Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham's "1909 Plan of Chicago", co-authored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city's most distinctive features. Carl Smith's fascinating history reveals the Plan's central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself. His concise and accessible narrative begins with a survey of Chicago's stunning rise from a tiny frontier settlement to the nation's second-largest city. He then offers an illuminating exploration of the Plan's creation and reveals how it embodies the renowned architect's belief that cities can and must be remade for the better. Smith points out the ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment. Richly illustrated and incisively written, this insightful book will be indispensable to our understanding of Chicago, Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.

Only few architecture firms in Europe have addressed the villa as a building type as consistently and with such formal rigor as Stuttgart-based Alexander Brenner Architects. The firm is widely known for designs characterised by plastic-geometric facades often resembling constructivist tableaux. What all of Alexander Brenner’s designs have in common is a truly holistic approach to the task. A house’s interior, kitchen, cupboards and other built-in furniture, is attended to with the same care for detail as its exterior. Corresponding gardens with curved sensual forms surround, and contrast, Brenner’s bright white cubic architectural sculptures. This new monograph follows-up on two successful previous volumes published in 2011 and 2015, and features five buildings realised between 2015 and 2021, including the architect’s own home in Stuttgart, the Brenner Research House. They are all documented in rich detail through striking photography, standardised plans and visualisations, as well as concise texts. An essay by Alexander Brenner rounds out this volume that serves again as a source of inspiration for anyone with an interest in residential architecture. Text in English and German.

Tom Munz established his St. Gallen office in 2013. Since then, he has produced a number of extremely high-quality buildings that are always developed with a special interest in structural and tectonic expression. For instance Wohnhaus Holzenstein in Romanshorn is a design inspired by Modernism, thriving on the interaction between reserved, beige-stained concrete wall surfaces and wooden window elements to achieve an extremely poetic radiance. Text in English and German.

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) is celebrated as a furniture designer, teacher, and architect who changed the American house after his emigration from Hungary to the U.S.A. in 1937. More recently historians, architects, and-with the reopening in New York of the great megalith of his Whitney Museum as the Met Breuer-a larger public are gaining new insights into the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned. Often seen as a pioneer of a "Brutalist modernism" of reinforced concrete, Breuer might best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional structures in and for which he worked, a vantage developed in the fresh approaches gathered here in essays by a group of younger scholars. These essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, now accessible online.

Das Buch dokumentiert erstmals umfassend das Gesamtwerk Josef Hoffmanns. Als Wagner-Schuler, Grundungsmitglied der Wiener Secession (1897), Professor an der Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule (1899-1936), Mitbegrunder der Wiener Werkstatte (1903), des Deutschen Werkbundes (1907) sowie des OEsterreichischen Werkbundes (1912) kultivierte er ein Modell moderner Lebensweisen auf der Basis einer handwerklich gepragten, kunstlerisch ambitionierten und gestalterisch avancierten Bau- und Produktkultur. UEber 40 illustrierte Essays namhafter ExpertInnen zu den wichtigsten Bauten, Interieurs, Ausstellungen, kunstgewerblichen Entwurfen und Produkten stellen alle Sparten seines grossen OEuvres dar. Grosszugige Bildstrecken, eine detaillierte Biografie und ein umfassender Dokumentationsteil runden das Buch zu einem neuen Standardwerk ab.

At various intervals between 1931 and 1945, Georgia O'Keeffe (18871986) completed seventeen drawings and paintings of katsina tithu ("kachina dolls"), the painted-wood representations of spirit beings carved by Native American artist -- especially Hopi and Zuni -- that have long played an important role in Pueblo and Hopi ceremonialism. O'Keeffe never explained how or why she became interested in these Native American carvings. Because she gave generic titles to her paintings of them except those works depicting Kokopelli, she may not have been aware of their specific names, meaning, or functions. But the artist always took inspiration from her immediate environment, whether working abstractly or representationally, often seeking subjects that conveyed her feelings for or experiences of specific places; her depictions of Native American spirit beings were no exception. As she later pointed out, "My pictures are my statement of a personal experience". The book, which accompanies a touring exhibition of fifty-three works by the artist, features fifteen drawings and paintings of katsina subjects made between 1931 and 1941 and thirty-eight additional works made between 1929 and 1953 that resulted from her deep exploration of the distinctive architecture and cultural objects of Northern New Mexico's Hispanic and Native American communities. Also included are numerous landscape paintings, a subject O'Keeffe addressed most consistently during her career. The book also features contributions by noted art historian W. Jackson Rushing III, Hopi weaver Ramona Sakiestewa, Hopi artist Dan Namingha, and Hopi tribal leader and author Alph H Secakuku. Rushing discusses O'Keeffe and other modernist painters, including Emil Bistram, Fred Kabotie, and Gustave Baumann, in their approach to Native subjects; Sakiestewa writes about O'Keeffe's katsina paintings and the influence the artist had on her own designs; Secakuku explicates katsinam ceremonalism; and Namingha is interviewed about katsina imagery in his work.

Since the mid-1990s, when China allowed its architects to practice independently from government-run design institutes, a new kind of architecture, distinguished by unique regional characteristics, has emerged. China Dialogues is a rigorously selected collection of insightful interviews that the book's author Vladimir Belogolovsky has conducted with 21 leading Chinese architects during his extensive travels in China. At the time when so many buildings that are being built around the world are no longer rooted in their place and culture, the leading Chinese architects succeeded collectively in producing unique architectural body of work that could not be confused with any other regional school. The interviews are accompanied by over 120 photographs and drawings of beautifully executed projects built throughout China since early 2000s. China Dialogues opens up the thinking process of the country's top architects, as they share their ideas, insights, intentions, and visions in unusually revealing and candid ways.

Text in English & German. Fritz Leonhardt would have been 100 years old in 2009. The Sudwestdeutsches Archiv fur Architektur und Ingenieurbau (saai) at the University of Karlsruhe is presenting the first full retrospective of this famous structural engineer's work, which holds his exten-sive estate. Leonhardt studied at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and then travelled in the USA. He made his professional debut with the German autobahn, for which he designed the Rodenkirchen suspension bridge in 1938-41. Leonhardt supported Herrmann Giesler's plans for the "capital of the movement" with a domed structure for the new main station in Munich, a project that was never realised. In the post-war period he worked mainly on reinforced and pre-stressed concrete structures. He combined pioneering structural innovations with a high standard of creative design. The television tower in Stuttgart, which he designed in 1953/54, is a good example of this. It has had countless successors all over the world. Leonhardt made important technical innovations in bridge-building in particular. He and his colleagues worked on the Dusseldorf family of bridges from the 1950s to the 1970s, diagonal cable bridges with an aesthetic shaping the urban landscape, and the Leonhardt, Andra und Partner practice founded by him created wide-span bridges all over the world based on these models. Leonhardt was involved as a structural engineer on the first post-war high-rise buildings in Germany. He worked with the architects concerned on the cable-net structures for the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, and for the roofs of the 1972 Munich Olympics buildings. The interplay between science and practice was crucial to Leonhardt. With texts by Hans-Peter Andra, Wolfgang Eilzer, Holger Svens-son and Thomas Wickbold, Ursula Baus, Norbert Becker, Dirk Buhler, Hans-Wolf Reinhardt and Christoph Gehlen, Theresia Gurtler Berger, Gerhard Kabierske, Joachim Kleinmanns, Karl-Eugen Kurrer, Alfred Pauser, Eberhard Pelke, Joerg Peter, Klaus Jan Philipp, Joerg Schlaich, Dietrich W. Schmidt, Werner Sobek, Elisabeth Spieker, Christiane Weber and Friedmar Voormann, Fritz Weller, and Fritz Wenzel.

La vie d'Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) fut pleine de contradictions. Jeune homme, critique a l'egard de l'Eglise, il rejoignit le mouvement nationaliste catalan, mais voua la fin de sa vie a la construction d'une eglise unique et spectaculaire, la Sagrada Familia. Il mena un temps une vie de dandy dans le beau monde, mais a sa mort dans un accident de tram a Barcelone, ses vetements etaient si miteux que les temoins le prirent pour un mendiant. L'incomparable architecture de Gaudi traduit cette multitude de facettes. Textures chatoyantes et structure squelettique de la Casa Batllo ou matrice arabo-andalouse de la Casa Vicens, son travail mele orientalisme, materiaux innovants, formes naturelles et foi religieuse pour faconner une esthetique moderniste unique. Aujourd'hui, son style particulier rencontre une popularite et une admiration mondiales. Son opus magnum, la Sagrada Familia, est le monument le plus visite d'Espagne et sept de ses oeuvres figurent au patrimoine mondial de l'humanite de l'UNESCO. Illustre de photos inedites, de plans, de dessins de la main de Gaudi et de cliches historiques, enrichi d'annexes approfondies presentant toutes ses creations y compris ses meubles et ses projets inacheves, cet ouvrage presente son univers comme jamais. A la maniere d'une visite guidee privee de Barcelone, on decouvre combien le "Dante de l'architecture" fut un constructeur au sens le plus pur du terme, qui faconna des edifices extraordinaires, foisonnant de details fascinants ou se materialisent les visions fantasmatiques au coeur de la ville. A propos de la collection TASCHEN fete ses 40 ans ! Depuis ses debuts en 1980 comme denicheur de tresors culturels, TASCHEN a toujours ete synonyme d'editeur accessible permettant aux devoreurs de livres du monde entier d'imaginer leur propre bibliotheque dediee a l'art, a l'anthropologie et a l'erotisme pour un prix imbattable. Nous fetons aujourd'hui 40 ans de livres incroyables en restant fideles au credo de la maison. La collection 40th Anniversary Edition presente de nouvelles editions de quelques-unes des stars de notre catalogue: plus compacte, a petit prix, mais toujours realisee avec la meme garantie d'une qualite irreprochable.

Based in Buenos Aires and New York, Estudio Ramos has developed a distinctive style that relies on a well defined vision of modernism. Through 35 years of experience the firm has developed its work with a deep respect for architectures principles. Their goal is to encourage reflection through a simple, pure and honest architectural language. Through 35 years of experience the firm has developed it's work with a deep respect for architecture's principles. In their long trajectory of residential and commercial building they seek to understand and interpret each project's context, pursuing its ideal scale and sustainability. In their long trajectory of residential and commercial building they seek to understand and interpret each project's context pursuing its ideal scale and sustainability. The particular nature of Estudio Ramos work's is strongly conferred from the use of the exposed concrete. It evokes stone, which emphasizes its qualities of durability and hardness while being crafted in an artistic manner.

The Zurich architects Annette Spillmann and Harald Echsle became renowned in 2006 with their container tower for the FREITAG bag and fashion label in Zurich. It represents 'architecture without architects' while also being a nonchalant solution for a common architectural programme in the midst of an inhospitable residual zone. The 2013 'House of Switzerland' in Sochi (Russia) is intelligently derived from the same approach. Text in English and German.

Text in English & German. The central Mosque of the Turkish-Islamic Union in Koeln-Ehrenfeld has given us one of the most vigorously discussed German building projects of the past 10 years. With this spectacular domed structure, Paul Boehm, the youngest son of Pritzker Prize-winner Gottfried Boehm and grandchild of Dominikus Boehm, has successfully introduced the Osman mosque typus into the modern age. The dome and minaret provide the Turkish / Islamic community with visual identification points. At the same time, this shell-construction structure is broken up into individual segments in a manner that opens it up to both the neighbourhood and the world. Containing conference halls, rooms for community use, a bazaar, a library and a museum, the complex is intended to convey to the surrounding area a message of retained ties to the historical country of origin coupled with acceptance and integration into the new homeland, and a willingness to engage in dialogue. Up to now the mosque represents the high point of the architectural career of Paul Boehm, who was born in 1959 and who is teaching at the Fachhochschule Koeln. His work encompasses a multitude of exciting projects and realised buildings, including cultural buildings, university buildings, administration buildings and residential buildings. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that an architect who comes from a family of church builders should have added an impressive religious structure to uvre. St. Theodor in Koeln-Vingst is a central-plan building that possesses a coherent atmosphere suited to contemplation whilst, at the same time, opening itself to a part of the city that suffers from social problems. Figures who have played a significant role in Paul Boehm's professional development include Tadao Ando, the master of velvet-smooth concrete, Oswald Mathias Ungers, the great lover of geometry, and Peter Zumthor, the essentialist of his generation. Like these three figures, the architects who Boehm worked with prior to founding his own firm in 2001, all espoused very different philosophies of architecture: Otto Steidle, Anton Schweighofer, Richard Meier . Paul Boehm does, of course, also owe a debt to the traditions of the family of architects that he comes from -- a tradition that he continues in his own individual way.

As synthetic materials, mutant and hybrid concoctions attain prominence in our daily lives - in our handheld devices, cooking utensils, vehicles, even things as simple as our shopping bags - the design and construction industries have instead reembraced the familiar, the conventional - wood, which has regained prominence through innovations in engineering and construction methodologies. Technology is now commonly used and often (though not always) affordably used - to cut, perforate, assemble, erect, and even fabricate materials in a manner not previously possible. Wood is one such material, and Timber in the City documents both the imaginings of those in the nascence of their education and practice and the executed work of design professionals at the leading edge of architecture. These designers, regardless of the duration of their immersion in the field, have imaginatively rethought the means by which we build and the methods by which we define space merely through differing deployments of a familiar building material.

Two architects, Jeanne Della Casa and Sylvie Pfaehler, together with their new partners Michael Perret and Lucile FontaRak, are working on a remarkable oeuvre in Lausanne. In the midst of an urban garden and an ensemble of housing, three timber residential developments have their own poetic radiance. The architects' award-winning works include clear tectonically structured residential buildings in Lausanne and the Lavaux region. Text in German and French.

In 2016, Dario Franchini and Diego Calderon founded two offices, one in Lugano and one in London. Since then, they have completed a number of small conversions and buildings with an experimental character. For the Palazzo del Cinema in Locarno, they carried out a relatively large conversion project including heightening measures. Their interventions are both precise and clinical. Text in English and German.

Laurent Lin, Alain Robbe and Rolf Seiler are the protagonists of the Geneva office founded in 1999. Since then, a dozen competition successes have resulted in several residential developments, a school building, an old people's home, commercial and administrative buildings, and individual homes. The designs are always pointedly critical and creative engagements with the building programme, the location and building regulations. Text in English and German.

Waro Kishi first caught the attention of the architectural world with his house in Nipponbashi, en elegant townhouse in an Osaka district full of stores marketing electric and electronic goods. Like a slender volume of poetry in a shelf otherwise crowded with how-to books, it is a work of remarkable lightness and transparency, four storeys high, 13 m deep, but only 2.5 m wide. The award-winning house, which has a steel-frame structure, is economically constructed of readily available materials such as cement boards, yet it is put together with enormous care. The austerity makes the high-ceilinged dining room, a dramatic eerie on the top floor, seem that much more luxurious. Kishi was educated at Kyoto University and opened his own office in Kyoto in 1981. Many of his buildings are located in the Kansai region, which, besides Kyoto, includes Osaka, Kobe and Nara. Kansai offers a working environment for architects that is very different from the one in Tokyo, where almost anything is permitted. It has an older history and, arguably, a more complex urban fabric that requires the observation of certain rules. A narrow frontage such as the one in Nipponbashi is commonplace in heavily built-up districts. The discipline that is demanded of someone working under such difficult conditions has helped to nurture Kishi's work. Born in 1950, Kishi belongs to the generation of Japanese architects that emerged after Tadao Ando. Although he has acknowledged the influence of the Oska architect, Kishi has a very different sensibility. His buildings are more delicate and subtle, and his designs are less driven by form. A self-described contrarian, who preferred the works of architects such as Marcel Breuer and Richard Neutra when many others were embracing Post-Modernism, he refuses in today's changed climate to be labelled a Modernist or Miesian.

Projects by Stefano Tibiletti and Catherine Glaeser-Tibiletti are clear architectural responses to the location and its urban morphology, translated into forms of typology and construction. A number of remarkable residential and public buildings have been erected in this way since 2006. Text in English and German.

When the A&M College of Texas opened its doors in 1876, its early buildings followed a Victorian architectural style. Classical architecture came to the campus with the Academic Building, after the 1912 fire that destroyed Old Main. Subsequent buildings generally followed this neoclassical path, but the growth of the campus in the Depression era saw the addition of an extraordinary group of buildings, sited in accordance with a master plan developed by college architect F. E. Giesecke and designed by S. C. P. Vosper, each of whom also held faculty positions in the first architecture program at a state college in Texas. The buildings designed by Vosper are arguably the finest buildings on the campus, uniquely expressive of the agricultural and mechanical origins of the university; they delight the senses with color, sculpture, and wit. Nancy T. McCoy and David G. Woodcock, distinguished preservation architects and scholars, review the history of Texas A&M campus architecture and provide in-depth coverage of Vosper and his legacy. Illustrated by the sumptuous photography of Carolyn Brown, Architecture That Speaks concludes with observations on recent approaches toward the reuse and rehabilitation of campus heritage architecture and a view to the future, as plans evolve for further development of the campus that maintains a respect for both strategic vision and historical heritage.

Combining the talents of an architect, artist, and developer, John Portman was able to embark on a series of large-scale building projects-megastructures-that radically redefined the relationship of architecture to the city and its citizens.Portman's own voice and ideas complement the contributions of others, including new photographs by Iwan Baan, to present a more complex and nuanced reading of both the architect and his architecture.Finally, the repertoire of Portman's buildings is analyzed in meticulous detail and used by a group of students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design as a catalyst for a host of divergent and new architectural speculations.

For around two decades, the architectural duo of Niklaus Graber & Christoph Steiger from Lucerne have been continuously working on the design and construction of high quality buildings that can without doubt be regarded as an enrichment to Swiss building culture. Although the architects attempt to make their works generally understandable and give them a timeless legibility, when designing them they take the risk of fundamentally questioning the relevant task. That often leads to surprising interpretations and tailored solutions that reveal the specific characteristics of each project. By now, their work includes private family homes and apartment buildings, as well as a considerable number of public buildings for educational, cultural, industrial and tourist purposes, which have attracted a great deal of attention on the specialist scene both in Switzerland and abroad. For instance the extension to a window factory in Hagendorn, the therapy centre for the Heilpadagogische Zentrum Uri and the panorama gallery on the peak of Mt. Pilatus have been awarded national and international architecture prizes. Text in German, with English translation booklet enclosed.

Text in German. Specialist literature on Schinkel has grown enormously since the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1981. But so far questions about the basis of his education and training remain unanswered. No one seems to have seen that Schinkel -- who is often called a classical or a Romantic architect -- was actually a son of the late Enlightenment. This is supported by his teachers' lesson notes (presented here for the first time), the educational periodicals of his period, private letters, exhibition catalogues and also treatises by avant-garde architectural theorists, who also have their say. It was a time of great elation, Kant's cry of 'sapere aude', have the courage to use your own reason, was the motto of this crucial epoch in the history of ideas. Schinkel's father, an unorthodox cleric, fought for the principles of the Enlightenment, and so did the teachers at the two progressive 'model schools' that Schinkel attended. For the first time, these schools brought children from all walks of life together under the same roof -- unheard of in those days. Friedrich Gedike, a leading Enlightenment teacher and the headmaster of Schinkel's grammar school Zum Grauen Kloster, not only tried to impart universal modern knowledge to his pupils, but also to educate them as citizens and servants of the state, with strong characters, and who could cope with life. The state was not just increasingly concerned with schooling, which had been dominated by the Church until that time, but also with education as a whole. The art academy, exhibitions and art as practised were to promote general enlightenment. To a certain extent this also applied to architecture. Friedrich Gilly, Schinkel's fervently revered master, even spoke of an architectural renaissance. The brightest minds of this period -- Schinkel met several of them -- were utterly convinced that the influence of science, culture and the fine arts was powerful enough to refine human nature and to sow peace and concord among nations. And so it is not surprising that the young Schinkel came to Fichte's philosophy at an early stage. Fichte defined the concept of virtue as the good will, which prevailed without exception, to "promote the purposes of humankind to the utmost of one's strength, and to promote them especially in the state, as it instructs". This became Schinkel's life's work.

In this essential TASCHEN introduction to Tadao Ando we explore the hybrid of tradition, modernism, and function that allows his buildings to enchant architects, designers, fashion designers, and beyond. Through key projects including private homes, churches, museums, apartment complexes, and cultural spaces, we explore a uniquely monumental yet comforting aesthetic that draws as much on the calm restraint of Japanese tradition as the compelling modernist vocabularies of Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. With featured projects in Japan, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States, we see not only Ando's global reach but also his refined sensitivity for the environs: the play of light through windows, and, in particular, the interaction of buildings with water. From the mesmerizing Church of the Light in Osaka to the luminous Punta della Dogana Contemporary Art Center in Venice, this is a radiant tour through a distinctly contemporary form as much as a timeless appeal of light, elements, and equilibrium. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts, and plans)