Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation." The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challenge--artists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquiry--brought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested.

Richard Rogers Talking Buildings introduces young readers to the work of one of the 20th Century’s most influential architects for the first time.

Written by his son, Ab Rogers, the book pays homage to Richard’s passion for legibility in architecture, each building tells its own story in a playful, informative language designed to intrigue, engage and inspire young minds. In addition to exploring the architect’s groundbreaking work, it celebrates his commitment to innovative building design that drives social and environmental change and shines light on his vision for a city that is fair and fun for all, his ethos as relevant today as ever before.

The book marks the opening of the exhibition of the same name at the Sir John Soane Museum, which runs from the 18th of June to the 21st of September 2025.

Since the dramatic discovery and tragic destruction of the monument in the 19th century, the Amar vat st pa in the south-east Deccan has attracted many scholars but has also left many unanswered questions. Akira Shimada's "Early Buddhist Architecture in Context" provides an updated and comprehensive chronology of the st pa and its architectural development based on the latest sculptural, epigraphic and numismatic evidence combined with the survey of the early excavation records. It also examines the wider social milieu of the south-east Deccan by exploring archaeological, epigraphic and related textual evidence. These analyses reveal that the flowering of the st pa was not a simple accomplishment of the powerful S tav hana dynasty, but was the result of the long-term development of urbanization of this region between ca. 200 BCE-250 CE.

In Cistercian Architecture and Medieval Society Maximilian Sternberg offers an account of the social functions of the built environment in medieval monasticism. Few medieval monuments hold so privileged a place in the modern imagination as Cistercian abbeys, yet Sternberg suggests, it is precisely our own, peculiarly modern fascination with the idea of 'Cistercian aesthetics' that has hindered a full view of the complex social meanings of their architecture. This book draws attention instead to the practical and symbolic means by which architecture helped the Cistercians to negotiate the dense web of relations that, in actuality, bound them to other spheres of medieval society. It explores the permeability of monastic boundaries, and considers their effectiveness in reconciling a simultaneous need for interaction and distance between monastic communities and these other social spheres.

Dear reader, if you are holding in your hands the book "Legends of the Phoenix" by A.V.Trehlebov, then in just a moment a magnificent journey awaits you filled with fascinating knowledge about the hidden history of our world and some of the most fascinating societal processes to ever occur. If you have already read a few dozen books on the subject but are still asking yourself the questions "Who am i?" "What is my purpose here?" or "Why do we die?" then this book will become a treasure within your library. If you are still searching for the answers to the age old questions of the origins of life on earth, the origins and evolution of our modern civilization, the origins of different races, the true history of the people on earth, our spiritual growth as humans, or the universal laws of the universe, then this book has come to you at the right time. Through years of scientific study, this non-fiction tractate is written in a simple yet fascinating manner and is suitable for all readers. The phoenix, as in the title of the book, is an ancient Russian symbol symbolizing the rebirth of Russia and the Slavic people. From folk tales it is written that these birds rise from their ashes, are then reborn in a magical flame and appear in a purer form. Since history has always been written by, and for the benefit of the current rulers, disregarding any previous facts or knowledge, we use the experience and heritage of our ancestors which have been laid out in the "Legends of the Phoenix." "Legends of the Phoenix" is devoted to the revival of the ancient, million year old culture and heritage of the Slavic people. The information in this book has deep roots from the Slavic Vedas dating back hundreds of thousands of years with knowledge not yet fully discovered by our modern civilization. Consisting of two parts, the first part "Origin of the Slavic-Aryans" discusses the root origins of the Slavic people, the ancient texts and archaeological monuments, the eon old Slavic ancestry, our beliefs, morals, commandments, and the answers to the mysterious wise tales of the Slavs. The second part called "The Path to Light" discusses the connection and meaning of the Slavic and Hindu Vedas, the stages of the ancient Slavic spiritual belief "Rodoveriye," the meaning of spiritual development, the paths and goals of our ancient societies, the wisdom behind each stage of life and how to get ready for and create virtuous offspring, the nature of divine and demonic entities and their purpose, the importance of understanding your inner self and past lives, the structure of all our energy bodies, the origins of the Vedas, what it means to have a non-dualistic view of the universe, and the secrets of the Golden Path.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION THE exhaustion of the first edition of this book, within so short a time of its publication, makes it difficult to add much new matter for the reissue now called for, or, in the light of subsequent research and experience, to revise what had already been written. Any book that seemed to show a way of meeting the present building difficulties, however partially, was fairly assured of a welcome, but the somewhat unforeseen demand for my small contribution to the great volume of literature on cottage-building is, I think, to be attributed chiefly to its description of Pise- building. Of the very large number of letters that reach me from readers of the book, quite ninety-nine out of every hundred are concerned with Pise. The other methods of building have their advocates and exponents, but it is clearly Pise that has caught the attention of the public as well as of the Press both at home and abroad, and it is to this method of construction that I have chiefly devoted my attention since the writing of the book as it first appeared. In our English climate Pise-building is a summer craft, and the small-scale experiments of one person through a single summer cannot in the nature of things add very greatly to the sum of our knowledge of what is possible with Pise and of what is not. Most of the new data have come through the building of Mr. Stracheys demonstration house, an account of which is included in the present volume. At the time of writing, various tests are being carried out with the help of the National Physical Laboratory but the results, though exceedingly encouraging, are not yet ready for publication. 1 The fact that Pise- building is essentially aDry-earth method makes necessary the creation of artificial summer conditions under which the experiments may be conducted 1 Certain of these have since been issued and will be found in Ap pendix IV. at the end of the book. 484387 Preface to Second Edition during the past winter. As a result of these researches, a considerable mass of useful data has become available for the opening of the present building season. 1 Much helpful information is also likely to come to us from the Colonies, particularly from Rhodesia and British East Africa, where there is great activity in Pise-building, and where there is no close season such as our winter us here. imposes upon It is instructive also to note that great interest in Pise- building has been aroused in Canada and in Scandinavia, the two countries that we were wont to associate particularly with timber-building. From both I have received a number of letters complaining of the lumber shortage, and discussing the advantages of Pise as compared with their traditional wood-construction. If these great timber countries are themselves feeling the pinch, the advocates of wooden houses for England may find that they are not merely barking up the wrong tree, but up a tree that is not even there. The timber famine is, - in any case, a calamity to anyone dependent on building, that is to everyone, for even a Pise house must still have a roof and floors and joinery. But to invoke the timber house as our salvation under existing conditions seems to be singularly perverse and unhelpful...

Architecture and Control makes a collective critical intervention into the relationship between architecture, including virtual architectures, and practices of control since the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. Authors from the fields of architectural theory, literature, film and cultural studies come together here with visual artists to explore the contested sites at which, in the present day, attempts at gaining control give rise to architectures of control as well as the potential for architectures of resistance. Together, these contributions make clear how a variety of post-2000 architectures enable control to be established, all the while observing how certain architectures and infrastructures allow for alternative, progressive modes of control, and even modes of the unforeseen and the uncontrolled, to arise. Contributors are: Pablo Bustinduy, Rafael Dernbach, Alexander R. Galloway, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Maria Finn, Runa Johannessen, Natalie Koerner, Michael Krause, Samantha Martin-McAuliffe, Lorna Muir, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Anne Elisabeth Sejten and Joey Whitfield

This new volume addresses the lasting contribution made by Central European emigre designers to twentieth-century American design and architecture. The contributors examine how oppositional stances in debates concerning consumption and modernism's social agendas taken by designers such as Felix Augenfeld, Joseph Binder, Josef Frank, Paul T. Frankl, Frederick Kiesler, Richard Neutra, and R. M. Schindler in Europe prefigured their later adoption or rejection by American culture. They argue that emigres and refugees from fascist Europe such as Gyoergy Kepes, Paul Laszlo, Victor Papanek, Bernard Rudofsky, Xanti Schawinsky, and Eva Zeisel drew on the particular experiences of their home countries, and networks of emigre and exiled designers in the United States, to develop a humanist, progressive, and socially inclusive design culture which continues to influence design practice today.