How Architecture Works

How Architecture Works

An essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday lives We spend most of our days and nights in buildings, living and working and sometimes playing. Buildings often overawe us with their beauty. Architecture is both setting for our everyday lives and public art form—but it remains mysterious to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, one of our best, most stylish critics and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his architectural writing, answers our most fundamental questions about how good—and not-so-good—buildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, he takes us behind the scenes, revealing how architects as different as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Robert A. M. Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to "read" plans, how buildings respond to their settings, and how the smallest detail—of a stair balustrade, for instance—can convey an architect's vision. Ranging widely from a war memorial in London to an opera house in St. Petersburg, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to a famous architect's private retreat in downtown Princeton, How Architecture Works, explains the central elements that make up good building design. It is an enlightening humanist's toolkit for thinking about the built environment and seeing it afresh. "Architecture, if it is any good, speaks to all of us," Rybczynski writes. This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.

HOLODECK architects works

Analytical thinking and holistic concepts Low-tech buildings with strong architectural identities Selected works from 25 years of international architectural practice HOLODECK architects work on a wide variety of projects, from urban development to exhibitions. Their impressive body of work is proof that sophisticated architecture need not ignore ecological and social issues. The latter are consciously reflected from concept to realization. For example, HOLODECK have developed strategic solutions as alternatives to single-family homes, apply a sensitive approach to existing structures, and design buildings that make consistent use of natural conditions such as passive solar energy, airflow, cross-ventilation, and natural lighting. This volume also reinterprets the typical architecture book. It consists of two separate yet connected parts; the first presents sketches, plans, studies and models, while the second features texts and lavish photo series.

Architecture and Civilization