Download or read book The Strip written by Stefan Al and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformations of the Strip—from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to “starchitecture”—and how they mirror America itself. The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change. Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.
Download or read book Signs Streets and Storefronts written by Martin Treu and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Treu tackles the architectural history and signage of Main Street and the strip—from painted boards nailed over crude storefronts to sleek cinemas topped with neon glitz. Honorable Mention, Architecture and Urban Planning, 2012 PROSE Awards Signs, Streets, and Storefronts addresses more than 200 years of signs and place-marking along America’s commercial corridors. From small-town squares to Broadway, State Street, and Wilshire Boulevard, Martin Treu follows design developments into the present and explores issues of historic preservation. Treu considers “common” architecture and its place-defining business signs as well as influential high-style design examples by taste-making leaders. Combining advertising and architectural history, the book presents a full picture of the commercial landscape, including design adaptations made for motorists and the migration from Main Street to suburbia. The dynamic between individual businesses and the common good has a major effect on the appearance of our country's Main Streets. Several forces are at work: technological advances, design imagination and the media, corporate propaganda, customer needs, and municipal mandates. Present-day controls have often led to a denuding of traditional commercial corridors. Such reform, Treu argues, has suppressed originality and radically cleared away years of accumulated history based on the taste of a single generation. A must-read for city planners, town councils, architects, sign designers, concerned citizens, and anyone who cares about the appearance and vitality of America’s commercial streets, this heavily illustrated book is equally appealing to armchair historians, small-town enthusiasts, and lovers of Americana.
Download or read book Main Street to Miracle Mile written by Chester Liebs and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1995-08 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traces the transformation of commercial development as it has moved from centralized main streets, out along the street car lines, to form the "miracle miles" and shopping malls of today ... Also explores the evolution of roadside buildings."--Back cover.
Download or read book Strong Towns written by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.
Download or read book The Architecture of Mobility written by Darrin Steven Nordahl and published by Darrin Nordahl. This book was released on 2002 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Architecture of the Everyday written by Deborah Berke and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ordinary. Banal. Quotidian. These words are rarely used to praise architecture, but in fact they represent the interest of a growing number of architects looking to the everyday to escape the ever-quickening cycles of consumption and fashion that have reduced architecture to a series of stylistic fads. Architecture of the Everyday makes a plea for an architecture that is emphatically un-monumental, anti-heroic, and unconcerned with formal extravagance. Edited by Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, this collection of writings, photo-essays, and projects describes an architecture that draws strength from its simplicity, use of common materials, and relationship to other fields of study. Topics range from a website that explores the politics of domesticity, to a transformation of the sidewalk in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, to a discussion of the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Contributors include Margaret Crawford, Peggy Deamer, Deborah Fausch, Ben Gianni and Mark Robbins, Joan Ockman, Ernest Pascucci, Alan Plattus, and Mary-Ann Ray. Deborah Berke and Steven Harris are currently associate professors of architecture at Yale University, and have their own practices in New York City.
Download or read book Common Places written by Dell Upton and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring America's material culture, Common Places reveals the history, culture, and social and class relationships that are the backdrop of the everyday structures and environments of ordinary people. Examining America's houses and cityscapes, its rural outbuildings and landscapes from perspectives including cultural geography, decorative arts, architectural history, and folklore, these articles reflect the variety and vibrancy of the growing field of vernacular architecture. In essays that focus on buildings and spaces unique to the U.S. landscape, Clay Lancaster, Edward T. Price, John Michael Vlach, and Warren E. Roberts reconstruct the social and cultural contexts of the modern bungalow, the small-town courthouse square, the shotgun house of the South, and the log buildings of the Midwest. Surveying the buildings of America's settlement, scholars including Henry Glassie, Norman Morrison Isham, Edward A. Chappell, and Theodore H. M. Prudon trace European ethnic influences in the folk structures of Delaware and the houses of Rhode Island, in Virginia's Renish homes, and in the Dutch barn widely repeated in rural America. Ethnic, regional, and class differences have flavored the nation's vernacular architecture. Fraser D. Neiman reveals overt changes in houses and outbuildings indicative of the growing social separation and increasingly rigid relations between seventeenth-century Virginia planters and their servants. Fred B. Kniffen and Fred W. Peterson show how, following the westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the structures of the eastern elite were repeated and often rejected by frontier builders. Moving into the twentieth century, James Borchert tracks the transformation of the alley from an urban home for Washington's blacks in the first half of the century to its new status in the gentrified neighborhoods of the last decade, while Barbara Rubin's discussion of the evolution of the commercial strip counterpoints the goals of city planners and more spontaneous forms of urban expression. The illustrations that accompany each article present the artifacts of America's material past. Photographs of individual buildings, historic maps of the nation's agricultural expanse, and descriptions of the household furnishings of the Victorian middle class, the urban immigrant population, and the rural farmer's homestead complete the volume, rooting vernacular architecture to the American people, their lives, and their everyday creations.
Download or read book Architecture and Spectacle A Critique written by Gevork Hartoonian and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl, this book puts forward a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture. It discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but does so by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present. The work of each discussed architect is seen as addressing a historiographical problem. To this end, and this is the second important aspect of this book, the chosen buildings are discussed in terms of the thematic of the culture of building (the tectonic of column and wall for example) rather the formal, and this through a discussion that is informed by the latest available theories. Having set the aesthetic implication of the processes of the digitalization of architecture, the book's conclusion highlights "strategies" by which architecture might postpone the full consequences of digitalization, and thus the becoming of architecture as ornament on its own right.
Download or read book Vernacular Architecture and Regional Design written by Kingston Wm Heath and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defines a set of strategies for understanding the complexities of a regional setting and, through a series of international case studies, examines how architects and designers have applied a variety of tactics to achieve culturally and environmentally appropriate design solutions.
Download or read book How to Read Architecture written by Paulette Singley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Read Architecture is based on the fundamental premise that reading and interpreting architecture is something we already do, and that close observation matters. This book enhances this skill so that given an unfamiliar building, you will have the tools to understand it and to be inspired by it. Author Paulette Singley encourages you to misread, closely read, conventionally read, and unconventionally read architecture to stimulate your creative process. This book explores three essential ways to help you understand architecture: reading a building from the outside-in, from the inside-out, and from the position of out-and-out, or formal, architecture. This book erodes boundaries between the frequently compartmentalized fields of interior design, landscape design, and building design with chapters exploring concepts of terroir, scenography, criticality, atmosphere, tectonics, inhabitation, type, form, and enclosure. Using examples and case studies that span a wide range of historical and global precedents, Singley addresses the complex interaction among the ways a building engages its context, addresses its performative exigencies, and operates as an autonomous aesthetic object. Including over 300 images, this book is an essential read for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of architecture with a global focus on the interpretation of buildings in their context.
Download or read book Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture written by Kate Nesbitt and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 1996-03 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of ArchitecturalTheory collects in a single volume the most significant essays on architectural theory of the last thirty years. A dynamic period of reexamination of the discipline, the postmodern eraproduced widely divergent and radical viewpoints on issues of making, meaning, history, and the city. Among the paradigms presented arearchitectural postmodernism, phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism. By gathering these influential articles from a vast array of books and journals into a comprehensive anthology, Kate Nesbitt has created a resource of great value. Indispensable to professors and students of architecture and architectural theory, Theorizing a New Agenda also serves practitioners and the general public, as Nesbitt provides an overview, a thematic structure, and a critical introduction to each essay. The list of authors in Theorizing a New Agenda reads like a "Who's Who" of contemporary architectural thought: Tadao Ando, Giulio Carlo Argan, Alan Colquhoun, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Marco Frascari, Kenneth Frampton, Diane Ghirardo, Vittorio Gregotti, Karsten Harries, Rem Koolhaas, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Thomas Schumacher, Ignasi de Sol-Morales Rubi, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Anthony Vidler. A bibliography and notes on all the contributors are also included.
Download or read book Buyways written by Catherine Gudis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-05-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highway has become the buyway. Along the millions of miles the public travels, advertisers spend billions on images of cola, cars, vodka, fast food, and swimming pools that blur past us, catching our fleeting attention and turning the landscape into a corridor of commerce. A smart, succinct, and visually compelling history of the billboard in America, Buyways traces how the outdoor advertising industry changed the face of American commercialism. Taking us from itinerant bill-stickers of circus posters in the 19th century to the blinking, beeping, 3-D eyesores of today, Gudis argues that roadside advertising has turned the landscape itself into a commodity to be bought and sold as advertising space. Buyways vividly chronicles the battles between environmentalists and businessmen as well as the response of artists, from New Deal photographers who satirized the billboard-infested landscape to commercial artists who embraced the kitsch of it all. It also shows how advertisers tapped into the American mythology of the open road, promoting mobile consumption as the American Dream on four wheels. Entertaining and brilliantly illustrated, Buyways is a vibrant road map of the new geography of consumption. Also includes an eight page color insert.
Download or read book The Urban Design Reader written by Michael Larice and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of The Urban Design Reader draws together the very best of classic and contemporary writings to illuminate and expand the theory and practice of urban design. Nearly 50 generous selections include seminal contributions from Howard, Le Corbusier, Lynch, and Jacobs to more recent writings by Waldheim, Koolhaas, and Sorkin. Following the widespread success of the first edition of The Urban Design Reader, this updated edition continues to provide the most important historical material of the urban design field, but also introduces new topics and selections that address the myriad challenges facing designers today. The six part structure of the second edition guides the reader through the history, theory and practice of urban design. The reader is initially introduced to those classic writings that provide the historical precedents for city-making into the twentieth century. Part Two introduces the voices and ideas that were instrumental in establishing the foundations of the urban design field from the late 1950s up to the mid-1990s. These authors present a critical reading of the design professions and offer an alternative urban design agenda focused on vital and lively places. The authors in Part Three provide a range of urban design rationales and strategies for reinforcing local physical identity and the creation of memorable places. These selections are largely describing the outcomes of mid-century urban design and voicing concerns over the placeless quality of contemporary urbanism. The fourth part of the Reader explores key issues in urban design and development. Ideas about sprawl, density, community health, public space and everyday life are the primary focus here. Several new selections in this part of the book also highlight important international development trends in the Middle East and China. Part Five presents environmental challenges faced by the built environment professions today, including recent material on landscape urbanism, sustainability, and urban resiliency. The final part examines professional practice and current debates in the field: where urban designers work, what they do, their roles, their fields of knowledge and their educational development. The section concludes with several position pieces and debates on the future of urban design practice. This book provides an essential resource for students and practitioners of urban design, drawing together important but widely dispersed writings. Part and section introductions are provided to assist readers in understanding the context of the material, summary messages, impacts of the writing, and how they fit into the larger picture of the urban design field.
Download or read book The Adirondack Architecture Guide Southern Central Region written by Janet A. Null and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Regional category The Adirondack Architecture Guide, Southern-Central Region provides a professional and insightful survey of the built environment of a unique area within New York's Adirondack Park. This book is the first field guide to the architecture of the Park, revealing the ordinary and the extraordinary, the remarkable buildings by prominent designers, as well as the hidden, unexpected gems few know exist. Based on more than seven thousand miles of fieldwork and years of research, the guide comprises more than seven hundred sites traversing the geographic range, socioeconomic strata, and historical span of the region from the late 1700s to the present. Organized according to clearly marked travel routes and fourteen tours on the ground and on the water, it features detailed maps and coordinates for each site, along with many beautiful photographs. Also included are eleven companion essays drawing on the expertise of professionals, local historians, and Adirondack residents that delve into the what, where, and why people built in the Adirondacks.
Download or read book Googie Redux written by Alan Hess and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2004-10-14 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that helped spark the retro craze for fifties architecture and introduced the term googie to the world is back! First published by Chronicle in 1986, this key survey of mid-century coffee shop and commercial architecture is still the standard work on the subject Googie Redux is a thoroughly revised and expanded edition of the classic and perennial top-selling book that rekindled the craze for 1950s coffee shop and commercial architecture. Long derided by critics as popular folly, the style - so named after John Lautner's eccentric Los Angeles coffee shop - was emblematic of Southern California's car-oriented architecture. By the time of the first edition's debut, these buildings were being demolished by the score. Alan Hess' 1985 Chronicle book did much not only to educate, legitimize, and popularize the style that characterized this endangered architecture, but it helped spark a resurgence of interest into midcentury modern design. Completely revised and significantly expanded in both text and images (some of them recently unearthed for this edition), this redesigned package features is still an entertaining and informative look at the rise, fall, and resurgence of the commercial architecture that changed the American landscape. Includes a greatly expanded guided tour of the iconic buildings in Southern California.
Download or read book American Autopia written by Gabrielle Esperdy and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War II, Esperdy creates a narrative that extends from U.S. Routes 1 and 66 to the Las Vegas Strip to California freeways, with stops at gas stations, diners, main drags, shopping centers, and parking lots along the way. While it addresses the development of auto-oriented landscapes and infrastructures, American Autopia is not a conventional history, offering instead an exploration of the wide-ranging evolution of car-centric territories and drive-in typologies, looking at how they were scrutinized by diverse cultural observers in the middle of the twentieth century. Drawing on work published in the popular and professional press, and generously illustrated with evocative images, the book shows how figures as diverse as designer Victor Gruen, geographer Jean Gottmann, theorist Denise Scott Brown, critic J.B. Jackson, and historian Reyner Banham constructed "autopia" as a place and an idea. The result is an intellectual history and interpretive roadmap to the United States of the Automobile.
Download or read book Design Review written by Brenda C. Scheer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That the topic ofdesign review is somehow trou My biases are clearfrom the start: I am among blesome is probably one thing all readers can those who believe that, despite all signals to the contrary, the physical structure of our environ agree on. Beyond this, however, I suspect pros pects of consensus are dim. Differing opinions ment can be managed, and that controlling it is on the subject likely range from those desiring the key to the ameliorationofnumerous problems control tothosedesiringfreedom. Saysonecamp: confronting society today. I believe that design our physical and natural environments are going can solve a host ofproblems, and that the design to hell in a hand basket. Says the other: design of the physical environment does influence be review boards are only as good as their members; havior. more often than not their interventions produce Clearly, this is a perspective that encompasses mediocre architecture. more than one building at a time and demands As a town planner and architect, I am sympa that each building understand its place in a larger thetic to the full range of sentiment. Perhaps a context-the city. Indeed, anyone proposing discussion of these two concepts-control and physical solutions to urban problems is designing freedom-and their differences would now be or, as may seem more often the case, destroying useful. But let me instead suggest that both posi the city.
