering the iconic landscapes he immortalized while traveling the famed Tokaido and Kiso Kaido roads. It features an exceptional selection of works accompanied by vivid text, drawing from Hiroshige’s diaries, his talent for humorous poetry, taste for travel (with all its pleasures and challenges) and deep affinity for the natural world.

In making accessible a deep understanding of Hiroshige’s body of work, this volume transports readers to Edo, Japan, via the artist's timeless prints.

Was Britain's postwar rebuilding the height of mid-century chic or the concrete embodiment of crap towns? John Grindrod decided to find out how blitzed, slum-ridden and crumbling austerity Britain became, in a few short years, a space-age world of concrete, steel and glass. What he finds is a story of dazzling space-age optimism, ingenuity and helipads - so many helipads - tempered by protests, deadly collapses and scandals that shook the government.

‘People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look.’

From Warhol’s romantic relationships to his thoughts on interior design, these candid, highly entertaining musings - on love, sex, beauty, work and space – give an intimate glimpse into the mind of one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century culture.

The essential companion to discover the styles, architecture, form, significance and historical impact of castles from all over the world. How to Read Castles is a travel-size primer that takes a strictly visual approach to castle architecture, building up your vocabulary of castle types, styles and materials, and showing you how these aspects can be recognised across architectural features from the floor-plan and moat, to the towers and crenulations. Focusing on the 10th-16th century period, and crusading across the globe from a Welsh motte-and-bailey to a Japanese hirajiro, this is both an architectural reference and a visitor's guide showing you how to read the stories embedded in every castle's stones. Castles once dominated the landscape as seats of power and symbols of wealth and status, providing a means of control over borders, passes, routes and rivers. Armed with this book you will be able to unpick their histories and see how they shaped the land around them. From rugged coastline defences to soaring mountain fortresses, this book takes you on an international journey of discovery, exploring some of the most inspiring and impressive architecture history has ever seen.

The author started writing as a child. By seven wanted to be an architect. By twenty-four had become a builder. By thirty-four had become an architect registered and working in the UK. At the age of fifty he decided that architecture as a discipline was a social science of some sort. On this basis he earned a masters at UCL, then a PHD at Heriot Watt for discovering and defending philosophical position based on interpretation that he now calls thermenutics. When teaching about cultural contexts at the university of Ulster architectural school (2001 a " 2010) the link between perception and emotion became central to his interest. At which point he retired to write about understanding, in a series of books, this one being the fourth. The first three were about sharing the management of understanding. This fourth is about the way we share the management of understanding by way of conversations between us that allow us to understand each other.