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E D I T O R ' S P I C K S

The Old Way of Seeing (And How to Get It Back)
by Johnathan Hale

Paperback
Published by Houghton Mifflin Co (Pap)
Publication date: September 1, 1995
Dimensions (in inches): 9.20 x 6.76 x .70
ISBN: 039574010X
List: $16.00 ~ Our Price: $12.80 ~ You Save: $3.20 (20%)
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From Kirkus Reviews, 04/14/94:
An architect and critic elaborates on what most of us see when we look at much of modern architecture: buildings that are lifeless and just plain ugly. Hale laments the current state of architecture and the loss of ``harmonious design,'' an art that involves play and intuition. ``A great building can give us the same exhilaration we experience in a natural landscape,'' he writes. He urges architects and designers to rediscover the beauties of natural law and geometry, to abandon the fragmentation he sees as characteristic of postmodern architecture. He offers a historical summary of how building strayed, in the middle of the 19th century coincident with the Industrial Revolution, from the intuitive verities of harmony and balance, forsaking meaningful patterns for crude symbolism or somber functionality. Photos. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Synopsis:
In this fascinating tour of our buildings and our social history, architect and critic Hale examines the historical movement in the 1830s, when builders and architects began to lose their sense of surety about what they were doing, and explores the societal pressures that turned buildings from pure efforts at expression into structures laden with symbols. Photos and illustrations.

The more you read, the more you are affected by his ideas...Engaging, clever, perceptive. – New York Times

A nervy, worthwhile book that can help us see the world with new alertness. – Robert Campbell, Boston Globe

An eloquent plea for a new way of thinking about architecture, a way to give intuition its proper role as the true judge of beauty. Every student of architecture should read this wonderful book. – Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Jonathan Hale may just be that quirky and brilliant person who can jump start America's historic preservation movement. – J. Jackson Walter, former President, National Trust For Historic Preservation

Anyone depressed and mystified by the stupendous ugliness of postwar American architecture will be illuminated by Jonathan Hale's fine book. The Old Way of Seeing is an antidote to the reigning architectural dogmas and isms. – James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere

The Old Way of Seeing takes us a few steps backward in order to help us all leap ahead, to a place where our imagination can soar. –Tony Hiss, author of The Experience of Place

Every client, every citizen determined to improve design, every architecture student ought to know this book. –John R. Stilgoe, Professor of the History of Landscape, Harvard University, author of Alongshore

Attractive, accessible, and very informative. – Gordon Bock, Editor-in-Chief, Old-House Journal

Eminently quotable... above all, provocative. – Douglas McCreary Greenwood, Inform

Glass in Architecture; Michael Wigginton, Michael Wiggington; Hardcover; $95.00 Now Only $66.50 This 318 page book presents the technical, historical and modern architectural uses of glass. Prominenly featured are the Glass Walls at Parc Villette, Paris by Adrien Fainsilber along with the work of Decq and Cornette, Rogers, Grimshaw and others on the forward edge of structural glass construction. There are 20 case studies presented - with photos and construction details illustrated. Also a section devoted to the future and five appendices - 1.materials, 2.glass manufacture, 3. manufacturing sectors, 4. other glasses and glass products, 5. transparent plastics. Glass in Architecture may become the standard reference - it certainly has the potential. If you are interested in the structural future of architecture, you must have this book.

The Projective Cast : Architecture and Its Three Geometries

by Robin Evans

Hardcover, 413 pages
List: $52.50 -- Our Price: $36.75 -- You Save: $15.75(30%)
Published by Mit Pr
ISBN: 0262050498

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In The Projective Cast Robin Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imaginging and realizing of architectural form. He shows that geometry does not always play a stolid and dormant role but, in fact, may be an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imagination and drawing, drawing and building. Surveying architecture and painting from the 15th to the 20th century, Evans explores the geometries involved, asking whether they are in fact the stable underpinnings of the creative , intuitive or rhetorical aspects of architecture. Describing the ambivalent role that pictures play in architecture, he suggests that there is much more within the scope of the architect's vision of a project than what can be drawn. He defines the different fields of geometric transmission that concern architecture and investigates the ambiguities of projection and the interaction of imagination with projection and its metaphors.

Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

by Rem Koolhaas

I would like to be selling S,M,L,XL, but the publisher is out of stock. Delirious was out of print for so long, now it's finally been reissued. This is a very important book and really established Rem and OMA. I would recommend buying Delirious now - before it's out of print again.

In this fanciful volume, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.), both analyzes and celebrates New York City. By suggesting the city as the site for an infinite variety of human activities and events--both real and imagined--the essence of the metropolitan lifestyle, its "culture of congestion" and its architecture are revealed in a brilliant new light. "Manhattan," Koolhaas writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Filled with fascinating facts, as well as photographs, postcards, maps, watercolors, and drawings, the vibrancy of Koolhaas's poignant exploration of Gotham equals the heady, frenetic energy of the city itself. Anyone who loves New York will want to own this book.

New Edition
Paperback, 317 pages
List: $35.00 -- Amazon.com Price: $31.50 -- You Save: $3.50(10%)
Published by Monacelli Pr
Publication date: January 1,1995
Dimensions (in inches): 9.41 x 7.28 x .81
ISBN: 1885254008

Architectural Graphic Standards. Charles Ramsey & H. Sleeper.

This is the standard, if you can afford it - buy it now. Student Edition : $79.95 Unabridged : $195.00
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