The history of Western architecture from the earliest times in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the dramatic impact of CAD on architectural practice at the beginning of the 21st century.

Whether you want to identify, date or evaluate your own pieces, Furniture is the only comprehensive, full-color reference guide for you. Judith Miller gives a global overview that spans the last 3,000 years of design, guaranteed to turn any amateur into a furniture buff. Furniture defines decorative motifs of key periods with over 3,500 photographs of every style and form. This eBook also includes profiles of influential designers, craftsmen and key movements.

Walk through five centuries of homes both great and small—from the smoke-filled manor halls of the Middle Ages to today's Ralph Lauren-designed environments—on a house tour like no other, one that delightfully explicates the very idea of "home." You'll see how social and cultural changes influenced styles of decoration and furnishing, learn the connection between wall-hung religious tapestries and wall-to-wall carpeting, discover how some of our most welcome luxuries were born of architectural necessity, and much more. Most of all, Home opens a rare window into our private lives—and how we really want to live.

Drawing upon a wealth of original research and entertaining anecdotal material, Guffey unearths the roots of the term “retro” and chronicles its evolving manifestations in culture and art throughout the last century.

Aldouby employs an innovative pictorial approach that allows her to uncover a wealth of visual evocations overlooked by Fellini scholars over the years.

In the seventeenth century, local Jesuits and Franciscans imagined Quito as the "new Rome." It was the site of miracles and home of saintly inhabitants, the origin of crusades into the surrounding wilderness, and the purveyor of civilization to the entire region. By the early twentieth century, elites envisioned the city as the heart of a modern, advanced society—poised at the physical and metaphysical centers of the world. In this original cultural history, Ernesto Capello analyzes the formation of memory, myth, and modernity through the eyes of Quito's diverse populations. By employing Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes, Capello views the configuration of time and space in narratives that defined Quito's identity and its place in the world. He explores the proliferation of these imaginings in architecture, museums, monuments, tourism, art, urban planning, literature, religion, indigenous rights, and politics. To Capello, these tropes began to crystallize at the end of the nineteenth century, serving as a tool for distinct groups who laid claim to history for economic or political gain during the upheavals of modernism. As Capello reveals, Quito's society and its stories mutually constituted each other. In the process of both destroying and renewing elements of the past, each chronotope fed and perpetuated itself. Modern Quito thus emerged at the crux of Hispanism and Liberalism, as an independent global society struggling to keep the memory of its colonial and indigenous roots alive.

Sei es Michael Graves Bestseller-Produktdesign für Target oder Sir Norman Fosters Renovierung des Berliner Reichstagsgebäudes: Architektur ist nach wie vor ein Thema, das im Zentrum des kulturellen Interesses steht und großen Neuigkeitswert genießt. "Architecture For Dummies": Ein Crashkurs in Sachen Architektur - für Leser, die es eilig haben. Hier finden Sie die wichtigsten Informationen zum Thema Architektur. Ein Band aus der beliebten 'For Dummies-Reihe'. Behandelt werden alle Höhepunkte der Architekturgeschichte - angefangen bei den Pyramiden von Ägypten bis hin zu Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Das Buch erklärt genau, wie man ein Gebäude betrachtet und bewertet, und wann man nicht mehr von einem Gebäude, sondern von einem Kunstwerk spricht. Der Abschnitt "Part of Tens" behandelt u.a.: zehn große architektonische Meisterwerke, die zehn größten architektonischen und bautechnischen Misserfolge, zehn der interessantesten modernen Architekten und vieles andere mehr. Autorin Deborah Dietsch ist eine renommierte Expertin auf diesem Gebiet. Sie war früher Chefredakteurin des 'Architecture' Magazins und leitende Redakteurin des 'Architectural Record'. Aus ihrer Feder stammt auch das kürzlich erschienene Buch 'Classic Modern'.

In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.