An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.

Powerhouse is the first book on the singular life and career of American architect Judith Chafee (1932-1998). Chafee was an unrepentant modernist on the forefront of sustainable design. Her architecture shows great sensitivity to place, especially the desert landscapes of Arizona. Chafee was also a social justice advocate and a highly respected woman in a male-dominated profession. After graduating from the Yale University Architecture School, where her advisor was Paul Rudolph, she went on to work in the offices of legends including Rudolph, Walter Gropius, Eero Saarinen, and Edward Larrabee Barnes. In addition to her architectural legacy, her decades of teaching helped shape a generation of architects. Chafee's drawings and archival images of her work are complemented by stunning photography by Ezra Stoller and Bill Timmerman.

Formed by a group of young architects, photographers, and psychologists in the Venice Beach of the late 1960s, Environmental Communications honed an image practice that constituted a new visual syntax for the late twentieth century city. The group speculated that their "environmental photography" would alter architecture and transform the consciousness of architecture students by way of the ubiquitous architecture slide library. Through their media experiments, events, and slide catalogs, they positioned themselves as interpreters and purveyors of new trends, assembling a lively body of populist and radical design imagery that undermined the canons defined by the prevailing institutions of architectural design. In reproducing the group's photography, booklets, and ephemera, Environmental Communications: Contact High records and critically reflects upon the work of this West Coast media collective.

In this exceptional book on the London based studio 6a architects, architecture critic Irenee Scalbert looks at the role of narrative, history, appropriation and craft in the work of Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald. The book traces an architectural approach avoiding style, signature, theory and even concept in favour of metis, an ancient form of intelligence combining 'flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, varied skills, and experience.' Structured around notions of situation, intervention, making, comedy, bricolage, chance and anthropology, the text is mirrored in a visual essay of archive photographs, artworks, film stills and recent projects by the practice.

This generously illustrated examination of architectural photography from the 1930s to the present shows how the medium has helped shape familiar views of iconic buildings. Photography has both manipulated and bolstered our appreciation of modern architecture. With beautiful photographs of private and public buildings by Julius Shulman, Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and others, this book examines the central and active role that photography plays in defining and perpetuating the iconic nature of buildings and places. This volume shows how different photographers represent the same building, offers commentaries on the "American dream," and explores changes in commercial architectural photography. Placing decades-old images alongside modern ones, Image Building depicts the idea of the comfortable middle-class home and the construction of suburbia as an ironic ideal. It presents the ways that public spaces such as libraries, museums, theaters, and office buildings are experienced differently as photographers highlight the social, cultural, psychological, and aesthetic conditions to reveal the layered meanings of place and identity. Looking at how photography shapes and frames our understanding of architecture, this volume offers thought-provoking points of view through an exploration of social and cultural issues. Published in association with the Parrish Art Museum

The great Frank Lloyd Wright taught us that form and function are forever bound in spiritual union; that design is eternally emotive; and that architecture structures society. Inspired by this depth of being, 20 modern architectural greats and their most extraordinary feats are celebrated in the illustrious pages of New View: A Curated Visual Gallery -- 20 Magnificent Homes by Architects of California. Designed to enchant, this third volume of a historic book series overflows with aesthetically stunning portraits of real California homes by celebrity and world-renowned architects. Awe-inspiring photography is balanced with engaging editorial interludes expressing the architects' varied creative philosophies, design perspectives, and transformational experiences. In New View: California you'll meet top California architects who present their finest California home designs: Josh Blumer, William Hayer, Jeff Zimmerman, Michael Ferguson and Kirby Smith, Robert Swatt and George Miers, Greg Faulkner, Ryan Marsden, Todd Gordon Mather, Mark English, Neal J.Z. Schwartz, Joanne Koch, Antonina Markoff and Bruce Fullerton, Cynthia Wang and Brendan Canning, Mary Ann Gabriele Schicketanz, Michael Holliday, Timothy Chappelle, Philip Liang, Nick Noyes, Chad Dorsey, Geddes Ulinskas. A meticulously curated collection, New View: California delves into the making of a wide variety of homes, each designed to express a sense of place. Whether along the Pacific coast, nestled in the mountains, or in the heart of an acclaimed cityscape. Part anthropological and part declarative, New View: California is an enlightening, inspired story of how architecture shapes our civilization.

The drawing has always been our most essential method of communication. Drawings have offered us both a glimpse into the past and a view to the future. As a vehicle of transferring ideas, it is without equal. As the computer gains ground in our society, the drawing and the ability to execute it are diminishing. Many architectural educators continue to extol the virtues of the drawing and the sketch; however, students seem to not comprehend the value and the didactic nature of this fundamental act.As one renders an architectural drawing, one must consider all aspects of the scene; the material, the details, the sun, the space. The immediacy of the decisions cannot be overstated.Many consider Michelangelo the first to execute both the 'presentation' drawing as well as the 'working' drawing. Michelangelo completed a number of drawings representing the niches in the Laurentian Library, which he apparently gifted to friends. These drawings mark the beginnings of the drawing as an object, something that could be saved and gazed upon. The architectural drawing was no longer merely a communication device, it had become an artifact itself. Michelangelo is also responsible during the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica, for the first use of drawings as elements that were used on the site as references for construction.Over the last thirty-five years, Andrews has discovered some interesting and disturbing things about the act of drawing. One should understand the nuances of the both the process and the product. It is a tremendously time-consuming action that offers no easy answers. One should both comprehend and value the end product. One should take possession of the project through the medium of the drawing and know it intimately by constructing it through that process. There are times when the act is accompanied by a sensation that is almost audible. This perception is brought on only by this particular type of toil. The drawing must become part of you.

Buckminster Fuller's humanitarian take on the war game Initially proposed for the US Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, Buckminster Fuller's World Game was an educational simulation intended to create solutions for overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. An alternative to war games, it uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thereby challenging the nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The World Game was played for the first time in 1969 in New York, and evolved over the next decade. Proposals for World Game centers described a vast computerized network that could process, map and visualize environmental information drawn from (among other sources) Russian and American spy satellites. Fuller claimed that their optical sensors and thermographic scanners could detect the location and quantity of water, grain, metals, livestock, human populations or any other conceivable form of energy. Despite Fuller's plans for a photogenic, televisual and cybernetic form of mass participation, through Fuller's life the World Game remained largely speculative and pedagogical. It appeared primarily through copious research reports, resource studies and ephemeral workshops. The book tracks this textual dimension by assembling documents related to various instances of the World Game conceived, proposed and played from 1964 to 1982, examining the World Game as a system for environmental information and as a process of resource administration.

A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years. How have art museums changed in the past century? Where are they headed in the future? Charles Saumarez Smith is uniquely qualified to answer these questions, having been at the helm of three major institutions over the course of his distinguished career. For The Art Museum in Modern Times, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey, visiting art museums across the globe and examining how the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it. His story starts with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums to focus squarely on the art of the present rather than the past. When it opened in 1939, MoMA’s boldly modernist building represented a stark riposte to the neoclassicism of most earlier art museums. From there, Saumarez Smith investigates dozens of other museums, including the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He explores our shifting reasons for visiting museums, changes to the way exhibits are organized and displayed, and the spectacular new architectural landmarks that have become destinations in their own right. Global in scope yet full of personal insight, this fully illustrated celebration of the modern art museum will appeal to art lovers, museum professionals, and museum goers alike.