More than ever, architecture is in need of provocation, a new path beyond the traditional notion that buildings must serve as vessels, or symbols of something outside themselves. Non-Referential Architecture is nothing less than a manifesto for a new architecture. It brings together two leading thinkers, architect Valerio Olgiati and theorist Markus Breitschmid, who have grappled with this problem since their first encounter in 2005. In a world that itself increasingly rejects ideologies of any kind, Olgiati and Breitschmid offer Non-Referential Architecture as a radical, new approach free from rigid ideologies. Non-referential buildings, they argue, are entities that are themselves meaningful outside a vocabulary of fixed symbols and images, and their historical connotations. For more than a decade, Olgiati and Breitschmid's thinking has placed them at the forefront of architectural theory. Indispensable for understanding what the future might hold for architecture, Non-Referential Architecture will become a new classic. The book's first edition, published in May 2018 by Simonett & Baer, was sold-out within months. This revised and slightly redesigned new edition makes this key text available again. Text in Italian.

The story of Leeds and its architecture in the 120 years before the First World War was one of remarkable development: industrial growth on an heroic scale. As an adjunct to commercial, manufacturing and commercial change came a stunning array of new buildings, sufficiently grand to reflect the town's achievements as well as its aspirations. In this book a total of 36 architects who practised in Leeds are chronicled.

He was a brawny, blue-eyed, Irish-American religious convert who became a holy warrior in the name of Islam -- until the holy war began to change.
Aukai Collins grew up hard: abandoned, surviving in the streets and running with thugs. While serving time, he converted to Islam, and went to fight with the Muslims who were targeted for genocide in Chechnya and Bosnia. This led him to Usama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. As terrorist attacks on civilians around the world intensified, Aukai was asked to lead a mission that included hostage taking and the killing of civilians -- something he would not do.
Disillusioned by those who used Islam for their own ends or to attack innocents, Aukai offered his services to the FBI and CIA as a counter-terrorist operative, even getting close to one of the leaders of the September 11 attacks. Yet his greatest strength -- providing insight into the problems surrounding the U.S. government's fight against something it doesn't understand -- was ignored by inept members of the American intelligence community.
"My Jihad" is an insider's story about the greatest threat to world peace and stability in modern times, told by an unforgettable true-life warrior who has walked the walk, fought the fights, and lived to tell about it.

To his critics, he was the cynical magus of a movement that debasedhigh art and reduced it to a commodity. To his admirers, he was the mostimportant artist since Picasso. As the quintessential Pop artist, Andy Warhol razed the barrier between high and low culture.

Pop disentangles the myths of Warhol from the man he truly was, offering a vivid, entertaining, and provocative look at the legendary artist's personal and artistic evolution during his most productive and innovative years. It is a dynamic, groundbreaking portrait of the man who changed the way we see the world.

Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) was an American architect and artist, one of the first licensed female architects in the world, designer for Frank Lloyd Wright's Chicago studio, and an original member of the Prairie School of architecture. Largely heralded for her exquisite presentation drawings for both Wright and her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, Mahony was an adventurous designer in her own right, whose independent and highly original work attracted attention at a moment when architectural drawing and graphic illustration were becoming integral to the design process.

This book examines new research into Mahony's life and paints a vivid portrait of a woman's place among the lives and productions of some of our most noted American architects. The essays included take us on an ambitious journey from Mahony's origins in the Chicago suburbs, through her years as Wright's right-hand woman and her bohemian life with her husband in Australia--whose new capital city, Canberra, she helped to plan--up until her golden years in the middle of the twentieth century. Filled with richly detailed analyses of Mahony's works and including and populated by an international cast of characters, "Marion Mahony Reconsidered "greatly expands our knowledge of this talented, complex, and enigmatic modern architect.

What does it mean to build a house? How can it change a life? What happens if the builder is a woman, a teacher and a writer, a woman unaccustomed to tools? How does such a woman come to build at all? What happens, then, if that first house, whose every nail is known, is sold? How does one leave such a house, leave and go on to build another? This is a building story, but more it is a story of a woman builder and those without whom she could not have built. It is about how building changed not only that woman but also her sense of what a house is, how she came to know that building houses of wood builds the house of the spirit.

A pulse-pounding real-life chase for an ancient masterpiece of immeasurable value . . .

Sotheby's. New York City. June 19, 1990.

Nothing of its kind had been sold to the public in more than a century. On a warm June evening on Manhattan's Upper East Side, with the auction-house showroom crammed with the wealthy, the curious, and the press, history was made when an anonymous man in a green golf sweater paid an unprecedented three quarters of a million dollars to win the twenty-five-hundred-year-old chalice. After that night, this historical artifact disappeared, its whereabouts a mystery. "Until now."

It is among the most prized of antiquities: the Greek artist Euphronios's wine cup depicting the death of Zeus's son Sarpedon at Troy. Lost for more than two millennia, the chalice--one of only six of its kind found intact--mysteriously surfaced in the collection of a Hollywood producer, who then sold it to a Texas billionaire. Coveted by obsessed private collectors, dealers, and museum curators, it was also of intense interest to the Italian police, who believed it belonged to their country, where it had first been dug up earlier in the twentieth century.

In this breathtaking tale of history, adventure, and intrigue, archaeologist and journalist Vernon Silver pieces together the extraordinary tale of the lost cup and offers a portrait of the modern antiquities trade: a world of tomb raiders, smugglers, wealthy collectors, ambitious archaeol-ogists, rapacious dealers, corrupt curators, and international law enforcement. Spanning twenty-five hundred years, "The Lost Chalice" moves from the mythic battlefield of the Trojan War to the countryside of twentieth-century Tuscany, the dusty libraries of Oxford University to the exhibition halls of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the cramped law-enforcement offices of the Carabinieri to the tony rooms of New York's auction houses to solve the mystery of the world's rarest masterpiece.

As Silver learns, the discovery of the chalice exposes another riddle--and an even greater missing treasure. Epic and thrilling, "The Lost Chalice" is a driving true-life detective story that illuminates a big-money, high-stakes, double-dealing world, which is as fascinating as it is unforgettable. Silver's thrilling tale opens a window onto Italian history, culture, and life rarely seen.

Today, the Kunsthaus Graz is integral to the urban identity of Austria's second-largest city. The "friendly alien" designed by architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier has become a familiar object in the city since landing in 2003. But views on the building have changed with the times. Looking back at nearly twenty years of history since the building's creation, the book opens up a kaleidoscopic perspective with a primary focus on how the Kunsthaus is used. It contextualizes the Kunsthaus Graz both locally and globally while exploring its relation to those who use it. With written contributions by Barbara Steiner, Sophia Walk, Pablo von Frankenberg, Anselm Wagner, Katia Huemer, Niels Jonkhans, Elisabeth Schloegl, Peter Cook, and Colin Fournier, and photographic contributions by Arthur Zalewski and Martin Grabner

Toby Gotesman Schneier has become enormously popular as a writer over the past several years. Her now infamous blog, I AM GODDESS XREBBITZIN, has earned her international acclaim, as well as being noted as "one of the top three blogs on spiritualism in the world." She pushes the envelope in ways that are charming, hilarious, and extremely edgy. This "fictional memoir" will keep the reader guessing, laughing, crying, and wanting more. This story, the first in a series of four, examines the life and times of famed exrebbetzin Missy Gold Meinfeld, her exploits, her meandorings, and her indefatigable spirit and humor. It is breathtakingly honest and reflective, setting forth a plethora of situations and convoluted life circumstances.

Johannes Kister, Reinhard Scheithauer (until 2020) and Susanne Gross have been running their offices in Cologne since 1992 and Leipzig since 2007, as well as recently opening a Berlin branch. The three protagonists have produced remarkable, inspiring buildings, including the major, sculptural facility of the University of Applied Sciences Bremerhaven (2005), which impresses with its solid, haptic materiality. Text in English and German.

"Bertie's story is a testament to the 3 T's--tenacity, talent, and triumph. She just kept on fighting and we are all the better for it.--Willa Sorensen, retired principal and school board member.

Custom and Innovation: John Miller + Partners is the first publication devoted to the work of John Miller + Partners, and explores Miller's work from his student days at the Architectural Association, to his present practice as a multi-award winning firm. The book provides an insight into the contemporary fascination with museum buildings as well as the revived interest on post-war modernism both in Europe and the USA. John Miller + Partners is responsible for some of the most highly regarded museum and university projects of the past 25 years, such as the Queen's Building and the extension to Tate Britain, as well as schemes for the Fitzwilliam Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
Custom and Innovation: John Miller + Partners takes a close look at the architects' body of work, and examines its working practices, such as John Miller's indebtedness to Modernism and its proponents, such as Le Corbusier. Further, the book sets out the practice's departure from its precedents by showing its work to be wholly contemporary and of its moment.
Fascinating texts by respected architects and writers elucidate the firm's contribution to modern architecture. Kenneth Frampton, well known for his writing on twentieth century architecture, looks at the work of John Miller in the context of the museum building, and other typologies he works with. Robert Maxwell, Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Princeton, writes extensively on architecture, combining consultancy and architectural criticism, and here looks at the historical context of John Miller + Partners' work. Finally, Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, London, focuses on the early work produced by John Miller through his student days to his partnership with Alan Colquhoun.

The terms 'analogue architecture' and 'oldnew architecture' are key aspects of the teaching of Miroslav Sik at the ETH Zurich. During his first period there (1983-1991), Sik worked as Senior Assistant at the Chair of Fabio Reinhart and was in effect the spokesman of an architectural movement that became renowned far beyond the borders of Switzerland and is still influential today. In 1986/1991, the compact movement presented itself to the public with a touring exhibition and an accompanying large-scale 'Swiss Box', including chalk perspective drawings of its projects. Miroslav Sik worked as a Full Professor at the ETH Zurich between 1999 and 2018 during his second period there. Since the 1990s, Sik's theory and teaching have formed an important pillar of Swiss and international architectural history. This extensive volume contains the best 90/120 works respectively by students from both periods of Miroslav Sik's teaching, including plans, project descriptions and perspective diagrams. Some of the presented students went on to become renowned contemporary Swiss architects. This volume also includes the most important manifesto-like texts by Miroslav Sik and enlightening essays on the movement of analogue and oldnew architecture.

Thinking About Remodeling? Whether it's big or small, a room addition, a new kitchen, an in-law suite, a new facade, a porch, whole house makeover - or whatever - this unique book will help you arrive at the correct design solution for your specifi c home. Written and illustrated by a licensed architect, nationally recognized for his expertise in the fi eld, this book is specifi cally written to help steer you clear of the many pitfalls encountered in remodeling. Whether you're a do-it-yourselfer, or you intend to engage professional contractors, this is a step by step guide organized to help you make the correct design choices for your home. With over 1000 illustrations and 300 different plans there is likely a plan, or many different plans, that should satisfy your budget as well as your needs.

Since he followed it all of his life, Richard Neutra (1892-1970) must have relished the maxim of the Greek philosopher Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." In his books, articles, lectures, correspondence, and even casual conversations, Neutra constantly examined, not only his own life, but the lives of others - present and past - and the human and natural world they inhabited. Nowhere was this truer than in his autobiography "Life and Shape," first published in 1962, which now, after years of being out of print, has again happily come back to life.

As opposed to "Survival Through Design" (1954), his superb collection of densely philosophical essays, Neutra took a different tack in "Life and Shape," following a lighter and more deliberately relaxed approach. It was as if the usually serious and intense Neutra was giving himself permission to reveal his richly ironic sense of humor and to probe areas in his personal experience which he had not examined as closely before. These included hitherto unrecorded memories of his parents, siblings, and his childhood and education in imperial Vienna, his numbing experiences as an Austrian artillery officer in World War I, and the beginnings of his architectural consciousness in his response to the work of Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Erich Mendelsohn, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

As in the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright, "Life and Shape" concentrates on Neutra's earlier years, both in Europe and America. While he naturally recounts his memories of such well-known commissions as the Lovell Health House (1929), his own Van der Leeuv Research House (1933) and the von Sternberg House (1935), he also muses on such less famous buildings as the small, and now virtually forgotten, Mosk House (1933). "Life and Shape" also confirms Neutra's obsession with the passage of time and his firm resolution never to waste it.

Like Sullivan and Wright, Neutra eschewed writing a factual chronicle, and - at the age of 70 - composed instead a meditation on the aspects of his life and work that seemed, in retrospect, to be the most interesting and significant. He felt no need to try to "include everything" but rather to present an honest recounting of his memory of his life. In writing my own "Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture" Oxford University Press, 1982; Rizzoli Press, 2006], I relied on "Life and Shape" when I wanted an account of Neutra's experiences told in his own authentic voice. For future generations of architects, historian, and readers, it is good to have it back.

- Thomas S. Hines, UCLA Professor Emeritus of History and Architecture

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, THE LAST VERMEER, STARRING GUY PEARCE: A revelatory biography of the world's most famous forger--a talented Mr. Ripley armed with a paintbrush--and a deliciously detailed story of deceit in the art world. It's a story that made Dutch painter Han van Meegeren famous worldwide when it broke at the end of World War II: A lifetime of disappointment drove him to forge Vermeers, one of which he sold to Hermann Goering in mockery of the Nazis. And it's a story that's been believed ever since. Too bad it isn't true. Jonathan Lopez has drawn on never-before-seen documents from dozens of archives for this long-overdue unvarnishing of Van Meegeren's legend. Neither unappreciated artist nor antifascist hero, Van Meegeren emerges as an ingenious, dyed-in-the-wool crook. Lopez explores a network of illicit commerce that operated across Europe: Not only was Van Meegeren a key player in that high-stakes game in the 1920s and '30s, landing fakes with famous collectors such as Andrew Mellon, but he and his associates later cashed in on the Nazi occupation.

Dietrich | Untertrifaller are outstanding representatives of the second generation of the New Vorarlberg Building School. Their buildings are always sensitive and, at the same time, confidently developed from the respective context; they display a spatial refinement, are formally disciplined, and feature finely nuanced materials. With a longstanding international reputation, the practice undertakes a wide spectrum of projects from its branches in Bregenz, Vienna, St. Gallen and Paris. Some of their latest works include the Omicron campus in Klaus, the Concert and Congress Center in Strasburg, and the University of Fine Arts in Nancy. This monograph presents the most important works of recent years in detail and provides a complete overview of the entire oeuvre of the architects, who are known for their efficient use of resources.