The augmentation of urban spaces with technology, commonly referred to as Media Architecture, has found increasing interest in the scientific community within the last few years. At the same time architects began to use digital media as a new material apart from concrete, glass or wood to create buildings and urban structures. Simultaneously, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers began to exploit the interaction opportunities between users and buildings and to bridge the gaps between interface, information medium and architecture. As an example, they extended architectural structures with interactive, light-emitting elements on their outer shell, thereby transforming the surfaces of these structures into giant public screens. At the same time the wide distribution of mobile devices and the coverage of mobile internet allow manifold interaction opportunities between open data and citizens, thereby enabling the internet of things in the public domain. However, the appropriate distribution of information to all citizens is still cumbersome and a mutual dialogue not always successful (i.e. who gets what data and when?). In this book we therefore provide a deeper investigation of Using Information and Media as Construction Material with media architecture as an input and output medium.

After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France examines key groups of actors - state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers - arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of the Trente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects', planners', and residents' understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the "right to comfort" as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.

Buildings Across Time brilliantly explores the essential attributes of architecture by uniquely combining both a detailed survey of Western architecture, including Pre-Columbian America, and an introduction to architecture from the Middle East, India, Russia, China, and Japan. Authors have searched out the stories these buildings have to tell, considered the intentions of the people who built them, and examined the lives of those who used them. The text contains extensive descriptive narrative leavened with focused critical analysis, which both allows the book to stand alone and invites lecturers to impose their studied interpretations on the material without the danger of undue ambiguity or conflict. In a world that grows smaller by the day, it presents a global perspective, and in a discipline that concerns built objects that are often beautiful as well as functional, it is copiously illustrated, intelligently designed, and consistently usable.

India in Art in Ireland is the first book to address how the relationship between these two ends of the British Empire played out in the visual arts. It demonstrates that Irish ambivalence about British imperialism in India complicates the assumption that colonialism precluded identifying with an exotic other. Examining a wide range of media, including manuscript illuminations, paintings, prints, architecture, stained glass, and photography, its authors demonstrate the complex nature of empire in India, compare these empires to British imperialism in Ireland, and explore the contemporary relationship between what are now two independent countries through a consideration of works of art in Irish collections, supplemented by a consideration of Irish architecture and of contemporary Irish visual culture. The collection features essays on Rajput and Mughal miniatures, on a portrait of an Indian woman by the Irish painter Thomas Hickey, on the gate lodge to the Dromana estate in County Waterford, and a consideration of the intellectual context of Harry Clarke's Eve of St. Agnes window. This book should appeal not only to those seeking to learn more about some of Ireland's most cherished works of art, but to all those curious about the complex interplay between empire, anti-colonialism, and the visual arts.

-- The oldest continuously settled community in the United States, St. Augustine has weathered Spanish, British, and American governments, several wars, and many changes in architectural fashion
-- Richly illustrated with original watercolors and color photographs to show representative styles and forms
-- Each chapter covers a separate era in St. Augustine's history and discusses the city's distinctive character during that era as well as how architectural styles evolved
-- Offers a history of attempts at historic preservation and suggests future remedies
-- For those who appreciate diverse architectural styles

This book shifts the frame of reference for today's network- and structure oriented discussions from the applied computational tools of the 20th century back to the abstractness of 19th century mathematics. It re-reads George Boole, Richard Dedekind, Hermann Grassmann and Bernhard Riemann in a surprising manner. EigenArchitecture argues for a literacy of the digital, displacing the role of geometrical craftsmanship. Thus, architecture can be liberated from today's economical, technocratic and bureaucratic straight jackets: from physicalistic optimization, sociological balancing, and ideological naturalizations. The book comprises a programmatic text on the role of technology in architecture, a philosophical text on the generic and on algebraic articulation, and six exemplary projects by postgraduate students in 2012 at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This volume builds upon the new worldwide interest in the global Middle Ages. It investigates the prismatic heritage and eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, while challenging the temporal and geographical parameters of the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early-modern art. Contact and interchange between primarily the Latin, Greek, and Slavic cultural spheres resulted in local assimilations of select elements that reshaped the artistic landscapes of regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north. The specificities of each region, and, in modern times, politics and nationalistic approaches, have reinforced the tendency to treat them separately, preventing scholars from questioning whether the visual output could be considered as an expression of a shared history. The comparative and interdisciplinary framework of this volume provides a holistic view of the visual culture of these regions by addressing issues of transmission and appropriation, as well as notions of cross-cultural contact, while putting on the global map of art history the eclectic artistic production of Eastern Europe.

A lost sketch book on a Portuguese castle rampart left Manuel Joao Ramos bereft, and the impulse to draw deserted him - but his first trip to Ethiopia reawakened this pleasure, so long denied. Drawing obsessively and free from care, his rapidly caught impressions convey the rough edges of the intensely lived experiences that are fundamental to the desire to travel. For the travel sketch is more than a record or register of attendance (`been there, seen that'): it holds invisibly within itself the remnant of a look, the hint of a memory and a trace of an osmosis of feelings between the sketcher and the person or objects sketched. Less intrusive than using a camera, Ramos argues drawing comprises a less imperialist, more benign way of researching: his sketchbook becomes a means of communication between himself and the world in which he travels, rendering him more human to those around him. As he journeys through the Ethiopian Central Highlands, collecting historical legends of the power struggles surrounding the arrival of the first Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century, he is drawn to the Portuguese legacy of castles, palaces and churches, near ruins now, though echoes of their lost splendour are retained in oral accounts. Excerpts from his diary, as well as journalistic pieces, share the conviviality of his encounters with the priests, elders and historians who act as custodians of the Amhara oral tradition. Their tales are interwoven with improvised, yet assured, drawings, and this informality of structure successfully retains the immediacy and pleasure of his discovery of Ethiopia. It also suggests the potential for drawing to play a more active part in anthropological production, as a means of creating new narratives and expositional forms in ethnography, bringing it closer to travel writing or the graphic novel.

How to Read Modern Buildings is an indispensable pocket-sized guide to understanding the architecture of the modern era. It takes the reader on a guided tour of modern architecture through its most iconic and significant buildings, showing how to read the hallmarks of each architectural style and how to recognise them in the buildings all around. From Art Deco and Arts and Crafts, through the International Style and Modernism to today's environmental architecture and the rise and fall of the icon, all the major architectural movements from the 1900s to the present day are traced through their classic buildings. Examining the key architectural elements and hidden details of each style, we learn what to look out for and where to look for it. Packed with detailed drawings, plans, and photographs, this is both a fascinating architectural history and an effective I-spy guide, it is a must-read for anyone with an interest in modern design and architecture.

This book covers new strategies, technology and methods for creating advanced architectural scale models, including the principles of digital NURBS modeling, parametric modeling and model manufacturing. Offers numerous tutorials, examples and practical advice.