Architecture: Finding Books

-Guiding principles for designing new work and learning environments, with the aim of enhancing and stimulating creativity -Twenty outstanding and wide-ranging examples, from offices and schools to research facilities -Interviews with the designers and users of these 'creative spaces' reveal their functionality in practice Businesses and schools today are looking for ways to spur the kind of creative thinking that leads employees and students to generate innovative ideas. Many are finding that the physical spaces in which people work and learn can provide a strong impetus to follow a creative train of thought. Space for Creative Thinking puts this trend into the knowledge-work context, discussing the underlying design concepts that factor into making a space that stimulates original thinking. The book follows this outline of theory with twenty compelling examples, which range from offices and schools to research facilities. Each case study is presented through photographs, as well as interviews with both designers and users. It concludes with a brief set of guiding principles for designing spaces that capture the essence of a Creative Thinking Space.

A leading architect of the Italian Renaissance, Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481-1536) has, until now, been a little-known, enigmatic figure. A paucity of biographical documentation and a modest number of surviving buildings, coupled with an undeservedly critical assessment by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), have long cast Peruzzi's career in shadow. With Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy, Ann C. Huppert taps into a known, but neglected resource--Peruzzi's autograph drawings--and reveals the full scope and artistic mastery of Peruzzi's work and its enduring influence.   Extraordinary not only in their beauty and design inventiveness, but also in the varied representational techniques and practical mathematics noted within them, Peruzzi's drawings record an evolving artistic process. Reassessing his architectural masterworks, Huppert also explores lesser-known work: his studies of Roman antiquity, realized paintings and unrealized buildings, as well as engineering projects. Huppert shows that Peruzzi anticipated modern representational methods and scientific approaches in architecture, and pinpoints the moment when architecture began to emerge as a profession distinct from the other arts.

Arata Isozaki (b.1931) is one of the most important and influential Japanese architects working today. Since opening his practice in 1963, he has built extensively in Japan, Europe, the United States and more recently China. Through his work, both as an architect and theorist, Isozaki has acted as a bridge between the East and the West, exporting Japanese architecture and introducing Western trends into Japan.   This book presents a selection of his vast oeuvre in six thematic chapters, conceived by Arata Isozaki himself together with Ken Tadashi Oshima. These chapters follow the principles of Isozaki's instructive theorization of architecture and his own architectural works. Each chapter is introduced by Ken Tadashi Oshima, and this is followed by a conceptual essay by Isozaki. Projects are then presented in depth accompanied by a wealth of illustrations from the Isozaki Office Archive, including sketches, silkscreens, drawings, photographs and models.

In our architectural pursuits, we often seem to be in search of something newer, grander, or more efficient--and this phenomenon is not novel. In the spring of 1910 hundreds of workers labored day and night to demolish the Gillender Building in New York, once the loftiest office tower in the world, in order to make way for a taller skyscraper. The New York Times puzzled over those who would sacrifice the thirteen-year-old structure, "as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack." In New York alone, the Gillender joined the original Grand Central Terminal, the Plaza Hotel, the Western Union Building, and the Tower Building on the list of just one generation's razed metropolitan monuments. In the innovative and wide-ranging Obsolescence, Daniel M. Abramson investigates this notion of architectural expendability and the logic by which buildings lose their value and utility. The idea that the new necessarily outperforms and makes superfluous the old, Abramson argues, helps people come to terms with modernity and capitalism's fast-paced change. Obsolescence, then, gives an unsettling experience purpose and meaning. Belief in obsolescence, as Abramson shows, also profoundly affects architectural design. In the 1960s, many architects worldwide accepted the inevitability of obsolescence, experimenting with flexible, modular designs, from open-plan schools, offices, labs, and museums to vast megastructural frames and indeterminate building complexes. Some architects went so far as to embrace obsolescence's liberating promise to cast aside convention and habit, envisioning expendable short-life buildings that embodied human choice and freedom. Others, we learn, were horrified by the implications of this ephemerality and waste, and their resistance eventually set the stage for our turn to sustainability--the conservation rather than disposal of resources. Abramson's fascinating tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent manifestations of sustainability, from adaptive reuse and historic preservation to postmodernism and green design, which all struggle to comprehend and manage the changes that challenge us on all sides.

George Suyama began his architectural practice in Seattle in 1971. His early career is marked by a number of notable designs in the contemporaneous wood idiom of the region. Over time, however, Suyama developed an architecture characterized by a search for minimalist simplicity, a paradoxical architecture of intense, even exciting, tranquility. In 2002, he and partners Ric Peterson and Jay Deguchi established Suyama Peterson Deguchi. Their firm has built a distinguished reputation by means of designs influenced by the immediate region and by Suyama's ancestral Japan, which are intimately related to site and executed with an astonishing finesse of detail. Above all, their architecture reflects Suyama's quest to eliminate what he calls "visual noise," a quest that has yielded not visual silence but a kind of visual music. Architectural elements are distilled to a purity analogous to that of a musical tone, and relationships between those elements are as pure and artistically rich as the mathematics of music. In Suyama: A Complex Serenity, Grant Hildebrand introduces the man and his work, discussing relevant aspects of Suyama's life, the influences that have shaped his beliefs, and twenty of his built and unbuilt projects that illuminate the development of his remarkable art and craft. Included also are appendices that illustrate Suyama's deep and long-standing involvement with the arts and product design.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Palmer house, built in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early 1950s, is one of Wright's last residential masterpieces. Working from extensive materials gathered by Ann and Leonard Eaton, and from his own fifty-two-year familiarity with the building, Grant Hildebrand crafts the story of Billy and Mary Palmer's extraordinary home. He presents in detail the events surrounding the Palmers' selection of Wright as architect; Wright's personal creation of the design; the challenges, and the craftsmanship, of its construction; the evolution of its garden and teahouse; the role of the house as a setting for the Palmers' lives; and an analysis of its remarkable formal and spatial qualities. With a rich compendium of personal information and an extensive array of photographs, plans, and diagrams created especially for this book, Frank Lloyd Wright's Palmer House offers a comprehensive exploration of a living work of art and an intimate portrait of the people who, having brought it into being, treasured its presence in their lives for half a century. Citing the particular synergies of architect and client, house and site, Hildebrand situates the heretofore little-known Palmer house within the context of Wright's overall oeuvre and presents a convincing argument for the inclusion of the Palmer house in the canon of the architect's finest residential designs.

Furniture Studio explores the origins, methods, results, and influence of the unique and highly successful furniture design and fabrication studios offered by the University of Washington Department of Architecture. The furniture program, initiated by Andris Vanags, is an immersion into the role of materials, design, and making in architectural education. Students directly engage the physical properties of materials, and the knowledge gained through this engagement enriches the design and fabrication process. The experiences of its graduates reveal that the studio fosters creative thinking that truly integrates design and making. Ochsner presents historical background to shop-based courses, including furniture studio; traces the careers of four representative graduates of the program; and suggests implications from this program for architectural education and individual achievement beyond the University of Washington. Eleven students and the projects they created in the winter 2009 studio are profiled, and the book contains a fully illustrated catalogue of exemplary student projects from 1989 to the present. Illustrations and descriptions throughout the book showcase the heirloom-quality projects created by the students, many of which won awards in competitions.

After World War I, architects around the world aspired to transcend national boundaries that had been devastated by conflicts. The result was a flurry of artistic creativity. In Japan, young architects strove to create an "international architecture," or kokusai kenchiku, an expression of increasing international travel and communication, growth of the mass media, and technological innovation. Ken Tadashi Oshima traces the many interconnections among Japanese, European, and American architects and their work during the interwar years by examining the careers and designs of three leading modernists in Japan: Yamada Mamoru (1894-1966), Horiguchi Sutemi (1895-1984), and Antonin Raymond (1888-1976). Each espoused a new architecture that encompassed modern forms and new materials, and all attempted to synthesize the novel with the old in distinctive ways. Combining wood and concrete, paper screens and sliding/swinging glass doors, tatami rooms and Western-style chairs, they achieved an innovative merging of international modernism and traditional Japanese practices. Their buildings accommodated the demands of modern living while remaining appropriate to Japan's climate, culture, and economy. Until now, scholars have tended to isolate the work of Japanese architects from the European-American sphere of influence. Oshima reverses this trend, exploring the influences that flowed in multiple directions among architects in Japan and their counterparts in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Sadly, few of the buildings of Japan's interwar period withstood the destruction of World War II and the wrecking balls of subsequent decades of development. Oshima uses a wealth of photographs to vividly capture the character of the burgeoning architectural media of those years and to generously illustrate the works and visions of these pioneering modernists.

This volume, the first comprehensive assessment of the work of the Metabolic architect Kiyonori Kikutake ( 1928 - 2011 ) in the English language, highlights his lifelong creation of a constantly evolving platform for living, floating above land and sea through pivotal works, from the late 1950s to today. Abundantly illustrated, the publication situates Kikutake's work within an international context and as a vital inspiration for Japanese architectural practice today.

Pietro Belluschi (1899-1994) was the last of a generation of architects that included Marcel Breuer, Jose Luis Sert, and Louis I. Kahn, European immigrants who had a major impact on American architecture. This first extensively illustrated study of his life and work brings to light a remarkably accomplished architect, recipient of the AIA Gold Medal and designer (by his own estimate) of well over 1,000 buildings and projects. It reveals the enormous power that Belluschi wielded as an arbiter of taste and decision maker in the 1950s and 1960s; his role in shaping the policy of the State Department in its overseas building program; and his role in securing major commissions for favored architects such as I. M. Pei. Equally important is Meredith Clausen's discussion of Belluschi's role in the development of regionalism in the Pacific Northwest, and its impact on the definition of modernism as it was emerging in the United States.Clausen examines all aspects of Belluschi's long and productive career from his classical origins in Rome and the arts and crafts influences in the Pacific Northwest that helped shape his aesthetic, to the restrained, modernist houses and churches that comprised his early work; individual buildings like the startlingly modern Portland Art Museum of 1931 and the aluminum- clad Equitable (now Commonwealth) Building of 1948 that were at the cutting edge of progressive architecture; and the stores, shopping centers, and flush-surfaced glass and metal corporate towers that were the bread and butter of Belluschi's practice.In this measured account, Clausen describes the collaboration with Walter Gropius on the massive Pan Am Building that, dogged by unpopular public sentiment, marked a downturn in Belluschi's career and the fortunes of modernism in general. By aligning himself with large-scale institutions and private developers, Clausen observes, Belluschi alienated both avant-garde theorists and aesthetic trend setters and was increasingly at odds with the temper of the times, a fall from grace that culminated in a well- publicized debate with Philip Johnson in the late 1970s over Michael Graves's design for the Public Services Building in Portland, Oregon.

Global Ends: towards the beginning explores the uncertain and de-centred nature of architecture and the global/local dynamic involved in both its perception and production in a post-9/11, post-Great East Japan Earthquake world. Taking views from several accomplished architects spread across all corners of the globe (Tom Kundig, Junya Ishigami, Kerry Hill, Sean Godsell, Smiljan Radic, Paulo David and RCR Aranda Pigem Vilalta Arquitectes), it focuses on the paradigm shift we are witnessing today, with collective creativity springing from far-flung regions and local solutions that are perhaps adaptable to global issues. (from Amazon)

When Ivory Towers Were Black lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education. It tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students earned degrees from a world-class university. The story takes place in New York City at Columbia University's School of Architecture and spans a decade of institutional evolution that mirrored the emergence and denouement of the Black Power Movement. Chronicling a surprisingly little-known era in U.S. educational, architectural, and urban history, the book traces an evolutionary arc that begins with an unsettling effort to end Columbia's exercise of authoritarian power on campus and in the community, and ends with an equally unsettling return to the status quo. When Ivory Towers Were Black follows two university units that steered the School of Architecture toward an emancipatory approach to education early along its evolutionary arc: the school's Division of Planning and the university-wide Ford Foundation-funded Urban Center. It illustrates both units' struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve them, and their revolutionary white peers, in improving Harlem's slum conditions. The evolutionary arc ends as backlash against reforms wrought by civil rights legislation grew and whites bought into President Richard M. Nixon's law-and-order agenda. The story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four Columbia alumni who received the gift of an Ivy League education during this era of transformation but who exited the School of Architecture to find the doors of their careers all but closed due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies. When Ivory Towers Were Black assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of this bold experiment to achieve racial justice in the school and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community. It demonstrates how the experiment's triumphs lived on not only in the lives of the ethnic minority graduates but also as best practices in university/community relationships and in the fields of architecture and urban planning. The book can inform contemporary struggles for racial and economic equality as an array of crushing injustices generate movements similar to those of the sixties and seventies. Its first-person portrayal of how a transformative process got reversed can help extend the period of experimentation, and it can also help reopen the door of opportunity to ethnic minority students, who are still in strikingly short supply in elite professions like architecture and planning.

In our architectural pursuits, we often seem to be in search of something newer, grander, or more efficient--and this phenomenon is not novel. In the spring of 1910 hundreds of workers labored day and night to demolish the Gillender Building in New York, once the loftiest office tower in the world, in order to make way for a taller skyscraper. The New York Times puzzled over those who would sacrifice the thirteen-year-old structure, "as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack." In New York alone, the Gillender joined the original Grand Central Terminal, the Plaza Hotel, the Western Union Building, and the Tower Building on the list of just one generation's razed metropolitan monuments. In the innovative and wide-ranging Obsolescence, Daniel M. Abramson investigates this notion of architectural expendability and the logic by which buildings lose their value and utility. The idea that the new necessarily outperforms and makes superfluous the old, Abramson argues, helps people come to terms with modernity and capitalism's fast-paced change. Obsolescence, then, gives an unsettling experience purpose and meaning. Belief in obsolescence, as Abramson shows, also profoundly affects architectural design. In the 1960s, many architects worldwide accepted the inevitability of obsolescence, experimenting with flexible, modular designs, from open-plan schools, offices, labs, and museums to vast megastructural frames and indeterminate building complexes. Some architects went so far as to embrace obsolescence's liberating promise to cast aside convention and habit, envisioning expendable short-life buildings that embodied human choice and freedom. Others, we learn, were horrified by the implications of this ephemerality and waste, and their resistance eventually set the stage for our turn to sustainability--the conservation rather than disposal of resources. Abramson's fascinating tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent manifestations of sustainability, from adaptive reuse and historic preservation to postmodernism and green design, which all struggle to comprehend and manage the changes that challenge us on all sides.

Containing over 6,000 entries from Aalto to ziggurat, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date dictionary of architecture available. Beautifully illustrated and written in a clear and concise style, it covers all periods of Western architectural history, from ancient times to the presentday. It also includes concise biographies of leading architects, from Brunelleschi and Imhotep to Le Corbusier and Richard Rogers. The text is complemented by over 250 beautiful and meticulous line drawings, labelled cross-sections and diagrams. These include precise drawings of typical buildingfeatures, making it easy for readers to identify particular period styles. The first edition of the Dictionary of Architecture received excellent reviews. Now it has been fully revised, and expanded, bringing it completely up-to-date. New entries include definitions of landscape terms, and biographies of modern architects. Each entry is followed by a mini-bibliography,with suggestions for further reading. It also contains over 50 new illustrations. This is an essential work of reference for anyone with an interest in architecture. With clear descriptions providing in-depth analysis, it is invaluable for students and professional architects, and provides a fascinating wealth of information for the general reader.