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Aspiring architects will be in their element! Explore this illustrated narrative history of buildings for young readers, an amazing construction in itself. We spend most of our lives in buildings. We make our homes in them. We go to school in them. We work in them. But why and how did people start making buildings? How did they learn to make them stronger, bigger, and more comfortable? Why did they start to decorate them in different ways? From the pyramid erected so that an Egyptian pharaoh would last forever to the dramatic, machine-like Pompidou Center designed by two young architects, Patrick Dillon’s stories of remarkable buildings — and the remarkable people who made them — celebrates the ingenuity of human creation. Stephen Biesty’s extraordinarily detailed illustrations take us inside famous buildings throughout history and demonstrate just how these marvelous structures fit together.
A strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it represents Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into "something rich and strange." The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was "restored" to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized. Remains of the Berlin Wall, meanwhile, which was once gleefully smashed and bulldozed, are now treated as precious relics. With The Secret Lives of Buildings, Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.
From the urban affairs correspondent of the New York Times--the story of a city through twenty-seven structures that define it. As New York is poised to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary, New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the story of the city through bricks, glass, wood, and mortar, revealing why and how it evolved into the nation's biggest and most influential. From the seven hundred thousand or so buildings in New York, Roberts selects twenty-seven that, in the past four centuries, have been the most emblematic of the city's economic, social, and political evolution. He describes not only the buildings and how they came to be, but also their enduring impact on the city and its people and how the consequences of the construction often reverberated around the world. A few structures, such as the Empire State Building, are architectural icons, but Roberts goes beyond the familiar with intriguing stories of the personalities and exploits behind the unrivaled skyscraper's construction. Some stretch the definition of buildings, to include the city's oldest bridge and the landmark Coney Island Boardwalk. Others offer surprises: where the United Nations General Assembly first met; a hidden hub of global internet traffic; a nondescript factory that produced billions of dollars of currency in the poorest neighborhood in the country; and the buildings that triggered the Depression and launched the New Deal. With his deep knowledge of the city and penchant for fascinating facts, Roberts brings to light the brilliant architecture, remarkable history, and bright future of the greatest city in the world.
From straw huts to skyscrapers, palaces to arts centres, this book features sixteen of the most iconic buildings from around the world including the Parthenon, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, the Forbidden City, the Bauhaus, Crystal Palace, the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre, and tells the human story behind each of them. Explains how and why famous buildings in history came to be built. Features detailed illustrations.
A captivating exploration of the ever-evolving world of architecture and the untold stories buildings tell. When a building is finished being built, that isn’t the end of its story. More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they’re allowed to. Buildings adapt by being constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and in that way, architects can become artists of time rather than simply artists of space. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei’s Media Lab, from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory. Discover how structures become living organisms, shaped by the people who inhabit them, and learn how architects can harness the power of time to create enduring works of art through the interconnected worlds of design, function, and human ingenuity.
Featuring over 200 photographs, this stunning book by renowned television historian Dan Cruickshank tells the history of architecture through the stories of 100 iconic buildings
Ever wonder how a suspension bridge can cross a gap thousands of feet wide? Want to know how to build a comfortable lounge chair out of cardboard boxes? Or what keeps a massive cathedral dome from collapsing? Discover the answers to these and many more questions in Steven Caney's Ultimate Building Book, a wonderfully comprehensive exploration of design, construction, and invention that will stimulate the curiosity of children and adults alike. Much as David Macaulay's blockbuster The Way Things Work did for machines and devices a decade ago, this definitive volume from best-selling author Steven Caney details the ins and outs of construction in all its fascinating forms. Packed with exciting building projects guaranteed to engage anyone from age 4 to 104, the Ultimate Building Book gives easy-to-follow instructions for creating amazing models and toys that are as much fun to make as they are to play with! Readers are also introduced to a wide variety of household materials and tools that can be used for building, along with fascinating insights into the architectural and design properties of everything from drinking straws to yurts. A mammoth project in its own right, this book has been under construction for more than a decade. The result is hundreds of superbly illustrated pages that will enlighten and fascinate armchair architects of all ages for years to come.
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
Inspired by the natural beauty of his homeland of Catalonia, Antoni Gaudi became a celebrated and innovative architect through the unique structures he designed in Barcelona, having a significant impact on architecture as it was known.
“A narrative that spans seven millennia, five continents and even reaches into cyberspace. . . . I savored each page.” —Henry Petroski, Wall Street Journal In Fallen Glory, James Crawford uncovers the biographies of some of the world’s most fascinating lost and ruined buildings, from the dawn of civilization to the cyber era. The lives of these iconic structures are packed with drama and intrigue, featuring war and religion, politics and art, love and betrayal, catastrophe and hope. They provide the stage for a startling array of characters, including Gilgamesh, the Cretan Minotaur, Agamemnon, Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, and even Bruce Springsteen. The twenty-one structures Crawford focuses on include The Tower of Babel, The Temple of Jerusalem, The Library of Alexandria, The Bastille, Kowloon Walled City, the Berlin Wall, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Ranging from the deserts of Iraq, the banks of the Nile and the cloud forests of Peru, to the great cities of Jerusalem, Istanbul, Paris, Rome, London and New York, Fallen Glory is a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture. And, by picking through the fragments of our past, it asks what history’s scattered ruins can tell us about our own future. “Witty and memorable . . . moving as well as myth-busting.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) “[An] elegant, charged book . . . A well-written prize for students of history, archaeology, and urban planning.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Astute, entertaining, and affecting.” —Booklist “A lovely, wise book.” —Alexander McCall Smith, New Statesman (UK) “A cabinet of curiosities, a book of wonders with unexpected excursions and jubilant and haunting marginalia.” —Spectator (UK)