The interrelated Seibu and Saison enterprise groups have shaped Japanese consumer culture and made the Tsutsumi family fabulously rich. Beginning with the colorful founder, Yasujiro Tsutsumi, Thomas Havens traces the family's fortunes through the rise of its various companies. He examines the strategic thinking, management styles, and marketing techniques of Yasujiro and his sons; explains how the companies have prospered outside Japan's zaibatsu and keiretsu business establishments; and demonstrates how the Seibu enterprises have shifted Japanese culture from a frugal, hardworking society to a New Breed that takes affluence for granted.

The interrelated Seibu and Saison enterprise groups have shaped Japanese consumer culture and made the Tsutsumi family fabulously rich. Beginning with the colorful founder, Yasujiro Tsutsumi, Thomas Havens traces the family's fortunes through the rise of its various companies. He examines the strategic thinking, management styles, and marketing techniques of Yasujiro and his sons; explains how the companies have prospered outside Japan's zaibatsu and keiretsu business establishments; and demonstrates how the Seibu enterprises have shifted Japanese culture from a frugal, hardworking society to a New Breed that takes affluence for granted.

The new edition of an essential text offers an informative, engaging view of the architectural profession from education through practice. Since 1985, Architect? has been an essential text for aspiring architects, offering the best basic guide to the profession available. This third edition has been substantially revised and rewritten, with new material covering the latest developments in architectural and construction technologies, digital methodologies, new areas of focus in teaching and practice, evolving aesthetic philosophies, sustainability and green architecture, and alternatives to traditional practice. Architect? tells the inside story of architectural education and practice; it is realistic, unvarnished, and insightful. Chapter 1 asks “Why Be an Architect?” and chapter 2 offers reasons “Why Not to Be an Architect.” After this provocative beginning, Architect? goes on to explain and critique architectural education, covering admission, degree and curriculum types, and workload as well as such post-degree options as internship, teaching, and work in related fields. It offers a detailed discussion of professors and practitioners and the “-isms” and “-ologies” most prevalent in teaching and practicing architecture. It explains how an architect works and gets work, and describes architectural services from initial client contact to construction oversight. The new edition also includes a generous selection of drawings and cartoons from the author's Washington Post column, “Shaping the City,” offering teachable moments wittily in graphic form. The author, Roger Lewis, has taught, practiced, and written extensively about architecture for many years. In Architect? he explains—for students, professors, practitioners, and even prospective clients—how architects think and work and what they care about as they strive to make the built environment more commodious, more beautiful, and more sustainable.

Introduction -- Formulas, free plans, and a Piranesian city -- Third generation -- Junk, bunk, and tomorrow -- The cube and the pile-up -- The uses of nostalgia -- The mechanical hobgoblin -- Aftermath.

Architect? addresses issues and concerns of relevance to students choosing among different types of programme, schools, firms and architectural career paths, and explores both the up-side and the down-side to the profession.

This English edition on the architecture of Akrotiri provides an overall picture of the architecture of Akrotiri, including an outline of its town plan, a description of the individual houses, and a discussion of its relationship with Crete and its neighbors in the Eastern Mediterranean. The work is based on the author's personal observations and experience from 15 years of work (1977-1992) at the site as the architect of the Akrotiri excavation. This book is confined to the last phase of habitation and the uniquely preserved houses that are seen today.

Architecture in Formation is the first digital architecture manual that bridges multiple relationships between theory and practice, proposing a vital resource to structure the upcoming second digital revolution. Sixteen essays from practitioners, historians and theorists look at how information processing informs and is informed by architecture. Twenty-nine experimental projects propose radical means to inform the new upcoming digital architecture. Featuring essays by: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher, Georges Teyssot, Mario Carpo, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Cache, Mark Linder, David Theodore, Evan Douglis, Ingeborg Rocker and Christian Lange, Antoine Picon, Michael Wen-Sen Su, Chris Perry, Alexis Meier, Achim Menges and Martin Bressani. Interviews with: George Legendre, Alessandra Ponte, Karl Chu, CiroNajle, and Greg Lynn. Projects by: Diller Scofidio and Renfro; Mark Burry; Yehuda Kalay; Omar Khan; Jason Kelly Johnson, Future Cities Lab; Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Munitxa; Anna Dyson / Bess Krietemeyer, Peter Stark, Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE); Philippe Rahm; Lydia Kallipoliti and Alexandros Tsamis; Neeraj Bhatia, Infranet Lab; Jenny Sabin, Lab Studio; Luc Courschene, Society for Arts and Technology (SAT); Eisenman Architects; Preston Scott Cohen; Eiroa Architects; Michael Hansmeyer; Open Source Architecture; Andrew Saunders; Nader Tehrani, Office dA; Satoru Sugihara, ATLV and Thom Mayne, Morphosis; Reiser and Umemoto; Roland Snooks, Kokkugia; Philip Beesley; Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger SPAN; Michael Young; Eric Goldemberg, Monad Studio; Francois Roche; Ruy Klein; Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter.

Allegories of Time and Space explores efforts by leading photographers, artists, architects, and commercial designers to re-envision Japanese cultural identity during the turbulent years between the Asia Pacific War and the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s. This search for a cultural home was a matter of broad public concern, and each of the artists under consideration engaged a wide audience through mass media. The artists under study had in common the necessity to establish distance from their immediate surroundings temporally or geographically in order to gain some perspective on Japan's rapidly changing society. They shared what Jonathan Reynolds calls an allegorical vision, a capacity to make time and space malleable, to see the present in the past and to find an irreducible cultural center at Japan's geographical periphery. The book commences with an examination of the work of Hamaya Hiroshi. A Tokyo native, Hamaya began to photograph the isolated "snow country" of northeastern Japan in the midst of the war. His empathetic images of village life expressed an aching nostalgia for the rural past widely shared by urban Japanese. Following a similar strategy in his search for authentic Japan was the photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei. Although Tōmatsu originally traveled to Okinawa Prefecture in 1969 to document the destructive impact of U.S. military bases in the region in his characteristically edgy style, he came to believe that Okinawa was still in some sense more truly Japanese than the Japanese main islands. The self-styled iconoclast artist Okamoto Tarō emphatically rejected the delicacy and refinement conventionally associated with Japanese art in favor of the hyper-modern qualities of the dynamic and brutal aesthetics that he saw expressed on the ceramics of the prehistoric Jōmon period. One who quickly recognized the potential in Okamoto's embrace of Japan's ancient past was the architect Tange Kenzō. As a point of comparison, Reynolds looks at the portrayal of the ancient Shintō shrine complex at Ise in a volume produced in collaboration with the photographer Watanabe Yoshio. Reynolds shows how this landmark book contributed significantly to a transformation in the meaning of Ise Shrine by suppressing the shrine's status as an ultranationalist symbol and re-presenting the shrine architecture as design consistent with rigorous modernist aesthetics. In the 1970s and 1980s, there circulated widely through advertising posters of the designer Ishioka Eiko, the ephemeral "nomadic" architecture of Itō Toyo'o, TV documentaries, and other media, a fantasy that imagined Tokyo's young female office workers as urban nomads. These cosmopolitan dreams may seem untethered from their Japanese cultural context, but Reynolds reveals that there were threads linking the urban nomad with earlier efforts to situate contemporary Japanese cultural identity in time and space. In its fresh and nuanced re-reading of the multiplicities of Japanese tradition during a tumultuous and transformative period, Allegories of Time and Space offers a compelling argument that the work of these artists enhanced efforts to redefine tradition in contemporary terms and, by doing so, promoted a future that would be both modern and uniquely Japanese.

This text collects the best of architecture critic Blair Kamin's columns. Using Chicago as a barometer of national design trends, the book sheds light on the state of American architecture during 'the Nervous Nineties'.