The pioneering British modernist architect Richard Seifert was one of the most successful and influential architects of his generation. During the 1960s and '70s he changed the face and fabric of London with a powerful series of highly visible and uncompromising brutalist buildings, including - most famously - Centre Point, the Nat West Tower and King's Reach Tower. Seifert is often described as a modernist version of Christopher Wren in terms of his impact upon the capital, building hundreds of towers, office buildings and hotels in London but also working in other parts of the UK and internationally. An enigmatic and determined figure, Seifert achieved much in his lifetime yet has remained a controversial and divisive figure due to his unwavering commitment to modernism. Both Seifert and his buildings have been attacked, with his work described as 'notorious' for its brutalist aesthetic and an arguable lack of contextuality. Yet in recent years there has been a noticeable upsurge of interest in brutalist architecture in general along with the beginnings of a re-evaluation of Seifert's extraordinary contribution to mid-century architecture and design: a number of buildings by Seifert and his associates have been listed in recognition of their architectural importance. Beautifully illustrated, this book records, analyses and celebrates a considered selection of Seifert's buildings, including Centre Point, the Nat West and King's Reach Towers, Space House, the Euston Station Buildings, the Park Lane Tower Hotel, Drapers Gardens, the International Press Centre, all in London, Wembley Conference Centre and Sussex Heights in Brighton, within the most extensive survey of his work to date.

Divided into three chapters, Houses in the City, Houses in the Country and Places People Go To, the book showcases some of MBA's most spectacular projects, showing site pictures before, during and after construction. Most architecture books gloss over the nightmare part of the build, but the authors are keen to explain exactly what to expect during the process. Scattered throughout the book are some of the inspirations for MBA's designs, things they like and items that inspire them. While much of their work is focused in Central London, MBA has undertaken commissions worldwide including France,Germany and Los Angeles. In particular, their work for the Soho House Group and their emphasis on recycling and the environment have been the hallmarks of their success. Whether their commissions are commercial, residential or charitable, country or town houses, hotels, restaurants or bars, MBA create spaces you really want to eat, live or stay in. A quirky sense of humour is always at play, infusing their work with an empathy and warmth that many architects in the same filed just miss. Theirs is a vibrant and very busy practice.

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)

This book presents over 40 finished works by Chinese architects, produced between 2003 and 2008. A compelling selection representing a new generation of architects in a country whose building rhythm over the last decade has been unstoppable, as China's architects are making their mark within the backdrop of an avalanche of world class architecture stars. Featuring works by China Architecture Design & Research Group, Jiakun Architects, Atelier Deshaus, Mada s.p.a.m, MAD, TM Studio, Urbanus, Studio Pei-Zhu, Amateur Architecture Studio, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, Atelier Z+, Standardarchitecture and Architectural Design & Research Institute Nanjing University.

Gordon Walker's (b. 1939) highly unusual design process has yielded an extensive architecture of extraordinary quality; he is a unique figure in the American architectural movement and in the history of the Pacific Northwest. This personal and professional biography contributes both to our understanding of the breadth of viable design processes and, in a broader sense, to regional and architectural history. Gordon Walker is a 1962 graduate of the University of Idaho. He was co-founder of Olson Walker Architects (now Olson Kundig), worked with NBBJ in Seattle and San Francisco, and practiced in his own name for twelve years before joining Mithun Architects as a consulting principal. His work embraces the American west coast from Davis, California, to the Canadian border. He has designed over thirty residences (and built several with his own hands); a host of buildings and plans for universities throughout the Northwest and California; three buildings for the Pacific Northwest Ballet; and myriad commercial buildings, remodels, restaurants, and parks. He has been an educator and mentor, teaching at the Universities of Idaho and Washington. In addressing all of its determinants simultaneously in plan, section, and elevation, Gordon Walker has, for half a century, created an architecture of exceptional merit.

An Architect's Address Book is memoir in 18 chapters of the places Robert Lemon has lived, studied, and worked over the past six decades. Some are of places that he has visited many times and are important to his career. Studying architecture and conservation, Lemon has lived in Ottawa, Paris, London, Rome, and York. His work has involved projects in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Dorset, the High Arctic, and Xi'an. Other stories are about visiting the buildings of Andrea Palladio and Carlo Scarpa in the Veneto, Arne Jacobsen and Kay Fisker in Denmark, and five iconic 20th-century houses in France, in company of colleagues. Most of the chapters focus on someone influential to Lemon's career; and his vast interest in food is a thread through most stories.

Throughout history, the relationship between landscape and architecture has formed the basis of culture and the development of human settlements. The unfolding of a site, its transformation through the construction of buildings or of entire cities, translates into this basic idea: that history extends geography. In recent decades, generic architecture has increasingly homogenized the appearance of different territories, resulting in a profoundly different understanding of nature and landscape. Within his work, french architect and urban planner Jean-Pierre Pranlas-Descours continuously articulates the relationship between landscape and architecture. This book traces his line of thought by reflecting on 16 projects and their specific conditions.

For more than one reason Professor Pevsner, eleventh Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge, takes as the topic of his Inaugural Lecture Matthew Digby Wyatt, the Victorian architect and the first Slade Professor. He begins by inspecting some of Wyatt's major works - Addenbrooke's Hospital at Cambridge and the Paddington Station among them. Presently he allows himself to be diverted from his light architectural candour about Wyatt's buildings to an account of Wyatt's more general interests in design, and so to investigate the Victorian arena, with Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris, the conservative idealists, preaching one gospel, and Wyatt, Cole, and the Prince Consort preaching something different. The battle being fought was, as the Professor's 1950 text shows, deeply important; and its effects remain.

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) set out to build for the future. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, the Berlin-born architect had an inestimable influence on our aesthetic environment, championing a bold new hybrid of light, geometry, and industrial design, as dazzling today as it was a century ago. In this essential architect introduction, we survey Gropius' evolution and influence with 20 of his most significant projects, from the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany, to the Chicago Tribune Tower and Harvard University Graduate Center, completed after Gropius's exodus to the United States in 1937. We explore his role both as an architectural practitioner, and as a writer and educator, not only as a Bauhaus pioneer, but also, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as a leading proponent of the International Style. Along the way, we see how many of Gropius's tenets remain benchmarks for architects, designers, and urbanists today. Whether in his emphasis on a functional beauty or his interest in housing and city planning, Gropius astounds in the agility of his thinking as much as in the luminous precision of his work. 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 is the first full biography of two of Scotland's most eminent Architects, James Miller and John James Burnet. While born just three years apart into very different circumstances - Burnet was the son of a wealthy Glasgow architect and Miller a farmer's son - their careers and lives became intertwined as they competed for work and eventually the role of Scotland's leading architect. Born in 1857 and 1860 respectively, one inherited and the other established successful practices in Glasgow at the zenith of that city's wealth in the late 19th century. John James Burnet, who was educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and led his profession in Glasgow in the latter years of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries, produced many of the city's finest buildings. These include The Athenaeum on Buchanan Street; Charing Cross Mansions; numerous city-centre commercial buildings such as Waterloo Chambers and Atlantic Chambers and the Townhouses on University Avenue. After moving to London, his work included the extension of the British Museum, The Daily Telegraph Building on Fleet Street and Adelaide House by London Bridge. Burnet was knighted and awarded the RIBA's Gold Medal in 1923 and is recognized as one of Scotland's finest architects. James Miller is simply Scotland's most prolific architect. During his long career he designed The Empire Exhibition of 1901, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Glasgow Central Station, Wemyss Bay Station, St Enoch's Underground Station, Turnberry Hotel, Peebles Hydro Hotel, Gleneagles Hotel, the interiors of the SS Lusitania and SS Aquitania, Hampden Park, Forteviot Model Village, the Institution of Civil Engineers in Westminster, numerous banks, commercial buildings and churches in Glasgow and beyond as well as schools, country houses, factories and town halls. Despite this extraordinary output and his considerable architectural contribution to Scotland's heritage, he has received relatively little acclaim, until now. This is a fascinating double biography, the story of Burnet and Miller's parallel lives and work, set against the background of the booming Empire's 'Second City'.

Covers the brief but groundbreaking career of the self-proclaimed 'anarchitect' Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), one of the most influential American artists of the 1970s. The immense ambition and scale of Gordon Matta-Clark's projects, and their fearless reimagining of the urban landscape, challenged city-dwellers to reconsider the very notion of built structure and the fragility of seemingly unassailable edifices. Matta-Clark's first interventions took place in abandoned, derelict structures, upon which he performed his famous 'building cuts' and 'intersects'. First published in 2008 (for a show at SMS Contemporanea in Siena), and organised thematically and chronologically, this substantial volume looks at these and other bodies of work, such as the Food restaurant, the performances, the 'estates' and the artist's pursuit of alternative economical housing. The catalogue also includes a filmography and critical essays, plus an interview done by Judith Russi Kirshner in 1978. Text in English and Italian.

Internationally recognized for his ability to blend space and light with great contextual sensitivity, architect Steven Holl achieves his award-winning designs by beginning each commission with a small watercolor exploring light, color, and form. Paintings help Holl create a concept-driven design that showcases the unique qualities of each project. This collection of watercolors, which are works of art themselves, includes his most recent projects, from the JFK Center for the Performing Arts expansion and Hunters Point Public Library to University College Dublin.

Inspiring panoramas of sustainable urban development projects around the world In Work in Progress, Spanish photographer Jose Manuel Ballester (born 1960) captures urban design and building projects by the Spanish transport company Ferrovial, including highways, airports and sustainable urban development projects all over the globe.

Leonardo da Vinci's scientific explorations were virtually unknown during his lifetime, despite their extraordinarily wide range. He studied the flight patterns of birds to create some of the first human flying machines; designed military weapons and defenses; studied optics, hydraulics, and the workings of the human circulatory system; and created designs for rebuilding Milan, employing principles still used by city planners today. Perhaps most importantly, Leonardo pioneered an empirical, systematic approach to the observation of nature-what is known today as the scientific method.
Drawing on over 6,000 pages of Leonardo's surviving notebooks, acclaimed scientist and bestselling author Fritjof Capra reveals Leonardo's artistic approach to scientific knowledge and his organic and ecological worldview. In this fascinating portrait of a thinker centuries ahead of his time, Leonardo singularly emerges as the unacknowledged "father of modern science."

This book features the advanced studios of Chris Perry, Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, and Liza Fior with Katherine Clarke assisted by Andrei Harwell. The research and projects grapple with the issues of how to insert new pieces of architecture both as infrastructural and individual cultural buildings, into sites where existing physical and social issues are at conflict. The design solutions in each case--Cern headquarters in Geneva, the Peripherique of Paris, and the London 2012 Olympic site--unify the urban design and piece together the sites as bits of urban acupuncture creating new amenities and resources for the future. The book includes interviews with the architects about the work of their professional offices and essays on the themes of their advanced studios."

To reach the old cemetery in the small city of San Vito d'Altivole, which houses the tomb of the Brion family, one can take the road between Riese and Asolo, crossing a motionless landscape of cultivated farmland, on a plain lined with canals. The experience that we live through Scarpa's architecture is the crossing of a beyond, still earthly, through the garden of death (the small existing cemetery), which leads to the garden of life, to a beyond, which is already here. In this work by the venetian architect, architecture thus becomes an art form which helps us to overcome the absence of life by expanding the horizon of our minds and hearts, freeing us from our bodies, giving dignity to the void left by the loss of living presences and emotional ties. The garden of Onorina and Giuseppe Brion is open to all, as a gift. A gift that asks for nothing in return, and which offers a new world to all.

In architecture, as in many fields, the best method of learning is to learn from the experts. Here, the author, using modern drawing software, has redrawn the plans, elevations, sections, and axonometric drawings from 138 architectural works by the renowned Louis I. Kahn, one of the most important architects of the 20th century in the United States. In so doing, the author arrives at a new and objective perspective to understanding Kahn and his work, creating an invaluable resource for future study. By working through and observing the sketches in a chronological order, Kahn's spatial characteristics and variations can be seen in a holistic way. This book provides an innovative and intimate new look at Kahn and his architectural work.

Julian Abele, Architect and the Beaux Arts uncovers the life of one of the first beaux arts trained African American architects. Overcoming racial segregation at the beginning of the twentieth century, Abele received his architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. Wilson traces Abele's progress as he went on to become the most formally educated architect in America at that time. Abele later contributed to the architectural history of America by designing over 200 buildings throughout his career including the Widener Memorial Library (1913) at Harvard University and the Free Library of Philadelphia (1917). Architectural history is a valuable resource for those studying architecture. As such this book is beneficial for academics and students of architecture and architectural historians with a particular interest in minority discussions.

The Roehampton Lane (Alton West) estate is widely acclaimed as one of the seminal works of the Modern Movement in Britain. Less well known is the identity of its designers, four ambitious young architects in the employ of the London County Council: Bill Howell, John Killick, John Partridge and Stan Amis. Launched into practice with a maverick design for Churchill College, Cambridge, their output ranged from additions to Oxford and Cambridge colleges to theatres, houses and government buildings.Deriving a distinctive design language from revealed structure and highly modelled surfaces, HKPA developed a rich, allusive and extrovert architecture. Although a mastery of pre-cast concrete and a preference for raw finishes earned them an early reputation as Brutalists, their sensitivity to context, refined sense of light and materials and eye for the qualities of historic buildings transcends any single style. Geraint Franklin has combined interviews with archival research to tell the story of the individuals, collaborations and aspirations behind the built and unrealised projects. Lavishly illustrated with new photography by James O. Davies and images from the practice archive, this book is a must for architects, students and enthusiasts wanting to discover this key practice in British post-war architecture.

A comprehensive look at the life and work of one of the 20th century's most influential architects Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) was a Dutch architect, writer, and teacher who helped redefine Modern architecture in the second half of the 20th century. As an advocate for architecture's engagement with history, culture, climate, and the lived human experience of buildings and urban spaces, he created designs that privileged place and the daily rituals in the lives of its inhabitants over universal ideals. In this volume, enlivened by 300 illustrations from the Aldo van Eyck archive, Robert McCarter provides the first comprehensive study of van Eyck's 50-year career since his death, guiding readers through the architect's buildings and unrealized projects, with a focus on the interior spatial experience and on the design and construction processes. Highlighted projects include the Amsterdam Orphanage, the Roman Catholic Church in The Hague, and some of the hundreds of playgrounds he famously designed over the course of his career. McCarter also investigates how van Eyck's writings and lectures convey the importance of architecture in the everyday lives of people around the world and throughout history. By presenting his design work together with the principles on which it was founded, McCarter illuminates van Eyck's ethical interpretation of architecture's place in the world.

For over three decades, Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen has created a body of work that is at once sublime and rich, minimal yet tactile. This monograph presents his complete works from 1989 to 2009, including his domestic architecture, office and commercial spaces, as well as furniture and decorative objects for such leading international manufacturers as B&B Italia, Poliform and Swarovski. Over thirty projects are presented in detail, each with a project profile, many accompanied by specially commissioned photographs taken by Alberto Piovano, along with a complete project chronology.

The buildings of the past were constructed with readily available and local materials, such as stone, wood, or handmade bricks. Architects in the modern era, however, can choose from an ever increasing number of new materials, each one allowing for different advances in design. And yet the traditional materials have never been entirely supplanted; they still form an important part of the architectural range and are still used by architects the world over. The humble brick, for example, has remained a constant throughout the history of architecture, as has timber with its flexibility and warm tones. But today such elements can be used in conjunction with newer materials to highlight their natural beauty in many different ways: creating a stunning metal facade, wrapping a building with a cool, sleek stone finish, designing a wall with an eye-catching interesting texture, or adding depth or warmth to an internal design. Traditional metals are also finding new use, being employed to coat a structure in a light metal skin that reflects the sunlight, or embedded onto a building to add interest and texture. This book journeys through a curated selection of stunning examples from across the world, showcasing how each material is creatively used over a diverse range of building types and styles, and illustrating the myriad possibilities and forms available to the modern architect who chooses to rework these age-old materials into a brand-new decorative yet functional form.