Spirit of Place is the first monograph on the work of Chad Oppenheim and his firm, Oppenheim Architectecture, and features seven of the award-winning firm’s projects, with a focus on how the architectural design honors the natural elements of each site. Oppenheim Architecture’s first monograph, Spirit of Place, explores seven of the architectural firm’s acclaimed projects, located in beautiful settings across the globe. The book includes 120 stunning photographs and minimal text. The projects presented range in scale and location from homes in the Bahamas and Aspen to a resort in the Jordanian desert. The images, like the architecture, focus on and celebrate the natural world, illustrating Chad Oppenheim’s design philosophy that “form follows feeling.” Through passion and sensitivity towards man and nature, the firm designs monumental yet silent work that invokes a site’s inherent power. “For thousands of years, civilization has constructed its buildings on the land. We prefer to construct our buildings with the land, where architecture recedes and becomes a frame,” writes Chad Oppenheim. The projects are categorized by each site’s predominant natural element: dune, desert, stream, river, sea, canyon, and peninsula. The volume includes text by Chad Oppenheim, Val K. Warke, Antón García-Abril, and Mark Jarzombek. The Collector’s Edition of Spirit of Place maximizes the viewer’s engagement with the sites. The book’s unique format includes extra-thick pages and a lay flat binding, allowing the book to open fully. The white-on-white cover, white book sleeve, and white hard-shell slipcase emphasize that the focus is on the natural world conveyed through the images. This book will appeal to readers interested in architecture, photography, nature, sustainability, and the environment.

Spirit of Place is the first monograph on the work of Chad Oppenheim and his firm, Oppenheim Architects, and features seven of the award-winning firm’s projects, with a focus on how the architectural design honors the natural elements of each site. Oppenheim Architects’ first monograph, Spirit of Place, explores seven of the award-winning architectural firm’s acclaimed projects, located in beautiful settings across the globe. The book includes 120 stunning photographs and minimal text. The projects presented range in scale and location from homes in the Bahamas and Aspen to a resort in the Jordanian desert. The images, like the architecture, focus on and celebrate the natural world, illustrating Chad Oppenheim’s design philosophy that “form follows feeling.” Through passion and sensitivity towards man and nature, the firm designs monumental yet silent work that invokes a site’s inherent power. “For thousands of years, civilization has constructed its buildings on the land. We prefer to construct our buildings with the land, where architecture recedes and becomes a frame,” writes Chad Oppenheim. The projects are categorized by each site’s predominant natural element: dune, desert, stream, river, sea, canyon, and peninsula. The volume includes text by Chad Oppenheim, Val K. Warke, Antón García-Abril, and Mark Jarzombek. This book will appeal to readers interested in architecture, photography, nature, sustainability, and the environment.

“Delve into this beautiful book. You’ll come away sharing his passion for the beauty that gardens bring into our lives.” —Sigourney Weaver, environmentalist, actor, trustee of New York Botanical Garden How does an individual garden relate to the larger landscape? How does it connect to the natural and cultural environment? Does it evoke a sense of place? In Spirit of Place, Bill Noble—a lifelong gardener, and the former director of preservation for the Garden Conservancy—helps gardeners answer these questions by sharing how they influenced the creation of his garden in Vermont. Throughout, Noble reveals that a garden is never created in a vacuum but is rather the outcome of an individual’s personal vision combined with historical and cultural forces. Sumptuously illustrated, this thoughtful look at the process of garden-making shares insights gleaned over a long career that will inspire you to create a garden rich in context, personal vision, and spirit.

What happens to buildings when they are no longer needed or have outlasted their original purpose? They are either lovingly restored so they can be used for something else--or they fall into ruin, where they remain as silent witnesses of a bygone era. French photographer Aurelien Villette has made it his mission to trace these dilapidated buildings--some completely forgotten by history--and capture their incomparable beauty in wondrous colour photographs. Whether his subject is a Christian chapel, an erstwhile theatre, or the events centre in a former Communist country, Villette brings the spirit and pathos the place once embodied back to life. At the same time, the ruins in his evocative photographs are stylised to create cultural heirlooms of the various periods and countries where they are located. The technically perfect photography allows the viewer to infer various architectural influences of earlier times, making this volume a very special historical and cultural documentation. Allow yourself to be transported by the breathtaking beauty of these images and dive into a former era where time stands still. SELLING POINTS: * Aurelien Villette captures the beauty of years gone by * Discover buildings of majestic grace and elegance * A must for any lover of wonderful photography and fascinating architecture of the past 100 colour photographs

Built environment surrounds us for 90% of our lives but only now are we realising its influence on the environment, our health, and how we think, feel and behave both individually and socially. Spirit & Place shows how to work towards a sustainable environment through socially inclusive processes of placemaking, and how to create places that are nourishing psychologically and physically, to soul and spirit as well as body. This book's unique arguments identify important, but often unrecognised, principles and illustrate their applicability in a wide range of situations, price-ranges and climates. It shows how to reconcile the apparently incompatible demands of environmental, economic and social sustainability; how to moderate climate to make places of delight, and realign social pressures so places both support society and maximise economic viability. Thought provoking and easy to understand, Christopher Day uses everyday examples to relate his theories to practice and our experience.

Richly illustrated and beautifully designed, Spirit of Place: Inspiration and Process is a great introduction to the thinking and philosophy of Oppenheim Architecture, an award-winning architecture, planning, and interior design firm. The book delves into how the firm arrives at its designs, taking you on a journey from research to explorations, to the spark and ultimate resolution. The book presents seven of the firm's projects, both realized and unrealized, through descriptive text, drawings, plans, renderings and photographs. While Spirit of Place is experiential and inspirational, the companion book breaks each project down analytically observing its creating from concept to completion. Oppenheim's commitment to creating environmentally conscious architecture that seeks inspiration from a project's surroundings is brought to light through a contextually diverse range of the firm's most globally recognized projects, including director Michael Bay's L.A. Villa, a spectacular private residence in California that immerses itself into the Bel Air hillside and accentuates the unprecedented views of the Los Angeles skyline and the surrounding terrain; Wadi Rum Desert Resort, an eco-resort carved into the desert stone of Jordan and inspired by the ancient civilizations that once inhabited the land; and House on a Dune, a modest and timeless private island getaway, perched on the edge of Harbour Island, whose elemental form and sincere materiality are intended to usher a transition from the Bahamas' lush tropical landscape to wide languorous ocean; to name a few.

From the bestselling author of the The House of God comes an ambitious novel about the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, doctors and patients, the past and the present, and love and death... Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death. On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,” he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town. There's one odd catch: he must live in her house for one year and thirteen days. As he struggles with his decision—to stay and meet the terms of the will or return to his life in Italy—Orville reconnects with family, reunites with former friends, and comes to terms with old rivals and bitter memories. In the process he’ll discover his own history, as well as his mother’s, and finally learn what it really means to be a healer, and to be healed.

What is the worth of your spirit? In the world of Awya, where life is scattered across isles in a seemingly endless ocean of black liquid, the Isle of Winder is home to uymns whose primary trade is agriculture and flower cultivation. Here, an umyn boy by the name of Amory Demshen becomes obsessed with Tempertime Cemetery a collection of portals powered by spirits that link the isles of Awya together, and a place forbidden to those without proper training and knowledge. Amory disobeys the laws and his mother, sacrificing the qualities of youth and the virtues of his upbringing to pursue a selfish adventure connived by a hidden, sinister force. Unnerving truths and perilous consequences await as Amory equipped with an authoritative jar, a chest of bewitching cards, and a flying stone slab plunges into the darkness of the spirit collectors. Will Amory learn the worth of a spirit in time to save his own?

Award-winning author Frederick Turner examines the lives and careers of nine American authors, the locales they made famous, and the ways in which landscape played a role in the creation of their finest works. Spirit of Place is both a testament to the creative genius of nine of America's most important writers and an insightful investigation of the vital role of the physical landscape in the cultural development of the United States.

Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for? In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before. As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself. This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.