Olin Library: Architecture : New Books/DVDs - 2017/02

This exquisitely illustrated volume features 150 works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's rich holdings of Islamic art. The objects - including brilliantly glazed pottery, enameled and gilded glass, inlaid metalwork, carved ornamental stone and wood, sumptuous woven textiles, and vividly illuminated and superbly written manuscripts and single pages - span the area extending from southern Spain to northern India, and range in date from the 7th century up to the modern era. Full-color plate images are accompanied by descriptions in both English and Arabic, organized chronologically and thematically. Among the book's essays is an illustrated narration of the museum's recently conserved Damascus Room. Published here for the first time, this stunning room retains its original brightly painted surfaces. Beautiful and authoritative, this book is an essential guide to global Islamic art.

The author of this book aims to encourage an awareness of sustainability as it is implemented across all areas of planning and design, and the ability to think and act on this knowledge. This book will explore in genuine depth the sustainable strategies that could be applied, along with the practical work of key figures in the built environment, setting these against historical experiences and traditional cultures. It also aimes to revive the discourse around these subjects. Achieving this will require the involvement of architects and structural, energy and environmental engineers, construction businesses and specialists, research institutes and universities. The five chapters and 333 show-cased projects reflect important stages in the architectural and engineering-based design process, stages which need to be addressed when dealing with sustainable strategies in the built environment.

Steve Badanes, Jim Adamson, and John Ringel believe an architect's job does not stop at designing a building, but that it extends to constructing it as well. Now working into their fifth decade, Jersey Devil, the loose-knit group they founded in 1972, bands together under this design/build ethos that an architect's place is just as much on the job site as it is at the drawing board. The trio pioneered design/build practice and their influence has spawned more than one hundred design/build programs. Jersey Devil's process and expertise are unpacked in this Architecture Brief, providing students and teachers with a toolkit for design/build education. Through stories, didactic commentary, and sample exercises, theDesign/Build complements nuts-and-bolts content with Jersey Devil's philosophy and perspective, allowing the book to impart practical instruction while acting as a valuable guide for navigating the elusive challenges of design/build. Themes touch on socially responsible architecture, intuition and intentionality, detailing and fostering craftsmanship, group work and collaboration, off-the-shelf components and nonstandard applications, educational reform, ethos and risk, good life and play, the politicsof building, and university-community relations.

Renowned for his extensive work in architectural history and historic preservation as an educator, scholar, activist, and public lecturer, Richard Longstreth is one of the most important architectural preservationists of the recent past. Looking beyond the Icons offers a generous and diverse selection of his writings over the past twenty-five years. The author explores a variety of topics related to midcentury (ca. 1945-70) preservation efforts, including practical, intellectual, and psychological dilemmas associated with preserving the recent past, preservation-related deficiencies in the urban planning process, and preservation of specific types of buildings. This collection offers a new understanding of the richness and variety of mid-twentieth-century U.S. architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and provides a detailed analysis of both the imperatives for and the challenges involved in preserving this legacy.

Since the earliest settlements, people have deliberated the issues that affect their future together. 'Making Community Design Work' shows how planners can guide the process toward effective decision making and beneficial community design.

In this engaging and handsome book, Cammy Brothers takes an unusual approach to Michelangelo's architectural designs, arguing that they are best understood in terms of his experience as a painter and sculptor. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on the built projects and considered the drawings only insofar as they illuminate those buildings, this book analyses his designs as an independent source of insight into the mechanisms of Michelangelo's imagination. Brothers gives equal weight to the unbuilt designs, and suggests that some of Michelangelo's most radical ideas remained on paper. Brothers explores the idea of drawing as a mode of thinking, using its evidence to reconstruct the process by which Michelangelo arrived at new ideas. By turning the flexibility and fluidity of his figurative drawing methods to the subject of architecture, Michelangelo demonstrated how it could match the expressive possibilities of painting and sculpture.

From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.

This is the first major book to study English architecture between 1945 and 1975 in its entirety. Challenging previous scholarship on the subject and uncovering vast amounts of new material at the boundaries between architectural and social history, Elain Harwood structures the book around building types to reveal why the architecture takes the form it does. Buildings of all budgets and styles are examined, from major universities to the modest caf#65533;. The book is illustrated with stunning new photography that reveals the logic, aspirations, and beauty of hundreds of buildings throughout England, at the point where many are disappearing or are being mutilated.   Space, Hope, and Brutalism offers a convincing and lively overview of a subject and period that fascinates younger scholars and appeals to those who were witnesses to this history.  

For a century and a half, women have been proving their passion and talent for building and, in recent decades, their enrollment in architecture schools has soared. Yet the number of women working as architects remains stubbornly low, and the higher one looks in the profession, the scarcer women become. Law and medicine, two equally demanding and traditionally male professions, have been much more successful in retaining and integrating women. So why do women still struggle to keep a toehold in architecture? Where Are the Women Architects? tells the story of women's stagnating numbers in a profession that remains a male citadel, and explores how a new generation of activists is fighting back, grabbing headlines, and building coalitions that promise to bring about change. Despina Stratigakos's provocative examination of the past, current, and potential future roles of women in the profession begins with the backstory, revealing how the field has dodged the question of women's absence since the nineteenth century. It then turns to the status of women in architecture today, and the serious, entrenched hurdles they face. But the story isn't without hope, and the book documents the rise of new advocates who are challenging the profession's boys' club, from its male-dominated elite prizes to the erasure of women architects from Wikipedia. These advocates include Stratigakos herself and here she also tells the story of her involvement in the controversial creation of Architect Barbie. Accessible, frank, and lively, Where Are the Women Architects? will be a revelation for readers far beyond the world of architecture.