Explore over 40 contemporary villas by today's most creative architects. Their brilliant architectural designs integrate the built structure and natural environment in open countryside and urban spaces, realizing ideal places. Villas in deserts, mountains, and meadows, with seaside or lakeside vistas, and in urban locations are all revealed in informative text and 560 gorgeous color photos and plans. Using modern techniques and au courant design theories, these contemporary villas invite Nature to participate in the design process, treating light, for example, as a deliberate design element. All of these highly individualistic villas deftly blend form and function. Clean-lined interiors eschew ornamentation, placing emphasis on the exhilarating response to voluminous space inside and infinite space viewed through walls of glass that erase the boundary between interior and exterior. This response cannot be experienced in traditional architecture. Homeowners, architects, interior designers, and all who are fascinated by contemporary architecture, with its new regard for Nature as design partner, will treasure this book.

--Shows pre-service and in-service middle and high school teachers how to integrate an understanding of adolescent development with strong pedagogical applications for their students, in a concise and accessible format. --Blends contemporary research on adolescent development with authentic teachers' voices, showing ways of successfully observing, understanding, engaging, and teaching adolescent students, particularly around the developmental changes that occur from ages 10 to 15 (grades 5 to 10). --The book features real-world classroom narratives that illustrate the successes-and struggles-of everyday teachers, and details specific teaching practices, classroom activities, and lesson ideas that help teachers tap the energy and talents bring to the classroom, all contributed by practicing teachers.

--Shows pre-service and in-service middle and high school teachers how to integrate an understanding of adolescent development with strong pedagogical applications for their students, in a concise and accessible format. --Blends contemporary research on adolescent development with authentic teachers' voices, showing ways of successfully observing, understanding, engaging, and teaching adolescent students, particularly around the developmental changes that occur from ages 10 to 15 (grades 5 to 10). --The book features real-world classroom narratives that illustrate the successes-and struggles-of everyday teachers, and details specific teaching practices, classroom activities, and lesson ideas that help teachers tap the energy and talents bring to the classroom, all contributed by practicing teachers.

This may be the most important book you or anyone else will read in the next fifty years. Assuming humanity survives that long. Draining the lifeblood of industrial civilization, the terminal decline of oil and gas production will spark a crisis far more dangerous than international terrorism, and more urgent than climate change. World leaders know it, so why aren't they telling? The last oil shock is the secret behind the crises in Iraq and Iran, the reason your gas bill is going through the roof, the basis of a secret deal cooked up in Texas between George Bush and Tony Blair, the cause of an imminent and unprecedented economic collapse, and the reason you may soon be kissing your car keys and boarding pass goodbye. David Strahan explains how we reached this critical state, how the silence of governments, oil companies and environmentalists conspires to keep the public in the dark, what it means for energy policy, and what you can do to protect yourself and your family from the ravages of the last oil shock.

In 545 beautiful color images, this fascinating book presents a broad sampling of residences that embody a living and evolving history of the Alamo City (including some repurposed commercial sites). Some of these structures are grand in their own right, others modest. Different in size, style, and locations, these varied living spaces share a similar sensitivity to the past and dynamic engagement in San Antonio's future. Those who refurbished these structures did not view them as frozen-in-time period pieces to double as museums or simply as Hollywood movie sets. Rather, they chose to breathe new life into these places in a number of remarkable and time-honoring ways. Two of the houses presented, from the historic King William district, are excellent examples of once-grand structures restored for living elegantly in the present, the late 19th century Nix House, the city's and perhaps the nation's first LEEDS/Platinum historic preservation home, and the exquisite Chabot House. This book will be a treasure to all who enjoy architecture or San Antonio.

This book is about deep change. In a series of research reports and commentaries, it mainly features case studies of powerful reform for the most part in local districts and in individual schools. They are set within the constraints of obvious political realities, essentially the recently legislated and bureaucratically enforced dimensions of high-stakes accountability. In this book, educational practice does not flow only from theory; neither does theory evolve only from educational practice. Rather, practice and theory fruitfully interact, not just some of the time, but most of the time. These accounts of deep change, moreover, are written gracefully, in understandable prose, and largely absent the barnacles of breathless advocacy. To be sure, the accounts are uneven, not as a function of their quality which uncommonly is high, but as a function of their foci and perceived attractiveness

This book is about deep change. In a series of research reports and commentaries, it mainly features case studies of powerful reform for the most part in local districts and in individual schools. They are set within the constraints of obvious political realities, essentially the recently legislated and bureaucratically enforced dimensions of high-stakes accountability. In this book, educational practice does not flow only from theory; neither does theory evolve only from educational practice. Rather, practice and theory fruitfully interact, not just some of the time, but most of the time. These accounts of deep change, moreover, are written gracefully, in understandable prose, and largely absent the barnacles of breathless advocacy. To be sure, the accounts are uneven, not as a function of their quality which uncommonly is high, but as a function of their foci and perceived attractiveness