« Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes is a manual for exploring and interpreting vernacular architecture, the common buildings of particular regions and time periods. Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley provide a comprehensive introduction to the field. » « Rich with illustrations and written in a clear and jargon-free style, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture is an ideal text for courses in architecture, material culture studies, historic preservation, American studies, and history, and a useful guide for anyone interested in the built environment. »--

"This book is an informal, accessible guide to architecture for the layperson"--

First published in 2005, An Architecture of invitation: Colin St John Wilson is a distinctive study of the life and architectural career of one of the most significant makers, theorists and teachers of architecture to have emerged in England in the second half of the twentieth century. Exceptionally in an architectural study, this book interweaves biography, critical analysis of the projects, and theory, in its aims of explicating the richness of Wilson’s body of work, thought and teaching. Drawing on the specialisms of its authors, it also examines the creative and psychological impulses that have informed the making of the work – an oeuvre whose experiential depth is recognised by both users and critics.

"We all love to be invited. The wedding of a relative. A friend's garden party. The launch of a new fasion label. Whether private party or corporate affair, a special occasion deserves a special invitation. You're Invited! presents alluring invitations crafted with hand-lettering techniques, fine paper choices, innovative printing methods, and more. From the digital to the handmade, an invitation provides a keepsake that will remain long after the buzz of the event."--back cover.

This trenchant discussion of the state of architectural theory, criticism and practice in the 1980s and 1990s follows on from Reyner Banhan′s seminal work of the 1960s. At a time of extraordinary interest and debate on architecture this book provides an illuminating insight into the issues of the impact of electronic information technology on architecture and urban planning and why the ′energy crisis′ did not transform architecture in the direction of megastructures and did not halt the slide back into traditional styles.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

The 20th century's avant-gardes as seen through invites, postcards and various inventive forms of printed communication, from Oskar Schlemmer to Nam June Paik The Archiv der Avantgarden in Dresden contains approximately 1.5 million items of ephemera from the 20th-century avant-gardes. Much of this material involves internal communications from within the art world, such as invitations to events and advertisements for exhibits. Invitation: Archive as Eventcompiles a wide selection of these communications, from a photocopied collage advertising Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's Mixed Media Operato Oskar Schlemmer's handwritten pink postcard inquiring about a gallery show presented by Walter Dexel. Still more event descriptions, case studies, interviews and visual references provide a compelling history of aesthetic trends in graphic design as well as insight into the myriad ways in which artists promoted their own work. Invitation: Archive as Eventprovides an archive-driven take on the social circles and institutions that drove the evolution of contemporary art throughout the 20th century. It provides important sources for scholars, students, artists and curators in the development of a lively and participatory archival model.

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.

Celebrated architect Ralph Knowles, Distinguished Emeritus at USC’s School of Architecture, has carefully crafted a book for architects, designers, planners—anyone who yearns to reconnect to the natural world through the built environment. He shows us how to re-examine a shadow, a wall, a window, a landscape, as they respond to the natural cycles of heat, light, wind, and rain. Analyzing methods of sheltering that range from a Berber tent to a Spanish courtyard to the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, Ritual House shows us the future: by coining the concept of solar access zoning, he introduces a radical yet increasingly viable solution for tomorrow’s mega-cities.

"Design Practice Research at RMIT is a longstanding program of research into what venturous designers actually do when they design. It is probably the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing evidence about design practice. It is a growing force in the world, with a burgeoning program of research in Asia, Oceania and Europe. This book documents some of its past achievements. Two kinds of knowledge are created by the research. One concerns the ways in which designers marshal their intelligence, especially their spatial intelligence, to construct the mental space within which they practice design. The other reveals how public behaviours are invented and used to support design practice. This new knowledge combined is the contribution that this research makes to the field of design practice research." -- publisher's website.