In this groundbreaking volume, conventional assumptions about one of England's greatest and most influential classical architects are turned on their head. Traditionally, Inigo Jones has been looked upon as an isolated, even old-fashioned, figure in European architecture, still espousing the Palladian ideals of the 16th century when European contemporaries were turning to the Baroque. Yet an investigation of contemporary European architecture and of Jones's buildings belies this impression, demonstrating that Jones must be viewed in the context of a European-wide, early-17th-century classicist movement. Giles Worsley examines the full range of Jones's architecture, from humble stable to royal palace. Worsley shows that key motifs that have been seen as proof of Jones's Palladian loyalties-particularly the Serliana, the portico, and the centrally planned villa-have a much older and deeper meaning as symbols of sovereignty. The book transforms our understanding not only of Inigo Jones but also of the architecture of his time. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Henri Labrouste is one of the few nineteenth-century architects consistently lionized as a precursor of modern architecture throughout the twentieth century and into our own time. The two magisterial glass-and-iron reading rooms he built in Paris gave form to the idea of the modern library as a collective civic space. His influence was both immediate and long-lasting, not only on the development of the modern library but also on the exploration of new paradigms of space, materials and luminosity in places of great public assembly. Published to accompany the first exhibition devoted to Labrouste in the United States--and the first anywhere in the world in nearly 40 years--this publication presents nearly 225 works in all media, including drawings, watercolors, vintage and modern photographs, film stills and architectural models. Essays by a range of international architecture scholars explore Labrouste's work and legacy through a variety of approaches.

A house is a representation of the idea of the world, of life, of existence. For the Cologne architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (19262007), owner of a famous collection of books on architecture, who also repeatedly addressed the theoretical aspects of building, the construction of his own house, in 1958/59, was more than a private adventure. For him it meant a chance to gain spatial experience and explore what was possible. It was a laboratory, a little universe, a piece of world. In the course of his life, Ungers built himself and his family no less than three houses, two in the Cologne suburb of Mungersdorf, one in the Eifel highlands. Even the first house, to which this richly illustrated volume is dedicated, caused an international sensation; it was considered to be an important example of so-called Brutalism. It showed "everything I knew how to do at the time", Ungers wrote regarding the building. He wanted a house that enveloped and sheltered, he wanted metamorphosis and transformation; architecture that was autonomous but at the same time respected the genius loci. At the time, architects preferred to build their private homes as freestanding bungalows in the countryside. Ungers, on the other hand, settled in a place where there were traces of the Roman past and purchased a plot of land adjacent to an already existing row of terraced houses. Three decades later, Ungers expanded the cataract of forms of his first home by adding a geometrically strict cube, intended to house his library. The shock aesthetics of the early work had evolved into the rigorous abstractness of his late work. This building too one of a kind, and in interplay with its predecessor became a manifesto. It corresponded to the idea of a house as a small town and the town as a large house, an idea that has run through European architectural history since Alberti. In spite of all their differences, the two contrasting formats make common cause. They show a world full of contradictions, illusions and realities that reflects the entire spectrum of the image of architecture, from the fiction to the reality of the function. Today the house and the library are the seat of the UAA, the Ungers Archiv fur Architekturwissenschaft, and open to the public. The architectural historian Wolfgang Pehnt often visited Ungers. The author of an authoritative book about the architecture of Expressionism, he profited by Ungers' collection of material back in the years when Ungers was still interested in Expressionism. Thus he is familiar with the house in its details and has witnessed its modifications. As portrayed by him, the history of the origins of the house gives access to the impressive uvre of a great German architect.

Marc Held entered history in 1965 with his famous Culbuto armchair, followed in 1966 by his furniture manufactured by Prisunic. Over a period of fifty years, he created some 150 furniture pieces, notably participating in 1983 in the interior design of the apartments in the Elysee Palace. Beginning in the 1970s, he also designed singular works of architecture, for individuals and for corporate clients such as IBM. At the end of the 1980s he chose to focus entirely on this passion of his when he settled on the Greek island of Skopelos. Interested in vernacular architecture, he dedicated a widely acknowledged book on Greece, Maisons de Skopelos, precis d'architecture vernaculaire published by Editions Skopelos.net, in 1994, to it. It was also on Skopelos where over a period of thirty years he built eight exceptional villas: Lemonia, Maistros, Nina, Loukas, The Temple, Mourtia, Myrto and Kapsari. Each house is an architectural manifesto in its own right. These eight villas, in spectacular sites beside the sea, built with local materials and in accordance with the construction techniques of the island - all the artisans were from there - with the magical landscapes in which they are integrated, are eight lessons on the notion of genius loci, which so inspired Marc Held's architecture. Photographed by Deidi von Schaewen - with spectacular shots taken via drone-mounted cameras - his eight beautiful villas are also presented with his drawings and plans developed during their conception phases. Text in English and French.

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) has come to be regarded as one of the great architects of late 18th and early 19th century Europe, and contemporary architects and designers are becoming increasingly influenced by the subtleties of the unique 'Soane style'. Dorothy Stroud's classic book, which is appearing in paperback for the first time, in an updated second edition, is the culmination of a lifetime's research. It brings together all the threads in her previous writings on Soane, combining a concise biography of the architect with a comprehensive and fully illustrated survey of his works. After studying in Italy, Soane built up a considerable private practice and a reputation that secured his appointment in 1788 as architect to the Bank of England, where over a period of forty-five years he designed a vast complex of courts and offices. With his appointment to the Office of Works in 1815, he became responsible for public buildings in Whitehall and Westminster, which entailed the designing of a Royal entrance and gallery in the House of Lords, new Law Courts, Privy Council Offices and a State Paper Office. As professor of architecture at the Royal Academy from 1806, he was to play a leading role in the improvement of architectural education in Britain; and he was active in the founding of what is now the Royal Institute of British Architects. Although much of his work was thoughtlessly destroyed towards the end of the 19th century, a substantial number of buildings and parts of buildings survive, especially outside London, as a testimony to his genius

Text in English and Italian. In a letter from London, dated 9 November 1815, Antonio Canova wrote: "...Here I am in London, dear and best friend, a wonderful city...I have seen the marbles arriving from Greece. Of the basreliefs we had some ideas from engravings, but of the full colossal figures, in which an artist can display his whole power and science, we have known nothing...The figures of Phidias are all real and living flesh, that is to say are beautiful nature itself." With his admiring words for the famous Elgin Marbles Canova, one of the last great artists embodying the grandiose heritage of the classical world, gave at the same time an appropriate description of his own artistic aims. It was his half-brother who decided to assemble most of Canova's plaster originals and to place them in a museum he had built in the garden of his brother's home in Possagno, a small village north of Venice, where the artist saw the light of day on 1 November 1757. This basilica-like building erected in 1836 now holds the great majority of Canova's compositions.To commemorate the bicentenary of his birth, the Venetian authorities decided to have an extension added to the overcrowded basilica, and they commissioned the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa for this delicate task. Scarpa composed a small, but highly articulated building that is in a strong contrast to the Neo-Classical, monumental basilica. The subtly designed sequence of spaces is unique even among Scarpa's so many extraordinary museum interiors as the architect was here in the rare position to compose the spaces as well as the placings of the exhibits. The placing of the sources of natural light which infuses the plaster surfaces with the softness of real life is in itself a rare achievement and it took an equally rare photographer to record such symphonies in white in all their magic.

Egyptian Places: An Illustrated Travelogue, presents an architect's account of visits to 12 of Ancient Egypt's most spectacular sites, a journey that transports the reader from the urban metropolis of Cairo and the Great Pyramid of Giza to the remote desert setting of the rock-cut temple at Abu Simbel; with visits to other monumental temples and towering pyramids which line the Nile River. The book recreates that journey, describing important architectural features of these sacred monuments, their mystic foundations, and religious significance. Over 200 colour hand drawings and graphic studies capture and interpret the character of each site from the architect's unique perspective.

Space Packed: The Architecture of Alfred Neumann is the first critical monograph on the work of the Austrian-born modernist architect Alfred Neumann (1900-1968). Based on an exploration of his writings and a close study of his built and unbuilt projects, it unveils and analyses Neumann's approach to architecture in the context of post-war modernism and the establishment of the State of Israel from 1948 onwards. Rafi Segal's book brings to attention again this highly significant, yet largely forgotten figure who contributed vastly to establishing modernism in Israel and who had a lasting impact on the new country's architectural culture. At his time, Neumann was equally renowned and controversial for his original designs that differed from modernist mainstream. Space Packed is divided into four chapters that discuss the development of Neumann's architectural theories, methodologies, and built work during the 1950s and 1960s, against the backdrop of contemporary architectural discourse and the nation-building demands of the new state of Israel. It also features a chronologically-organised and illustrated catalogue of Neumann's buildings and designs, including a vast number of previously unpublished photographs, drawings and sketches.

Text in English & German. Francesco di Giorgio Martini's fortress complexes, created at the end of the Quattrocento, continue to look experimental and highly speculative half a millennium later by their semiotic character. They represent an extreme of European architectural history, occupying a position where architecture and sculpture cannot be sharply distinguished any longer. The alien-looking creations represented in this book have their origins in a particular historic situation: the emergence of firearms in the 14th century and their spread in the 15th century had shifted the balance of warfare in favour of the attacking side, against which the defensive structure had not yet found a remedy. Enter Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439 to 1502) at this point, a native of Siena and one of the Quattrocento's highly versatile artists. He worked mainly in Federico da Montefeltro's Urbino, and left behind a body of work that included painting -- the three famous prospects of ideal cities in Berlin, Baltimore and Urbino are attributed to him -- sculpture -- primarily his imposing reliefs -- and architecture -- here he was definitely the outstanding figure between Alberti and Bramante. His achievements as an engineer are equally impressive, and his elaborate designs for machines strongly influenced those of Leonardo da Vinci. He was a true Renaissance uomo universale, though, despite of his voluminous and influential theoretical work, less in the sense of a humanist homme de lettres than as an all-round artist. Francesco's sacred and secular structures are classicist and austere in nature, yet his fortress structures look as if, moving beyond all functional concerns, he is exploiting the newness of the task, the lack of any tried and tested technical solutions and the removal of all typological boundaries to give his architectonic fantasies free rein, resulting in an apotheosis of the new, the unfamiliar and the alien. This book is an attempt to understand the strangely grandiose semiotic character of these structures. In doing so, it poses the question of what strategies can be used when seeking a shape for buildings for which there is no precedent.

Text in English & German. Heroic 20th-century Modernism saw the private home as a place to first test out utopian theories -- a place for free play and experimentation where new approaches could be put into action, on a small scale but no less radical. Here, where architecture and life are most closely interwoven, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and even Konstantin Melnikov found the suitable space to give their visionary concepts a plastic reality. The house built by the architect Fritz Barth for his own use in his home town of Fellbach places itself in an ironic, possibly melancholic distance from this kind of heroic pathos, but still has this tradition as its background. So it is considered by his builder as an experiment to determine the state of architecture at the start of the 21st century -- not to apply whatever offers itself to expand the architectonic repertoire (an approach that Barth considers to be a questionable, increasingly rhetoricised form of a somewhat naive belief in the future), but to find out what possibilities are still open to architecture and how far architecture still permits a concept of 'dwelling' in the sense the word was used by Heidegger. The result is not a backward-looking homeliness, but a structure that, as a commitment to architecture in and of itself, stands his ground like few others in its time and place. This is not least because its complexity its multi-layered, opulent fabric of allusions, references and quotations, only reveals itself gradually and with close observation behind a simple appearance targeted on the immediacy of experience and architecture. Despite the somewhat polemical intentions of its builder and inhabitant, the house is not experienced as an ideological manifesto in bricks and mortar. It is and here lies its radicality, devoted to the immediate experience of 'dwelling' in so far as it does not allow, as Thomas Hettche writes in his essay, any distinction between surface and function, life and experience.

Vast interior spaces have become ubiquitous in the contemporary city. The soaring atriums and concourses of mega-hotels, shopping malls and transport interchanges define an increasingly normal experience of being 'inside' in a city. Yet such spaces are also subject to intense criticism and claims that they can destroy the quality of a city's authentic life 'on the outside'. Interior Urbanism explores the roots of this contemporary tension between inside and outside, identifying and analysing the concept of interior urbanism and tracing its history back to the works of John Portman and Associates in 1960s and 70s America. Portman - increasingly recognised as an influential yet understudied figure - was responsible for projects such as Peachtree Center in Atlanta and the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel, developments that employed vast internal atriums to define a world of possibilities not just for hotels and commercial spaces, but for the future of the American downtown amid the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. The book analyses Portman's architecture in order to reconsider major contexts of debate in architecture and urbanism in this period, including the massive expansion of a commercial imperative in architecture, shifts in the governance and development of cities amid social and economic instability, the rise of postmodernism and critical urban studies, and the defence of the street and public space amid the continual upheavals of urban development. In this way the book reconsiders the American city at a crucial time in its development, identifying lessons for how we consider the forces at work, and the spaces produced, in cities in the present.

The city is the point of departure and arrival for the "architectural experience." It is, therefore, a palpable, external fact as well as a product of the mind, an abstraction. This book attempts to recreate this trajectory and to describe this exchange between the mind and the world through the traces it has produced. Two separate moments lie at the heart of this book's very structure and shape: one when the city is the site of an experience and of reflection and the other, when architects modify this site through a new project. The white notebooks contain writings, reflections, and observations collected over a ten-year period about our urban experiences. In fact, they hold the names of the cities that gave rise to them. These notes were often written during our travels, on the occasion of conferences or projects. Very importantly, though, they do not aspire to certainty; rather, they are a collection of questions and hypotheses. The black notebooks instead seek to delineate the scope of our research and to describe architecture as we practice it, namely as a collaborative effort, where each person's ideas and experiences form part of our shared vision and designs.

Since 2002, Christian Dupraz has managed his own office in Geneva. Over the years, he has produced a dozen buildings, including abstract, sculptural residential architecture such as the "House for an Art Collector" in Geneva (2010) and the seemingly minimalist holiday home in Les Posses-sur-Bex (2015). Text in English, German and French.

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.

In 2001, Pascal Muller and Peter Sigrist, who died in 2012, founded their architectural office in Zurich. Their dynamism led them to construct two exceptional buildings in 2006 and 2007, which were highly regarded by experts: the municipal administration centre in Affoltern am Albis and the festival cabin in Amriswil, a concentric structure that fittingly reflects the atmosphere of a festive tent. Since then, several residential developments have followed, such as the coherent Frohheim estate in Zurich-Affoltern and the widely regarded Kalkbreite in Zurich, which was developed over a tram garage and was the result of a new cooperative concept. Public buildings such as the Kunstfreilager Dreispitz in Basel and the Volketswil community centre also attracted attention. This volume presents in detail 18 buildings and projects from the past 16 years, including texts, plans and images. A further 21 buildings are described with texts and one or two images in the list of works. The exciting presentation of works is complemented by illuminating essays by Sabine von Fischer (with interview sections), Ariel Huber and Kornel Ringli. Text in English and German.

This is the long-awaited overview of the recent works of architect Stephane Beel. As productive and versatile an architect as Stephane Beel is, architectural criticism and reception of his work are never far behind - new works are followed almost immediately by new words. This combination of work and word has made Stephane Beel into one of the most successful Belgian architects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From his oeuvre, eighteen projects have been selected that have never before been elucidated in detail in a book. Each is described and commented on by one of the contributing authors. The book begins with an extensive introductory interview with the architect himself, in which - in eight thematic sections - the basic features of Beel's approach are discussed. The interview is entitled 'An Intense Order', which at once reflects the structure and the concept of this book: without putting forward a single, all-embracing interpretative system, it systematically endeavours to offer a variety of opportunities for capturing the spark that invariably lights up the work of Stephane Beel.

Since the end of the 20th century, an unprecedented number of remarkable museums have been built. None have had bigger worldwide implications than Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (199197). Until, that is, the new Musee des Confluences in Lyon was opened to the public, in late 2014. It was created by Wolf D. Prix of the Coop Himmelb(l)au team, which was founded in the 1970s. Many avant-garde groups from those wild years such as Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Haus-Rucker-Co, and the Japanese Metabolists are now consigned to the past, but the Coop Himmelb(l)au architecture firm, whose special aspiration was always to bring into the world buildings that overcome the pull of the earth buildings 'to float on the horizon like clouds' is more in demand than ever. The finest demonstration of this endeavour to date can now be admired in Lyon. Functioning as a museum of human history, this impressive concrete, metal and glass colossus truly does appear to float above the peninsula at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone. Like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, this new building, so impossible to overlook, is an inspiration for the revita-lisation of disrupted urban areas and the valorisation of derelict industrial areas within the city precincts, but also far beyond Lyon. This Opus volume deals with the origins, construction, function and formal appearance of the Musee des Confluences, and also offers a preliminary theoretically based evaluation of the architecture of the building. Frank R. Werner was professor of history and architecture theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Stuttgart from 1990 until 1994 and director of the Institut fur Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie at the Bergische Universitat in Wuppertal from 1993 until his retirement in 2012. He studied painting, architecture and history of architecture in Mainz, Hanover and Stuttgart. Christian Richters studied communication design at the Folkwang-schule in Essen. He is one of the most sought-after architecture photographers in Europe. To date he has been represented in the Opus series by 14 volumes, including ones about the embassies of the Nordic countries and the Bode Museum in Berlin, the Nieuwe Luxor Theater in Rotterdam and the BMW Welt in Munich. See also: Opus 66. Coop Himmelb(l)au, BMW Welt, Munchen, Edition Axel Menges 2009.