Frei Otto, awarded the Royal Gold Medal 2006 by the Royal Institute of British Architects, is one of Germany’s most innovative architects in the second half of the 20th centuvry. In this volume, prominent authors analyse and discuss the key aspects of Frei Otto’s work. In addition it contains an extensive and detailed catalogue of over 200 buildings and projects dating from the years 1951–2004.

Trees are ideal sources of shade; where they cannot be used, their function is taken over by tents, pergolas, and pavilions. In the context of global warming, shade-providing construction is becoming an increasingly important building task. In Part One of this book, specialists in the field present the typical forms of shade-providing construction as well as the design approach associated with each. Part Two presents easily consultable overviews of 140 plants that have proven to be effective givers of shade in temperate, subtropical, and tropical zones. Part Three presents thirty built projects by celebrated architects and landscape architects from five continents. These constructions illustrate a wide variety of functions and scales and cover various climatic zones and cultural contexts. All structures are constructionally and systematically analyzed with texts, true-to-scale drawings, and photographs from their foundations to their connections and the shadows they cast.

In a positive departure from modernism, the work of the art critic and urbanist Ludwig Hilberseimer offers schemata towards the design for the city itself: its mereological composition. The resonance of parts unfolds to an alternative of a purely contrasting equation of form and content. It reminds us, that when the ground (gr.: logos) of the city is defined by its parts (gr.: meros), its architecture, the city in turn always also is part of the architecture as its desire. »The Mereological City« introduces a mereological methodology and contributes to an ongoing discussion about an ecological form of urban design.

Now in its second edition: the trailblazing introduction and textbook on construction includes a new section on translucent materials and an article on the use of glass.

Textiles are among the materials with the most promising future in architecture. Even though they are frequently reduced to mere decorations in an everyday context, their enormous versatility coupled with their inherent sensual quality gives textiles tremendous architectural potential. This book provides an overview of textile architecture.

Standard ASCE/SEI 55-16 provides minimum criteria for the analysis, design, and performance of membrane-covered cable and rigid member structures and of air-supported structures, collectively known as tensile membrane structures.

There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘inferior’ races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people. Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the ‘world of enemies’ which, in their view, threatened them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed, and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so destructive. The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.

Under the code name Operation Reinhard, more than one and a half million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943 in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Unlike more well-known camps, which were used both for slave labor and extermination, these camps existed purely to murder Jews. Few victims survived to tell their stories, and the camps were largely forgotten after they were dismantled in 1943. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps bears eloquent witness to this horrific tragedy. This newly revised and expanded edition includes new material on the history of the Jews under German occupation in Poland; the execution and timing of Operation Reinhard; information about the ghettos in Lublin, Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, and Galicia; and updated numbers of the victims who were murdered during deportations. In addition to documenting the horror of the camps, Yitzhak Arad recounts the stories of those courageous enough to struggle against the Nazis and their "final solution." Arad's work retrieves the experiences of Operation Reinhard's victims and survivors from obscurity and exposes a terrible chapter in humanity's history.