Lake-Flato Architects of San Antonio, Texas, is nationally and internationally acclaimed for buildings that respond organically to the natural environment. The firm uses local materials and workmanship, as well as a deep knowledge of vernacular traditions, to design buildings that are tactile and modern, environmentally responsible and authentic, artful and crafted. Lake-Flato won the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2013, and it has also received the American Institute of Architects' highest honor, the National Firm Award. In all, Lake-Flato has won more than 150 national and state design awards. Residential architecture has always been a priority for the firm, and Lake-Flato Houses showcases an extensive selection of landmark homes built since 1999. Color photographs and architectural commentary create a memorable portrait of houses from Texas to Montana. Reflecting the firm's emphasis on designing in harmony with the land, the houses are grouped by the habitats in which they're rooted--brushland, desert, hillside, mountains, city, and water. These groupings reveal how Lake-Flato works with the natural environment to create houses that merge into the landscape, blurring boundaries between inside and outside and accommodating the climate through both traditional and cutting-edge technologies. The sections are opened by noted architect and educator Frederick Steiner, who discusses Lake-Flato's unique responses to the forms and materials of the various landscapes. An introduction by journalist Guy Martin summarizes the history of Lake-Flato and its philosophy, and explores the impact of its work on sustainable architecture.

The first history of Frank Lloyd Wright's exhibitions of his own work--a practice central to his career More than one hundred exhibitions of Frank Lloyd Wright's work were mounted between 1894 and his death in 1959. Wright organized the majority of these exhibitions himself and viewed them as crucial to his self-presentation as his extensive writings. He used them to promote his designs, appeal to new viewers, and persuade his detractors. Wright on Exhibit presents the first history of this neglected aspect of the architect's influential career. Drawing extensively from Wright's unpublished correspondence, Kathryn Smith challenges the preconceived notion of Wright as a self-promoter who displayed his work in search of money, clients, and fame. She shows how he was an artist-architect projecting an avant-garde program, an innovator who expanded the palette of installation design as technology evolved, and a social activist driven to revolutionize society through design. While Wright's earliest exhibitions were largely for other architects, by the 1930s he was creating public installations intended to inspire debate and change public perceptions about architecture. The nature of his exhibitions expanded with the times beyond models, drawings, and photographs to include more immersive tools such as slides, film, and even a full-scale structure built especially for his 1953 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Placing Wright's exhibitions side by side with his writings, Smith shows how integral these exhibitions were to his vision and sheds light on the broader discourse concerning architecture and modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. Wright on Exhibit features color renderings, photos, and plans, as well as a checklist of exhibitions and an illustrated catalog of extant and lost models made under Wright's supervision.

This book is about a lost world, albeit one less than 50 years old. It is the story of a grand plan to demolish most of Whitehall, London's historic government district, and replace it with a ziggurat-section megastructure built in concrete. In 1965 the architect Leslie Martin submitted a proposal to Charles Pannell, Minister of Public Building and Works in Harold Wilson's Labour government, for the wholesale reconstruction of London's 'Government Centre'. Still reeling from war damage, its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces stood as the patched-up headquarters of an imperial bureaucracy which had once dominated the globe. Martin's plan - by no means modest in conception, scope or scale - proposed their replacement with a complex that would span the roads into Parliament Square, reframing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The project was not executed in the manner envisaged by Martin and his associates, although a surprising number of its proposals were implemented. But the un-built architecture is examined here for its insights into a distinctive moment in British history, when a purposeful technological future seemed not just possible but imminent, apparently sweeping away an anachronistic Edwardian establishment to be replaced with a new meritocracy forged in the 'white heat of technology'. The Whitehall plan had implications well beyond its specific site. It was imagined by its architects as a scientific investigation into ideal building forms for the future, an important development in their project to unify science and art. For the political actors, it represented a tussle between government departments, between those who believed that Britain needed to discard much of its Victorian and Edwardian decoration in the name of 'professionalization' and those who sought to preserve its ornate finery. Demolishing Whitehall investigates these tensions between ideas of technology and history, science and art, socialism and el

A memoir and collection of essays on architecture and urbanism from one of the most interesting figures in Singapore’s cultural landscape. According to architect Tay Kheng Soon, the time has come to change and build a new world. The feeling has impelled him to write this book, bringing together memoir and writings on identity, landscape and belonging, and on architecture and urbanism. Born in British-ruled Singapore, Soon was deeply engaged in the debates about building a new world that attended the end of colonialism. His focus, but far from his only concern, was Singapore's built environment—and its spiritual one—since the early 1960s. A New World in the Making is a must-read reflection on tropical Asia, on architecture and urbanism, and on looking ahead to the always urgent task of building a new world.

The evolving environmental justice paradigm is conceptualized differently based on political, economic and historical factors. In developed countries, emphasis is placed on the role of individuals in environmental decision-making and the protection of their access to the prerequisite environmental information and capacity to challenge environmental decisions is the main focus. However, in developing countries, access to land and natural resources are considered integral elements of environmental justice paradigm. This book focuses on the conceptualization, recognition and protection of environmental justice in developing countries. It explores the situation by engaging an analytical discourse of relevant legal provisions in four case study countries including Nigeria, South Africa, India and Papua New Guinea. The comparative analysis of environmental justice in these countries present a framework within which to appreciate the conceptualization of the environmental justice paradigm

During the years 1919 into 1925 Frank Lloyd Wright worked on four houses and a kindergarten located in metropolitan Los Angeles using concrete blocks as the main building material. The construction system has been described by Wright and others as 'uniquely molded', 'woven like a textile fabric' and perceived as ground breaking, truly modern, unprecedented. Many have attempted to uphold these claims while some thought the house-designs borrowed from old exotic buildings. For the first time this book brings together Wright's declarations, the support of upholders and inferences in order to determine their accuracy and correctness, or the possibility of feigned or fictional stories. It examines technical developments of concrete blocks by Wright and others before his experiences in Los Angeles began in 1919. It also studies the manner of Wright's design process by an examination of relevant pictorial and textual documents. A unique, in-depth and critical analysis of the houses is set within historical, biographical and theoretical contexts. Consequently, the book explains the impact upon Wright of California contemporaries, architects Irving Gill and Rudolph Schindler, and their instrumentally profound role upon the course of modernism 1907-1923. In doing so, it allows a full appreciation of Wright's, Gill's and Schindler's buildings beyond their experiential qualities.

This book presents an expansive overview of the development of architectural and environmental research, with authoritative essays spanning Dean Hawkes' impressive 50-year academic career. The book considers the relationship between the technologies of the environment and wider historical and theoretical factors, with chapters on topics ranging from the origins of modern 'building science' in Renaissance England to technology and imagination in architecture. It includes numerous architectural examples from renowned architects such as Christopher Wren, Peter Zumthor, Alvar Aalto, Robert Venturi and Carlo Scarpa. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in architecture and beyond, this illustrated volume collates important and wide-ranging essays tracing the definition, scope and methodologies of architectural and environmental studies, with a foreword by Susannah Hagan.

"A model city, the hope of democracy" John Nolen on his suggested plans for Madison, Wisconsin

This book connects John Nolen's political and social visions with his design proposals by analyzing his extensive writings, personal correspondence and some of his most significant works. While John Nolen is best known as a city planner, he trained as a landscape architect and used the titles 'landscape architect' and 'city planner' interchangeably throughout his career. A prolific practitioner, he was engaged in nearly 400 projects throughout the United States between 1905 and 1936, including town planning, industrial housing, state and city parks, new towns and regional planning.

Focusing particularly on several projects central to Nolen s career including Madison (WI), Mariemont (OH), Venice (FL) and Penderlea (NC), Beck investigates the ideologies that underpinned Nolen s work. This is a rare look at a key figure in the development of 20th century American cities.

"A model city, the hope of democracy" John Nolan on his suggested plans for Madison, Wisconsin

This book connects John Nolen's political and social visions with his design proposals by analyzing his extensive writings, personal correspondence and some of his most significant works. While John Nolen is best known as a city planner, he trained as a landscape architect and used the titles 'landscape architect' and 'city planner' interchangeably throughout his career. A prolific practitioner, he was engaged in nearly 400 projects throughout the United States between 1905 and 1936, including town planning, industrial housing, state and city parks, new towns and regional planning.

Focusing particularly on several projects central to Nolen s career including Madison (WI), Mariemont (OH), Venice (FL) and Penderlea (NC), Beck investigates the ideologies that underpinned Nolen s work. This is a rare look at a key figure in the development of 20th century American cities.

Demonstrates how generations of Western designers have recognized in Japanese art and architecture essentially what they wanted to see, in order to advance their own theoretical agendas Fully illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings and a colour plate Includes discussion of the work of Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Gunter Nitschke and Heinrich Engel, Mies van der Rohe, Antonin Raymond, Frank Lloyd Wright to name but a few

First director of the Academie royale d'architecture, Francois Blondel established a lasting model for architectural education that helped transform a still largely medieval profession into the one we recognize today. Most well known for his 1676 urban plan of Paris, Blondel is also celebrated as a mathematician, scientist, and scholar. Few figures are more representative of the close affinity between architecture and the "new science" of the seventeenth century. The first full-length study in English to appear on this polymath, this book adds to the scholarship on early modern architectural history and particularly on French classicism under Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. It studies early modern science and technology, Baroque court culture, and the development of the discipline of architecture.

Few figures in the American arts have stories richer in irony than does architect Minoru Yamasaki. While his twin towers of New York's World Trade Center are internationally iconic, few who know the icon recognize its architect's name or know much about his portfolio of more than 200 buildings. One is tempted to call him America's most famous forgotten architect. He was classed in the top tier of his profession in the 1950s and '60s, as he carried modernism in novel directions, yet today he is best known not for buildings that stand but for two projects that were destroyed under tragic circumstances: the twin towers and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. This book undertakes a reinterpretation of Yamasaki's significance that combines architectural history with the study of his intersection with defining moments of American history and culture. The story of the loss and vulnerability of Yamasaki's legacy illustrates the fragility of all architecture in the face of natural and historical forces, yet in Yamasaki's view, fragility is also a positive quality in architecture: the source of its refinement, beauty, and humanity. We learn something essential about architecture when we explore this tension of strength and fragility. In the course of interpreting Yamasaki's architecture through the wide lens of the book we see the mid-century role of Detroit as an industrial power and architectural mecca; we follow a debate over public housing that entailed the creation and eventual destruction of many thousands of units; we examine competing attempts to embody democratic ideals in architecture and to represent those ideals in foreign lands; we ponder the consequences of anti-Japanese prejudice and the masculism of the architectural profession; we see Yamasaki's style criticized for its arid minimalism yet equally for its delicacy and charm; we observe Yamasaki making a great name for himself in the Arab world but his twin towers ultimately destroyed by Islamic militants. As this curious tale of ironies unfolds, it invites reflection on the core of modern architecture's search for meaning and on the creative possibilities its legacy continues to offer. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color illustrations of Yamasaki's buildings, this book will be of interest to students, academics and professionals in a range of disciplines, including architectural history, architectural theory, architectural preservation, and urban design and planning.

A spirited memoir by artist Aviva Rahmani, offering a relatable narrative to discuss trigger point theory and the importance of eco-art activism. Divining Chaos is an intimate personal memoir of unparalleled transparency into the moments in Rahmani's life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led her to two seminal projects-Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied her premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use-Rahmani shares the decisions that shaped her life's work and thinking. Her discussions about trigger point theory argue for how to predict, confront, and determine outcomes to the ecological challenges we face today.

With his geometric structures perched upon the hillsides, beaches, and deserts of California, John Lautner (1911-1994) was behind some of the most striking and innovative architectural designs in mid-20th-century America. This introductory book brings together the most important of Lautner's projects to explore his his ingenious use of modern building materials and his bold stylistic repertoire of sweeping rooflines, glass-paneled walls, and steel beams. From commercial buildings to such iconic homes as the Chemosphere, we look at Lautner's sensitivity to a building's surroundings and his unique capacity to integrate structures into the Californian landscape. With several of Lautner's houses now labeled Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments, we'll also consider the architect's cultural legacy, as much as his pioneering of a visual paradigm of 1950s optimism, economic growth, and space-age adventure. 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)

This book introduces and defines the burgeoning concepts of transculturalism and essentialism and how they relate to one another, as articulated with reference to the work of Jorn Utzon. It introduces critical contemporary perspectives of the design thinking and career of this renowned Danish architect, internationally recognised for his competition-winning, iconic design for the Sydney Opera House - an outstanding exemplar of transcultural essentialism in architecture. Transcultural essentialism is analysed through the lens of critical regionalism and architectural phenomenology, with emphasis on the sense of place and tectonics in Utzon's architectural works. It provides a new understanding of the Danish architect as an early proponent of a still emergent and increasingly relevant direction in architecture. Going beyond biographical studies, it presents a more comprehensive understanding of the broad range of transcultural influences that formed his thinking. The volume includes numerous previously unpublished photographs, drawings, and interviews with Utzon's family members, former students, and colleagues, offering a significant contribution to the existing body of knowledge for any architecture scholar interested in Utzon's work and design principles. The book also comprises a Foreword by eminent architecture theorist Juhani Pallasmaa in which he provides insights into the wider architectural and cultural context of Utzon's worldview.

Louis I. Kahn is unarguably one of the most eminent and influential figures of 20th-century architecture. He is known as the poet and philosopher among the great modern architects. On 12 February 1969, Kahn gave a lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), entitled 'Silence and Light'. This fundamental text reveals Kahn's spiritual understanding of architecture and his creative thinking. Kahn's idea of architecture goes far beyond the mere building. He understands architecture as a concept comprising the entire environment of mankind. With this he anticipated more than forty years ago what is branded 'sustainability in architecture' today. 'Louis I. Kahn - Silence and Light' makes this text available again in its original version, for the first time ever also in Kahn's own voice on audio-CD. The book includes a full-length transcript of the Zurich lecture in original English and translations into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Kahn's sketches drawn while speaking and number of previously unpublished images of the architect lecturing complement the text. Text in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

This book examines the idea of organism in the work of Louis I. Kahn, from the turning point of Rome to the project for Venice. It presents an original interpretation of the work of Kahn during one of the most fruitful periods of his career, when he was working on a particular design method based on an entirely novel way of interacting with the past. Beginning with a meticulous documentation and analysis of Kahn's experiences in the twenty years from 1930 to 1950, the book sheds new light on the relationship between Kahn's work and the modern movement. The arguments are supported by case studies, including that of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice based on Kahn's words (like his lessons in Venice at IUA, International University of Art, in 1971) and others as the Trenton Bath House, the Salk Institute (La Jolla), the Kimbell Museum (Fort Worth), the Yale Gallery and the Mellon Center for British Art (New Haven) and more. Unlike much of the by now well-established literature on Kahn's work, Louis I. Kahn in Rome and Venice suggests that the basic premise of Kahn's invention is the idea of spatial, constructive organism, which explains how he created forms that were inextricably anchored in the past, without imitating any one kind of ancient architecture. The main objective of the book is to explain Kahn's methodology to architects and students, showing how he was able to design an architectural object with the characteristics of the best designed objects: organisms, in which each part contributes, with the whole, to creating "something made of indivisible parts".

Based on extensive fieldwork, and research into John Ruskin's still little-interpreted archival material, notebooks and drawings (in the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, UK and elsewhere), Stephen Kite offers an unprecedented account of the evolution of Ruskin's architectural thinking and observation in the context of Italy where his watching of building achieved its greatest intensity. Venice naturally figures large in a work that also examines other key sites including Verona, Lucca, Pisa, Florence, Milan and Monza; here, the fabrics are vividly read in their contexts against the rich evidence of Ruskin's diaries, his pocket-book sketches, architectural worksheets, drawings, and daguerrotypes (the early form of photography), and the drafts and published editions of the texts. Kite presents the complex story of Ruskin's visual thinking in architecture as a narrative of deepening interpretation and representation, focusing on the humbler monuments of Italy. He shows how Ruskin's early picturesque naturalism was transformed by the realisation that to understand the built realities confronting him in Italy demanded a closer engagement with the substance of the stones themselves; reflecting Ruskin's sense of his task as a near-archaeological gleaning and gathering of remains 'hidden in many a grass grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal'.

Frederick Law Olmsted's career as a landscape architect was long and varied. The best-known fruits of that career were surely the great urban parks: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston. But most of this took place after the Civil War. Prior to 1865, Olmsted had built a public reputation as an author and journalist (producing three historically important books on slavery and the antebellum South) and as General Secretary of the Sanitary Commission of the Union Forces, the committee in charge of organizing medical treatment for the military during the war. He had also previously been an apprentice merchant, a seaman, a farmer, and manager of a mining plantation in California. His life had been marked by innumerable illnesses and accidents. His personality was notable for its contentiousness and obsessiveness.

Working from Olmsted's own personal and professional writings, Melvin Kalfus seeks to establish in this, the first biography of Olmstead to appear in a decade and a half, the connections between the many facets of Olmstead's life and work. Kalfus shows how Olmsted's childhood afflictions provided him with the inner sources of his creative imagination, provided the symbolism that was the linguistic and visual vocabulary employed in his work, fired his ambition, and led him so obsessively to seek the world's esteem through his works. Finally, Kalfus argues that Olmsted's individual psychodynamics fitted him uniquely to the role of the creative professional in public life-- the agent (or "delegate") for his society's needs-- needs that were unspoken as well as spoken.

Erich Mendelsohn's buildings, erected throughout Germany between 1920 and 1932, epitomised architectural modernity for his countrymen. This study examines his department stores, office buildings, and cinemas, counterparts to the famous housing projects built during the same years in Frankfurt and Berlin. Demonstrating the degree to which their dynamic presence stemmed from Mendelsohn's attention to their consumer-oriented functions, James shows Mendelsohn to be more than an Expressionist, as he is usually characterised. James recounts how his architecture closely reflects the controversies over modernity, including relativity, consumerism, and urban planning, that raged during the years of the Weimar Republic. She also illustrates how much Mendelsohn's thriving practice depended on the patronage of fellow German Jews, many of whom shared his commitment to creating alternatives to the nationalistic historicism of the late Wilhelmine period.

Demonstrates how generations of Western designers have recognized in Japanese art and architecture essentially what they wanted to see, in order to advance their own theoretical agendas Fully illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings and a colour plate Includes discussion of the work of Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Gunter Nitschke and Heinrich Engel, Mies van der Rohe, Antonin Raymond, Frank Lloyd Wright to name but a few

This book features the best and most spectacular conversions on the international architecture scene, accompanied by an insightful text and photographs. It includes over 60 projects around the world, including work by Hassell + OMA, David Chipperfield, Heatherwick Studios, Ney + Partners, Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid and many others. The author explores how these architects creatively approached the conversions of older buildings, ultimately finding a new functionality and life for them in the 21st century.

Affect, Architecture, and Practice builds on and contributes to work in theories of affect that have risen within diverse disciplines, including geography, cultural studies, and media studies, challenging the nature of textual and representational-based research. Although numerous studies have examined how affect emerges in architectural spaces, little attention has been paid to the creative process of architectural design and the role that affect plays in the many contingencies and uncertainties that arise in the process. The book traces the critical, philosophic, and architectural theories to examine how affect, architecture, and practice are interlinked. Through a series of conversations and reflections, it examines three key contemporary architects, their practices and projects, all within a single coherent theme. Reiser + Umemoto (RUR Architecture DPC), USA, Kerstin Thompson Architects, Australia, and Shigeru Ban Architects, Japan, are critically studied through the lens of different aspects of practice, namely image-making, the design process, and the making of an everyday object/material. Through this investigation, author Akari Nakai Kidd demonstrates how affect theory allows a critical interrogation of the in-betweens of practice, its liminality and limits. It questions the stability of objects, the smooth temporality of practice, and its often under-conceptualised non-human dimensions. More significantly, the book demonstrates architectural practice's contribution to the reconceptualisation of theories of affect.