Download or read book The Iconic Building written by Charles Jencks and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new type of achitecture has emerged in the last decade : the iconic landmark building, which challenges the traditional architectural monument. In the past, public buildings expressed shared meaning through well-known conventions. Today those conventions are superceded by commercial forces and the quest for instant fame. Public architecture is now required to be an amazing piece of surreal sculpture as well as something that appeals to a diverse audience - at once provocative and practical yet without the context that religion and ideaology once provided. Such contrary demands drive the architect toward a new convention : the enigmatic signifier. This curious sign suggests many meanings without naming of them. The most publized version of the genre, Frank Gehry's New Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, 1997, became an instant media event that forces other architects to design event buildings routinely. This 'Bilbao effect' has led to a series of landmark buildings by architects such as Norman Foster, Peter Eisenman, Enric Miralles, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Renzo Piano, Will Alsop, and Rem Koolhaas. Some of these buildings are successful creations, while others make us wince." -- book jacket.
Download or read book The Iconic House written by Dominic Bradbury and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in an updated edition and attractive new format, this essential book on modern architecture presents over one hundred of the most significant houses of the past hundred years. The Iconic House features over one hundred of the most important and influential houses designed and built since 1900. With seminal works by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as modern-day greats like Tadao Ando, Rem Koolhaas, and Herzog & de Meuron, this book brings to life a stunning array of architectural masterpieces. Wide-ranging in both geographical scope and artistic style, the houses share an appreciation of local materials and building traditions and a careful understanding of clients’ needs. Each house, however, is the result of a unique approach that makes it groundbreaking for its time. Now, fully updated, the book features iconic houses recently constructed, as well as concise, informative texts, specially commissioned photographs, floor plans, and drawings. The Iconic House remains an ideal overview of contemporary architects and architecture, for design-lovers and professionals alike.
Download or read book The Icon Project written by Leslie Sklair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A pioneering look at the ways in which contemporary architecture serves the interests of the capitalist class, from global North to South and through to the petro-cities of the Gulf States In the last quarter century, a new form of iconic architecture has appeared throughout the world's major cities. Typically designed by globe-trotting "starchitects" or by a few large transnational architectural firms, these projects are almost always driven by private interests. In The Icon Project, sociologist Leslie Sklair focuses on ways in which capitalist globalization is produced and represented all over the world, especially in globalizing cities. Sklair traces how the iconic buildings of our era-elaborate shopping malls, spectacular museums and vast urban megaprojects-constitute the triumphal "Icon Project" of contemporary global capitalism, promoting increasing inequality and hyperconsumerism. He sets out to explain how the architecture industry organizes the social production and marketing of iconic structures and how corporations increasingly dominate the built environment and promote the trend towards globalizing, consumerist cities. The Icon Project, Sklair argues, is a weapon in the struggle to solidify capitalist hegemony as well as reinforce transnational capitalist control of where we live, what we consume, and how we think"--
Download or read book The Los Angeles Central Library written by Kenneth A. Breisch and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2016-12-21 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the most comprehensive investigation of the Los Angeles Public Library’s early history and architectural genesis ever undertaken, Kenneth Breisch chronicles the institution’s first six decades, from its founding as a private library association in 1872 through the completion of the iconic Central Library building in 1933. During this time, the library evolved from an elite organization ensconced in two rooms in downtown LA into one of the largest public library systems in the United States—with architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s building, a beloved LA landmark, as its centerpiece. Goodhue developed a new style, fully integrating the building’s sculptural and epigraphic program with its architectural forms to express a complex iconography. Working closely with sculptor Lee Oskar Lawrie and philosopher Hartley Burr Alexander, he created a great civic monument that, combined with the library’s murals, embodies an overarching theme: the light of learning. “A building should read like a book, from its title entrance to its alley colophon,” wrote Alexander—a narrative approach to design that serves as a key to understanding Goodhue’s architectural gem. Breisch draws on a wealth of primary source material to tell the story of one of the most important American buildings of the twentieth century and illuminates the formation of an indispensible modern public institution: the American public library.
Download or read book The History of Architecture written by Gaynor Aaltonen and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-28 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a bird's eye view of architecture in time, and explores the different ways architects have responded to civilizations, giving them the buildings and cities they deserve.
Download or read book Architecture Inside Out written by John Zukowsky and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ancient palaces and glorious cathedrals, to futuristic homes and striking skyscrapers, architecture continues to play an important role in the development of history and culture. Architecture Inside + Out examines fifty of the world's most impressive buildings and uncovers their structural secrets through detailed illustrations, while clear and accessible text places each building in its context. By researching original plans, notes and drawings, this book reveals the expertise and original intentions behind these magnificent creations, simulating the experience of spending time with the architects themselves.However, a building truly comes alive once it is inhabited, and Architecture Inside + Out also looks beyond the bricks and mortar to explore the principal spaces within. Photographs of striking interiors enable readers to scrutinize the most awe-inspiring aspects of these structures. The reader will discover how ancient wonders, such as the Parthenon and Colosseum, were constructed; learn the colour-coding behind the exposed skeleton of the Centre Pompidou in Paris; understand the vision behind the Brutalist housing complex, Habitat 67, in Canada; and take a tour through the Capitol Building in Washington, the seat of the United States Congress.
Download or read book The LEGO Architect written by Tom Alphin and published by No Starch Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel through the history of architecture in The LEGO Architect. You’ll learn about styles like Art Deco, Modernism, and High-Tech, and find inspiration in galleries of LEGO models. Then take your turn building 12 models in a variety of styles. Snap together some bricks and learn architecture the fun way!
Download or read book Iconic L A written by Gloria Koenig and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Los Angeles is a city whose buildings define it, a city whose buildings are instantly recognizable. A bestseller in hardcover, Iconic L.A. has been completely updated and revised to include Case Study House #8, the famed steel-and- glass masterpiece designed by Charles and Ray Eames"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book All the Buildings in New York written by James Gulliver Hancock and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A charmingly illustrated journey through New York City, neighborhood by neighborhood. All the Buildings in New York is a love letter to New York City, told through James Gulliver Hancock’s unique and charming drawings of the city’s diverse architectural styles and cityscape. His buildings are colorful and chock full of fun and offbeat details, and this book is full of new discoveries as well as old chestnuts for anyone who loves the Big Apple. Organized by neighborhoods, the book features iconic New York buildings, such as the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and Flatiron Building, as well as the everyday buildings that make up New York City—the boutique shops in SoHo, timeless brownstones in Brooklyn, and rows of busy markets in Chinatown. New Yorkers and tourists alike will savor this one-of-a-kind volume that uniquely celebrates the energy and spirit of the city that never sleeps.
Download or read book 10 Buildings That Changed America written by Dan Protess and published by Agate Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 10 Buildings that Changed America tells the stories of ten influential works of architecture, the people who imagined them, and the way these landmarks ushered in innovative cultural shifts throughout our society. The book takes readers on a journey across the country and inside these groundbreaking works of art and engineering. The buildings featured are remarkable not only for aesthetic and structural reasons, but also because their creators instilled in them a sense of purpose and personality that became reflected in an overarching sense the American identity. Edited by the staff of WTTW, the Chicago PBS affiliate that is the most-watched public television station in the country, 10 Buildings will be released alongside the national broadcast of an hour-long special by the same name. This television event will be promoted over digital media, on-ground events, and educational initiatives in schools, and the book will be a significant component to all of these elements. 10 Buildings retells the shocking, funny, and even sad stories of how these buildings came to be. It offers a peek inside the imaginations of ten daring architects who set out to change the way we live, work, and play. From American architectural stalwarts like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, to modern revolutionaries like Frank Gehry and Robert Venturi, this book examines the most prominent buildings designed by the most noteworthy architects of our time. Also profiled are Americans less noted for their architectural acumen, but no less significant for their contributions to the field. Thomas Jefferson, a self-taught architect, is profiled for designing the iconic Virginia State Capitol. Taking its inspiration from ancient Rome, America's first major public building forged a philosophical link between America and the world's earliest democracies. Similarly, Henry Ford employed Albert Kahn to design a state-of-the-art, innovative factory for Ford's groundbreaking assembly line. Reinforced concrete supported massive, open rooms without any interior dividing walls, which yields the uninterrupted space that was essential for Ford's sprawling continuous production setups. What's more, Kahn considered the needs of workers by including astonishingly modern large windows and louvers for fresh air. The design of each of these ten buildings was completely monumental and prodigious in its time because of the architect’s stylistic or functional innovations. Each was also highly influential, inspiring a generation or more of architects, who in turn made a lasting impact on the American landscape. We see the legacy of architects like Mies van der Rohe or H.H. Richardson all around us: in the homes where we live, the offices where we work, our public buildings, and our houses of worship. All have been shaped in one way or another by a handful of imaginative, audacious, and sometimes even arrogant individuals throughout history whose bold ideas have been copied far and wide. 10 Buildings is the ideal collection to detail the flashes of inspiration from these architects who dared to strike out on their own and design radical new types of buildings that permanently altered our environmental and cultural landscape.
Download or read book Digital Monuments written by Simone Brott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Monuments radically explodes "iconic architecture" of the new millennium and its hijacking of the public imagination via the digital image. Hallucinatory constructions such as Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi are all introduced to the world by immortal digital imagery that floods the internet—yet comes to haunt the actualised buildings. Like holograms, these "digital monuments," which violently push physics and engineering to their limits, flicker eerily between the real and the unreal—invoking fantasies of omnipotence, immortality and utopian cities. But this experience of iconic architecture as a digital dream on the ground conceals from the urban spectator the social reality of the buildings and the rigidity of their ideology. In 18 micro-essays, Digital Monuments exposes the stereotypes of iconic architecture while depicting the savagery of the industry, from the Greek and Spanish crises triggered by financialised iconic development to mass labour-deaths on construction sites in the UAE.
Download or read book Building the Golden Gate Bridge written by Harvey Schwartz and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silver Award Winner, 2016 Nautilus Book Award in Young Adult (YA) Non-Fiction Moving beyond the familiar accounts of politics and the achievements of celebrity engineers and designers, Building the Golden Gate Bridge is the first book to primarily feature the voices of the workers themselves. This is the story of survivors who vividly recall the hardships, hazards, and victories of constructing the landmark span during the Great Depression. Labor historian Harvey Schwartz has compiled oral histories of nine workers who helped build the celebrated bridge. Their powerful recollections chronicle the technical details of construction, the grueling physical conditions they endured, the small pleasures they enjoyed, and the gruesome accidents some workers suffered. The result is an evocation of working-class life and culture in a bygone era. Most of the bridge builders were men of European descent, many of them the sons of immigrants. Schwartz also interviewed women: two nurses who cared for the injured and tolerated their antics, the wife of one 1930s builder, and an African American ironworker who toiled on the bridge in later years. These powerful stories are accompanied by stunning photographs of the bridge under construction. An homage to both the American worker and the quintessential San Francisco landmark, Building the Golden Gate Bridge expands our understanding of Depression-era labor and California history and makes a unique contribution to the literature of this iconic span.
Download or read book A History of New York in 27 Buildings written by Sam Roberts and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Heroic written by Mark Pasnik and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often problematically labeled as “Brutalist” architecture, the concrete buildings that transformed Boston during 1960s and 1970s were conceived with progressive-minded intentions by some of the world’s most influential designers, including Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb, Araldo Cossutta, Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, Paul Rudolph, Josep Lluís Sert, and The Architects Collaborative. As a worldwide phenomenon, building with concrete represents one of the major architectural movements of the postwar years, but in Boston it was deployed in more numerous and diverse civic, cultural, and academic projects than in any other major U.S. city. After decades of stagnation and corrupt leadership, public investment in Boston in the 1960s catalyzed enormous growth, resulting in a generation of bold buildings that shared a vocabulary of concrete modernism. The period from the 1960 arrival of Edward J. Logue as the powerful and often controversial director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority to the reopening of Quincy Market in 1976 saw Boston as an urban laboratory for the exploration of concrete’s structural and sculptural qualities. What emerged was a vision for the city’s widespread revitalization often referred to as the “New Boston.” Today, when concrete buildings across the nation are in danger of insensitive renovation or demolition, Heroic presents the concrete structures that defined Boston during this remarkable period—from the well-known (Boston City Hall, New England Aquarium, and cornerstones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University) to the already lost (Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty’s concrete Lincoln House and Studio; Sert, Jackson & Associates’ Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School)—with hundreds of images; essays by architectural historians Joan Ockman, Lizabeth Cohen, Keith N. Morgan, and Douglass Shand-Tucci; and interviews with a number of the architects themselves. The product of 8 years of research and advocacy, Heroic surveys the intentions and aspirations of this period and considers anew its legacies—both troubled and inspired.
Download or read book The Parthenon Enigma written by Joan Breton Connelly and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.
Download or read book Dingbat 2 0 the Iconic Los Angeles Apartment As Projection of a Metropolis written by Thurman Grant and published by Doppelhouse Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dingbat 2.0 is the first critical study of the most ubiquitous and mundane building type in Los Angeles: the dingbat apartment. Often dismissed as ugly and unremarkable, dingbat apartments have qualities that arguably make them innovative, iconoclastic, and distinctly "L.A." For more than half a century the idiosyncratic dingbat has been largely anonymous, occasionally fetishized and often misunderstood. Praised and vilified in equal measure, dingbat apartments were a critical enabler of Los Angeles' rapid postwar urban expansion. While these apartments are known for their variety of midcentury decorated facades, less explored is the way they have contributed to a consistency of urban density achieved by few other twentieth century cities. Dingbat 2.0 integrates essays and discussions by some of today's leading architects, urbanists and cultural critics with photographic series, typological analysis, and speculative designs from around the world to propose alternate futures for Los Angeles housing and to consider how qualities of the inarguably flawed housing type can foreground many crucial issues facing global metropolises today. Dingbat 2.0 gives an often-maligned Los Angeles building type its long overdue moment in the sun, not only advancing a sophisticated typology of dingbats, but also reimagining the potential of the dingbat for the twenty-first century--at a moment when the imperative to create livable and modest affordable housing is more pressing than ever. - Ken Bernstein, Principal City Planner, Los Angeles Department of City Planning and Office of Historic Resources This book is extremely valuable for designers, particularly when one considers that architects generate species of buildings. An in-depth study of this particularly indigenous species to Los Angeles allows architects to not only become familiar with the causes and effects of the dingbat, but also the many possibilities for its future morphologies. - Jimenez Lai, founder and creator of Bureau Spectacular One of the many brilliances of this great book is the telling comparison of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye--raised on its skinny pilotis to create an entirely ornamental void--and the dingbat--likewise lally column-upped in the air but usefully making room for cars beneath. Ever not quite modern, Corb pontificated about "machines for living" while never quite knowing what to do with their true enabler: the machine for leaving. The indelible dingbat is a sandwich of necessity and desire that bespeaks the throwaway (and getaway) modernity uniquely Made in L.A. -- Michael Sorkin, Architect, Urbanist and Author; Principal, Michael Sorkin Studio
Download or read book New York Architectural Guide written by Vladimir Belogolovsky and published by Architectural Guide. This book was released on 2019 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This architectural guide brings together 100 of the most original structures built in New York City since 1999. Vladimir Belogolovsky pairs them with such nicknames as Guillotine, Peacock, Shark's Fin, Turtle Shell, and Woodpecker. The New York-based author's selection covers buildings realized by the world's most renowned architects in a period when their creations were celebrated as art, and personal styles were encouraged by the media, critics, and clients. The featured time span begins with the rise of the starchitect in the late 1990s, and ends in the present day. But the mission of the book is not only to document; it is also to celebrate New York's transformative energy. Many of the buildings were designed either by foreign architects or those who settled in the city and now call it home. Through witty, incisive commentary, catchy nicknames, and quotes from the author's interviews with the architects, this singular guide allows readers to see many of New York's contemporary icons in a new way.
