"A career in music ... is a calling with such a strong pull; you'd think a tide was sucking you under. It becomes an intense obsession of such great intensity that you can almost think of nothing else, it drives you with a fever and fervor."

In the early 70s, an idealistic young man - Brian Torff - arrived in New York to pursue his passion for music. During an excursion to Long Island, Brian found his dream instrument: a 1775 re-built Nicola Galliano bass.

Such was the beginning of a career that led Torff from Cafe Carlyle to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. He has toured worldwide with the greatest: from Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, George Shearing, and Erroll Garner to Stephane Grappelli, Benny Goodman, Mary Lou Williams, and Marian McPartland.

As Brian notes, "bass players do a lot of observing from the back of the bandstand." It is this supportive role that qualifies Torff to share his insight into jazz music, and its many personalities. Torff takes us beyond the music by adding depth with his vision of American music, and paints vivid portraits of the musicians with whom he played.

Torff's memoir is one of creativity, and determination mixed with timing, and plain good luck. His sharp narrative not only brings the legends of jazz to life, but reading about them here will certainly motivate you to add some music to your collection.

The materials are mostly unpublished, and Renzo Piano comments on them with sketches made for this special publication. The story of the project evolves from the origins to the first conceptual ideas, revealing the hard research process through sketches, drawings, study and presentation models, but also scientific experiments on light, sound and materials, to finally arrive to the construction site, the architecture built and the space lived. Few brief comment captions and some phrases by Renzo Piano bring a deeper understanding of the project stages, extracted from the story of the architect's adventure. A text at the end of the book provides the reader with a "behind the scene" view, from the relationship with the curators and the client to the choice of the materials, to the research of the most suitable solution for that museum and the specific context in which it was build. A conception of the museum that starts from the work of art to arrive at the architectural project. A journey that takes the reader through time and space during its realisation.

The figure of Sir Christopher Wren looms large in English national consciousness. The imposing beauty of St Paul's Cathedral stands forever for the nation's achievement - its undamaged dome towering above the rubble of the Blitz in the Second World War a symbol of the London's indomitable fighting spirit.
The man behind the work was as remarkable as the monuments he has left us. Lisa Jardine takes us deep into Wren's imagination and discovers the unique, exacting nature of his mind and the emerging new world of late-seventeenth-century science and ideas.
Wren was a versatile genius who could have pursued a number of brilliant careers with equal virtuosity. A mathematical prodigy, an accomplished astronomer, a skilful anatomist, and a founder of The Royal Society, he eventually made a career in what he described in later life as 'Rubbish' - architecture, and the design and construction of public buildings. But he remained committed to science. The Monument to the Great Fire was built with a subterranean laboratory; the south-west tower of St Paul's was used as a vertical telescope during construction - both were designed to function as public monuments and as oversized scientific instruments.
Wren was a major figure at a turning point in English history. He mapped moons and the trajectories of comets for kings; lived and worked under six monarchs; pursued astronomy and medicine through two civil wars, the English Commonwealth, the Great Fire, the Restoration, and the eventual extinction of the Stuart dynasty.
Jardine explores also Wren's personal motivations and passions. A sincere man with a remarkable capacity for friendship, his career was shaped by lasting associations forged during a turbulent boyhood, and a lifelong loyalty to the memory of his father's master and benefactor, the 'martyred' king, Charles I. Everything Wren undertook he envisaged on a grander scale - bigger, better, more enduring than anything that had gone before.

The importance of the leading British architect A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) in the history of the Gothic Revival, the development of ecclesiology, the origins of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and in architectural theory is incontestable. His letters are vigorous, direct, often witty, and invaluable for architectural and religio-historical research. The second of five volumes.

Calvert Vaux (1824--1895) designed Central Park and other parks in American cities with Frederick Law Olmsted. Trained in England as an architect, Vaux also planned buildings that mirrored the advance of urbanization in America. Museums, exhibition halls, model tenements, and dwellings, as well as many structures in Central Park, were among his designs. This book is an in-depth study of Vaux's life and work.

Delve into the world of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his Glasgow School of Art-trained contemporaries who forged a unique and distinct vision in both art and architecture at the end of the Victorian era. The Glasgow Style is the name given to the work of a group of young designers and architects working in Glasgow from 1890-1914. At its centre were four young friends who had trained at Glasgow School of Art; two architects and two artists - Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair, Margaret Macdonald and Frances Macdonald - who were simply known by their friends and contemporaries as 'The Four'. Their work was a personal vision in the new international style of the 1890s, Art Nouveau, and is perhaps best known for Mackintosh's architecture and furniture. But at the root of this new style was a graphic language which all four shared. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Art of The Four presents the most coherent story to date of this important group, concentrating on the entirety of their artistic imagery and output, far beyond the best known work of the 1890s, and charting the constantly changing relationships between the artists and their work.

The Architect & Sculptor RAs photographed in their workplaces with examples of their sculpture or buildings accompanied by a brief biography.

From office planning and museum concepts to medical practices: this handbook shows 50 examples from the creative oeuvre of architect Carsten Wiewiorra. The project collection from his many years of practice also provides the basis for his teaching as a professor at the Detmold School of Architecture and Interior Design. The practical part is supplemented by a richly illustrated introduction with seven theses on interior design, which deal equally with the emotional spatial effect, technical implementation and financial aspects. In addition, the didactic design aid contains execution plans true to scale, as they have proven themselves in planning and construction site practice.

The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright are not immune to the social and environmental forces that affect all architecture. Because of the popular recognition and historical significance of his work, however, the stakes are unusually high when his buildings are modified in any way. Any additions or changes must meet the highest standards; how exactly this can be achieved is the debate that fuels this compelling new book. The essays collected here are authored by many of the top professionals in the fields of architecture and preservation. Some of the contributors worked directly on the buildings discussed and provide invaluable firsthand accounts of these projects. This is the most thorough discussion of modifying Wright's works published to date and a fascinating commentary on preserving our architectural legacy.

Contributors:

Richard Longstreth on additions to historic buildings - de Teel Patterson Tiller on design in historic districts - Sidney K. Robinson on Taliesin - Anne Biebel and Mary Keiran Murphy on the Hillside School - Mark Hertzberg on the S. C. Johnson Administration Building - Dale Allen Gyure on Florida Southern College - Neil Levine on the Guggenheim Museum - Scott W. Perkins on the Price Tower - Tom Kubala on the First Unitarian Meeting House - Eric Jackson-Forsberg on the Darwin Martin House - Lynda S. Waggoner on Fallingwater - Patrick J. Mahoney on Graycliff - Thomas Templeton Taylor on the Westcott House

The sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan is today universally recognized as the defining figure in the development of the classical Ottoman style. In addition to his vast oeuvre, he left five remarkable autobiographical accounts, the "Ads?z Risale," the "Ris?letu'l-Mi?m?riyye," "Tu?fetu'l-Mi?m?r?n," "Te?kiretu'l-Ebniye" and "Te?kiretu'l-Buny?n," that provide details of his life and works. Based on information dictated by Sinan to his poet-painter friend Mustafa Sa?i Celebi shortly before his death, these accounts exist in multiple manuscript versions in libraries in Istanbul, Ankara, and Cairo. The present volume contains critical editions of all five texts along with transcriptions, annotated translations, and facsimiles of the most important variant versions; and an introductory essay that analyzes the various surviving manuscripts, reconstructs their histories, and establishes the relationships between them; and a preface that considers the sources, themes, and broader implications of the five autobiographies.

An intellectual biography of the cultural critic Reyner Banham. Reyner Banham (1922-88) was one of the most influential writers on architecture, design, and popular culture from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. Trained in mechanical engineering and art history, he was convinced that technology was making society not only more exciting but more democratic. His combination of academic rigor and pop culture sensibility put him in opposition to both traditionalists and orthodox Modernists, but placed him in a unique position to understand the cultural, social, and political implications of the visual arts in the postwar period. His first book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (still in print with The MIT Press after forty years), was central to the overhaul of Modernism, and it gave Futurism and Expressionism credibility amid the dynamism and change of the 1960s. This intellectual biography is the first comprehensive critical examination of Banham's theories and ideas, not only on architecture but also on the wide variety of subjects that interested him. It covers the full range of his oeuvre and discusses the values, enthusiasms, and influences that formed his thinking.

An examination of the work and influence of Scottish urban planner and theorist Patrick Geddes. The Scottish urbanist and biologist Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) is perhaps best known for introducing the concept of "region" to architecture and planning. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was one of the strongest advocates of town planning and an active participant in debates about the future of the city. He was arguably the first planner to recognize the importance of historic city centers, and his renewal work in Edinburgh's Old Town is visible and impressive to this day. Geddes's famous analytical triad-place, work, and folk, corresponding to the geographical, historical, and spiritual aspects of the city-provides the basic structure of this examination of his urban theory. Volker Welter examines Geddes's ideas in the light of nineteenth-century biology-in which Geddes received his academic training-showing Geddes's use of biological concepts to be far more sophisticated than popular images of the city as an organic entity. His urbanism was informed by his lifelong interest in the theory of evolution and in ecology, cutting-edge areas in the late nineteenth century. Balancing Geddes's biological thought is his interest in the historical Greek concept of polis, usually translated as city-state but implying a view of the city as a cultural and spiritual phenomenon. Although Geddes's work was far-ranging, the city provided the unifying focus of nearly all of his theoretical and practical work. Throughout the book, Welter relates Geddes's theory of the city to contemporary European debates about architecture and urbanism.

Soon after 1900 in both North America and Europe the evolution from the tradition of Mediterranean and Gallic architectural styles to modernism began. This phenomenon was due, in part, to American industrial architecture and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright's building and architectural treatises of 1898-1908, with the additional help of Dutch propaganda on his behalf, significantly influenced European practitioners and theorists. European architecture within and outside of Holland reflects an adaptation of Wright's theories along with the structural determinism of American industrial buildings. With new evidence and fresh analysis culled from Dutch and American archives, personal correspondence, and professional material, this study examines the weight of Wright's works and words and those of the Dutchmen H.P. Berlage, Theo van Doesburg, Jan Wils, J.J.P. Oud, William Dudok, and Hendrik Theodor Wijdeveld.

This new insight on the effects of Wright's architectural theories and designs, coupled with an extensive guide for further research, will attract art and architecture scholars and historians on both sides of the Atlantic and will also be of interest to social historians, artists, and architects. Events and new theories, including the assertion that Hendrik Theodor Wijdeveld was the catalytic source behind Wright's Taliesin Fellowship established in 1932, are presented in clear accessible language. Tied to the text are numerous visual presentations of significant designs and buildings.

For forty years (1880 1920), the now-legendary architectural firm led by Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White was responsible for many of the finest buildings in America. The Boston Public Library, Pennsylvania Station in New York, and the campus of Columbia University are among the national landmarks designed by these men and their partners, Bert Fenner and William Mitchell Kendall. This anthology of plans, elevations, and details of major works of McKim, Mead, and White is an invaluable reference source and inspiration for the student of architecture. As Allan Greenberg writes in his introduction: The legacy of McKim, Mead, and White] is so vast that . . . both its outer boundaries and its inner characteristics are only barely discernible. As architects of some of the most important buildings in the history of American architecture, the work of the office of McKim, Mead, and White reached a level of quality which has never been equaled by any large office before or after. Charles Follen McKim cofounded the firm with William Rutherford Mead in 1878, along with his brother-in-law William B. Bigelow. One year later, Bigelow left the firm and was replaced by young Stanford White. Among the commissions that McKim worked on were the Villard Houses, the Boston Public Library, the Chicago World s Fair Columbian Exposition and the Agriculture Building, the Columbia University campus, Symphony Hall in Boston, alterations to the White House, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Pennsylvania Station, and the University Club in New York. Stanford White, who, ironically, had replaced Charles McKim at the firm of Gambrill and Richardson in New York, joined the partnership in September 1879. A young, enthusiastic man who could draw like a house afire, in the words of McKim, White was responsible for many of the firm s great architectural projects, including Madison Square Garden; the Washington Arch; the Judson Memorial Church; what is now Bronx Community College, and the accompanying Hall of Fame of Great Americans; the Tiffany Building, and the Gorham Building. His life and career ended abruptly at the age of fifty-three, when he was murdered on the roof of Madison Square Garden in a well-publicized shooting incident in 1906.

Until his death at age 104, Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) was something of an unstoppable architectural force. Over seven decades of work, he designed approximately 600 buildings, transforming skylines from Bab-Ezzouar, Algeria, to his homeland masterpiece Brasilia. Niemeyer's work took the reduced forms of modernism and infused them with free-flowing grace. In place of pared-down starkness, his structures rippled with sinuous and seductive lines. In buildings such as the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum, Edificio Copan, or the Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasilia, he brought curvaceousness to the concrete jungle. In the futuristic federal capital of Brasilia, he designed almost all public buildings, and thus became integral to the global image of Brazil. With rich illustrations documenting highlights from his prolific career, this book introduces Niemeyer's unique vision and its transformative influence on buildings of business, faith, culture, and the public imagination of Brazil. 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)

Salomon de Caus has been viewed as, variously, a Protestant martyr, the unsung inventor of the steam engine, one of the most important early hydraulic engineers, and a garden designer whose work was influenced by astrology and hermeticism. The first comprehensive book on this protean figure, Nature as Model sifts through historical material, Caus's own writings, and his extant landscape designs to determine what is fact and what is fiction in the life of this polymathic and prolific figure. In doing so, it clarifies numerous hitherto unresolved problems in his biography and historiography. As Luke Morgan shows, Caus made important contributions to some of the most significant landscape projects of his period, including the gardens of Coudenberg Palace in Brussels, Richmond Palace, Hatfield House, Somerset House, Greenwich Palace in London, as well as, most famously, the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, which he designed for the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, and his wife, Elisabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England. In his work, Caus drew on his intimate knowledge of the late sixteenth-century Italian garden, and through his commissions the design principles and motifs of the late Renaissance garden were transmitted across Europe. The book is a masterful exercise in historical reconstruction, showing how Caus has been read by subsequent generations intent on nationalism, romance, or magic. Morgan investigates the ways in which the early modern garden actually generated meaning through conventional motifs rather than through esoteric narrative programs.

From the first idea to the opening day, the project is followed step by step through a long picture-report. Phrases by Renzo Piano serve as comments for the pictures and guide the reader though this journey. The main text, that can be found at the end of the book, is the testimony of Renzo Piano himself, recorded for this special occasion. Moreover, some sketches have been made especially for this book. The choice not to use any caption for the pictures, but to leave Renzo Piano's voice as a guide for the reader, has the aim to transmit the sense of gradual discovery that is experienced when entering the museum. Our objective is to create a collection of "unique" books, that allow the reader to share with us at every stage of the project, this extraordinary adventure that is "building".

On Charles II's restoration to the throne in 1660, four of his supporters were provided with plots of land in a leafy suburb of London, on which to build their extravagant town palaces. The only one to survive - built for the poet and courtier Sir John Denham (1615-1669) and now situated in the heart of Piccadilly - became the home of the Royal Academy of Arts, its exhibitions and its Schools. This important study charts the history of the estate through its many owners, including the 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694-1753), who gave the house not only its name but also its distinctive and influential architecture. In his day, the house was host to leading scholars and celebrities, who met within Burlington's cutting-edge creation, which remains an unparalleled example of the Palladian style in England. Nicholas Savage's meticulous research examines 350 years of social and architectural history, as well as revealing the next phase in the life of the estate, as the Royal Academy opens up Burlington House as never before in an exciting redevelopment led by Sir David Chipperfield CBE RA to celebrate the institution's 250th anniversary.

Famed for his motto "less is more," Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a hotly-debated tastemaker of twentieth-century aesthetics and urban experience. Mies van der Rohe's philosophy was one of underlying truth in pure forms and proportions. With the help of contemporary technological and material developments, he sought a stripped-down purity to architecture, showcased by the likes of the Seagram Building and Farnsworth House. Some spoke out against this stark approach as the precursor to bland, generic cityscapes. Others cite Mies van der Rohe as the ultimate master of an abidingly elegant essence. This book presents more than 20 of Mies van der Rohe's projects from the period 1906-1967 to introduce his groundbreaking practise and influence in both America and Europe. 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)

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.