Site Matters

Site Matters

2005 | ISBN: 0415949769 | 376 pages | PDF | 5 MB

One of the trends in twentieth century architecture and planning has been to denigrate and ignore the site, or larger context (both physical and social), surrounding a building or set of buildings.

Focussing on Le Corbusier's designs, Site Matters presents that first considered theory and vocabulary for the inevitable reaction against Modernism in planning, beginning in the 1960s and swelling through the 1980s as architects and planners alike developed a new appreciation of site, reincorporating the wider context into their plans.

Theoretical essays and empirically grounded pieces combine to provide the language and theory of this re-emergence of site, looking at Le Corbusier's designs, contemporary suburbs, and the planning agendas involved at the World Trade Center site.

Groundbreaking and innovative, Site Matters provides valuable theory and vocabulary for planners and architects.

Download

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects - Knowlton Hall

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects - Knowlton Hall

Source Books in Architecture

160 pages | August 25, 2005 | PDF | 29 Mb

Some buildings are famous. Others deserve to be, but in their modesty remain satisfied to stand simply as excellent works of architecture. Such is the case with Ohio State University School or Architecture's recently completed Knowlton School of Architecture. Designed by the internationally respected firm Mack Scogin Merrill Elam, Knowlton manages to project both a monumental physicality and a sense of subdued elegance.

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects/Knowlton Hall provides a comprehensive look at this impressive new work using sketches, models, renderings, working drawings, and photographs. As with all of the books in the Source Books in Architecture series, it is accompanied by commentaries from the architects and critics who explore both the technical and contextual elements of the work.

Download

Graphic Thinking for Architects and Designers

Graphic Thinking for Architects and Designers

 3 edition | 2001 | PDF | 246 pages | 75 MB

For architects, drawing is more than a convenient way to communicate ideas; it is an integral part of the creative process that has a profound impact on thinking and problem-solving. In Graphic Thinking for Architects and Designers, Third Edition, Paul Laseau demonstrates that more versatile and facile sketching leads to more flexible, creative approaches to design challenges. To encourage this flexibility and stimulate graphic thinking, he introduces numerous graphic techniques that can be applied in a variety of situations. He also helps readers acquire a solid grasp of basic freehand drawing, representational drawing construction, graphic note-taking, and diagramming.

Important features of this new edition include:

* Easy-to-understand discussions supported by freehand illustrations

* A new format with superior representation of techniques and concepts

* Dozens of new and updated illustrations

* Extensive coverage of new technologies related to the graphic thinking process

Download

German Architecture for a Mass Audience

German Architecture for a Mass Audience

English | 2000 | 192 pages | PDF | 12,7 MB

This book vividly illustrates the ways in which buildings designed by many of Germany's most celebrated twentieth-century architects, were embedded in widely held beliefs about the power of architecture to influence society. German Architecture for a Mass Audience also demonstrates the way in which these modernists ideas have been challenged and transformed, most recently in the rebuilding of central Berlin.

Download

Architects to the Nation: The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect's Office

Architects to the Nation:

 The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect's Office

2000 | 352 pages | HTML | 11,8 MB

This unique book traces the evolution and accomplishments of the office that from 1852 until 1939 held a virtual monopoly over federal building design. Among its more memorable buildings are the Italianate U.S. Mint in Carson City, the huge granite pile of the State, War, and Navy Building in Washington, D.C., the towering U.S. Post Office in Nashville, New York City's neo-Renaissance customhouse, and such "restorations" as the ancient adobe Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. In tracing the evolution of the Office and its creative output, Antoinette J. Lee evokes the nation's considerable efforts to achieve an appropriate civic architecture.

Download

100 Houses

100 Houses

English |  2004 |  480 pages | JPG | 348 MB

The greatest challenge in designing homes is negotiating the delicate balance between aesthetics and the personal desires of the occupants. While it’s important for the structure to reflect the vision and style of the architect, the client must ultimately feel at home beneath the roof. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to examine the homes that architects create for themselves. If houses reflect their owners’ personalities, then architects’ own homes are like autobiographies. Location, layout, style, lighting, artwork, furnishings—every detail adds color to the story. Each of these 100 dwellings, presented A-Z by architect, speaks more about its designer than any other building possibly could.

Download

Eco-Urban Design

Eco-Urban Design

2011 | PDF | 236 pages | 80.7 MB

"Eco-Urban Design" focuses on the unprecedented challenges currently faced by architects and designers. In a world where climate change, diminishing natural resources and an increasing global population have become indisputable facts of life there is now a rising demand for evolved buildings that no longer endanger the Earth's fragile ecological systems.

This book endeavours to tell the positive side of the story by featuring considered design solutions provided by the world's most innovative architects and engineers. By only including realised projects which have been subjected to post construction monitoring this publication provides evidence-based information that measured reductions in carbon emissions, water and energy usage can actually be achieved in the field and not just on the drawing board.

These completed projects demonstrate best practice and will inspire a new hybrid generation of designers who will combine architecture and engineering skills to resolve a key environmental challenge. Furthermore, these creative construction projects from a variety of genres including, commercial property, public buildings, social housing and private homes give testimony to the fact that investment in green archineering also provides a commercial advantage to forward thinking developers and investors.

Download

Design-Tech: Building Science for Architects

Design-Tech: Building Science for Architects

528 pages | PDF | 21,5 MB

Taking a fresh, holistic approach to the topic of architectural technology, this indispensable book looks at the 'why' as well as the 'how' of building science, providing a comprehensive, clear and concise introduction to the subject.

The demands faced by architects in their training and education are constantly changing. Written by two practicing architects who teach building technology and design, this text ensures that the reader is given the full picture of the discipline, as it integrates technical material with design sensibilities.

Incorporating structural design, environmental principles, material science and human factors, this book shows how these topics rely upon and influence one another in architectural design. It also relates the technical with the theoretical, illustrating how technology and design have influenced one another historically.

Offering highly practical guidance to the essentials of building design, this book is the first to provide the full spectrum of building science for architects in one volume.

Design-Tech includes hundreds of illustrations and numerous case studies that show how these theories work in practice.

* A single volume integrating structual, environmental and construction engineering basics for architects

* A holistic approach to technology, illustrating how it relates to the history and theory of architecture

* Presents sustainable design as a given, with environmental design principles included throughout the text

Download

Creating the Productive Workplace

Creating the Productive Workplace

1999 | CHM | 384 pages | 2,3 mb

Productivity is a key factor for individual companies as well as for worldwide economies. Many studies have shown that productivity at work bears close relationship to the work environment. Creating the Productive Workplace takes evidence from both US and European companies to show the elements of an efficient work environment. This book is essential reading for facilities and estates managers, interior designers, architects and building environmental engineers.

Download

Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects

A Living Architecture: 

Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects

English

After Frank Lloyd Wright's death in 1959, some of those who had studied and worked with the visionary American architect stayed on at Taliesin and formed Taliesin Architects. 

The group's aim is to create buildings in harmony with nature; to embrace lifelong learning; to make a positive contribution to the way people live; and to keep Wright's vision alive while experimenting within its parameters.

Author John Rattenbury, head of the talented firm, studied with Wright and has been with Taliesin ever since. 

A Living Architecture offers a fascinating overview of the renowned Taliesin Architects' work of the past forty years, a history of the fellowship's development, and a succinct summary of Wright's design philosophy. 

With three hundred full-color photographs and drawings, it is a spectacular visual treat, documenting some of the world's most exciting buildings of the late twentieth century

Download

Valode & Pistre Architects

Valode & Pistre Architects

English

The firm of Denis Valode and Jean Pistre, which has been practicing for 25 years, entered upon a new phase of its career in 1992, when the architects in cooperation with the landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson received the Equerre d'argent prize of the journal Le Moniteur for the L Oréal corporate headquarters outside Paris. 

Their predominantly large-scale projects are distinguished by their high degree of diversity. For some years, Valode & Pistre have not only been practicing in France, their native country, but also maintain offices in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Russia, Mexico, China, and elsewhere.

This book contains detailed presentations of 18 projects by Valode & Pistre, with documentation focusing on the specific working and design methods of the architects. Projects presented include the Renault Technocentre in Guyancourt, France; the Las Mercedes business park in Madrid, Spain; a group of office and hotel towers in Beijing, China; and the Hyatt Hotel in Ekaterinburg, Russia.

Download

Eisenman Architects: Selected and Current Works

Eisenman Architects: Selected and Current Works

(Master Architect Series)

Peter Eisenman

English

THE MASTER ARCHITECT SERIES is a series of monographs on some of the greatest architects and architectural firms of our time. Each monograph will contain 256 pages displaying several hundred color photographs, drawings, sketches and renderings. Although primarily a pictorial essay, the books will contain selected projects described in concise detail, along with a critique or overview of the firm, a resume of the partners, and a comprehensive bibliography.

Download

Ten Houses : Wheeler Kearns Architects

Ten Houses : Wheeler Kearns Architects

 Wheeler Kearns Architects seeks out small- to medium-sized projects with intellectually challenging programs and involved clients. The firm enjoys these projects, typically institutional or residential, because they best utilize its talents and coincide with established goals.

Holding fast to this groundwork has proved valuable as Wheeler Kearns Architects has gained recognition. Early notice for its residential work in 1989 by the AIA's Chicago Chapter was followed in 1992 by the AIA's national publication, Architecture, when it included Wheeler Kearns Architects in their list of nine national firms of "emerging talent." 

The firm operates a Website at [http://wkarch.com] that not only distributes project information among consultants and clients, but also has portions open to the general public and is periodically updated.

Download

NBJJ - Selected and Current Works

NBJJ - Selected and Current Works

The Master Architect Series

English/Chinese Edition

Download

Itsuko Hasegawa : Selected and Current Works 1976-1996

Itsuko Hasegawa 

Selected and Current Works 1976-1996

(The Master Architect Series II)

English

A leading Japanese architect whose projects range from formal beginnings through Shondndai cultural centre and beyond to the sophistication of recent work which is an orchestra of practicality and elegance.

Download

Hascher & Jehle Architektur

Hascher & Jehle Architektur

(Modern Architect)

PDF | 222 Pages | 33 MB

English, German

Download

Foster Associates - Recent Works

Foster Associates - Recent Works

Architectural Monographs

1995 | English | 143 pages

Foster Associates was established by Norman and Wendy Foster in 1967 after several years of working with Richard Rogers. 

Perhaps best known internationally for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the firm has worked recently in the UK, Japan, France, Germany and Spain. 

Having received over 50 awards and commendations for outstanding architectural design, there has continued to exist a passionate belief in modern architecture and the adaptation of technology to meet human needs. 

The work presented in this volume covers an enormous range of recent, diverse projects and also illustrates a number of unrealised projects.

Download

Archigram : Architecture without Architecture

Archigram : Architecture without Architecture

2005 | 440 pages | PDF | 10,8 Mb

In the 1960s, the architects of Britain's Archigram group and Archigram magazine turned away from conventional architecture to propose cities that move and houses worn like suits of clothes. In drawings inspired by pop art and psychedelia, architecture floated away, tethered by wires, gantries, tubes, and trucks. 

In Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, Simon Sadler argues that Archigram's sense of fun takes its place beside the other cultural agitants of the 1960s, originating attitudes and techniques that became standard for architects rethinking social space and building technology. 

The Archigram style was assembled from the Apollo missions, constructivism, biology, manufacturing, electronics, and popular culture, inspiring an architectural movement—High Tech—and influencing the postmodern and deconstructivist trends of the late twentieth century.

Although most Archigram projects were at the limits of possibility and remained unbuilt, the six architects at the center of the movement, Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb, became a focal point for the architectural avant-garde, because they redefined the purpose of architecture. 

Countering the habitual building practice of setting walls and spaces in place, Archigram architects wanted to provide the equipment for amplified living, and they welcomed any cultural rearrangements that would ensue. 

Archigram: Architecture without Architecture—the first full-length critical and historical account of the Archigram phenomenon—traces Archigram from its rediscovery of early modernist verve through its courting of students, to its ascent to international notoriety for advocating the "disappearance of architecture."

Download

KPF: Selected and Current Works (Kohn Pedersen Fox)

KPF: Selected and Current Works (Kohn Pedersen Fox)

The Master Architect Series II
English/Chinese Edition
 

 Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (also known by the acronym KPF) is an international architectural design firm located in New York, London and Shanghai providing urban design and master planning for public authorities and private companies

.The firm's designs can be seen in commercial skyscrapers such as the Shanghai World Financial Center. In 1990, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) awarded KPF with its Architecture Firm Award.

The firm was established in 1976 by Eugene Kohn, William Pedersen and Sheldon Fox

 Download

Herzog & de Meuron

Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron

 español | 208 pages | GG

Download