What makes a garden regionally appropriate? Fifteen private gardens designed by leading landscape architects answer that question for arid Southern California by directly addressing the climate, landscape, and culture they inhabit. Whether small or large, urban or rural, luxurious or low budget, these resilient outdoor spaces are finely attuned to the Mediterranean climate and the indoor-outdoor lifestyle for which Southern California is known. They make use of local building materials and craftspeople and offer their owners a unique emotional connection to nature. Firmly planted in time and place, the projects, complete with plans, define not so much a style as an experience and thrive with little effort from their owners.

Examining Marseille as a significant center for the evolution of architectural and urban modernism.

This book gathers more than 150 peer-reviewed papers presented at the 5th INTBAU International Annual Event, held in Milan, Italy, in July 2017. The book represents an invaluable and up-to-date international exchange of research, case studies and best practice to confront the challenges of designing places, building cultural landscapes and enabling the development of communities. The papers investigate methodologies of representation, communication and valorization of historic urban landscapes and cultural heritage, monitoring conservation management, cultural issues in heritage assessment, placemaking and local identity enhancement, as well as reconstruction of settlements affected by disasters. With contributions from leading experts, including university researchers, professionals and policy makers, the book addresses all who seek to understand and address the challenges faced in the protection and enhancement of the heritage that has been created.

"The Mediterranean region and Asia provide a natural laboratory to investigate the driving forces of continental tectonics in an ongoing collisional orogen and the crustal and mantle response to various modes of deformation associated with plate boundary processes. The multidisciplinary research efforts in this region over the last fifteen years have produced a wealth of new data to better understand the interplay and feedback mechanisms between crustal and mantle processes and the dynamic landscape evolution in a complexly deforming area. A number of discrete collisional events between the Gondwana-derived continental fragments (i.e., Adria, Pelagonia, Arabia, India) and Eurasia controlled the geodynamics of the Mediterranean region and Asia during the late Mesozoic and Cenozoic. This book is a collection of research papers, presenting new data, interpretations, and syntheses on various aspects of the collision-induced tectonic, magmatic, metamorphic, and geomorphic processes that have affected the evolution of this orogenic belt. It should help us better understand the mode and nature of tectonic and magmatic processes and crustal evolution in active collision zones, and the distribution and causes of seismic and volcanic events and their impact on landscape evolution."--Publisher's website.

This book explores the bioclimatic approach to building design. Constant innovations in the field are evident, including the need to face climate changes and increase the local resilience at different scales (regional, urban, architectural). Differently from other contributions, this book provides a definition of the bioclimatic design approach following a technological and performance-driven vision. It includes one of the largest collection of research voices on the topic, becoming also a critical reference work for bioclimatic theory. It is intended for architects, engineers, researchers, and technicians who have professional and research interests in bioclimatic and in sustainable and technological design issues.

Foreword by Adrian Forty. The Algarve is not only Portugal’s foremost tourism region. Uniquely Mediterranean in an Atlantic country, its building customs have long been markers of historical and cultural specificity, attracting both picturesque driven conservatives and modernists seeking their lineage. Modernism, regionalism and the ‘vernacular’ – three essential tropes of twentieth-century architecture culture – converged in the region’s building identity construct and, often the subject of strictly metropolitan elaborations, they are examined here from a peripheral standpoint instead. Drawing on work that won the Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in 2013, Algarve Building challenges the conventional inclusion of Portuguese modern architecture in ‘Critical Regionalism’ narratives. A fine-grain reconstruction of the debates and cultures at play locally exposes the extra-architectural and widely participated antecedents of the much-celebrated mid-century shift towards the regional. Uncelebrated architects and a cast of other players (clients, officials, engineers and builders) contributed to maturing a regional strand of modern architecture that, more than being the heroic outcome of a hard-fought ‘battle’ by engaged designers against a conservative establishment, became truly popular in the Algarve. Algarve Building shows, more broadly, what the processes that have been appropriated by the canon of architectural history and theory – such as the presence of folk traditions and regional variation in learned architecture – stand to gain when observed in local everyday practices. The grand narratives and petites histoires of architecture can be enriched, questioned, revised and confirmed by an unprejudiced return to its facts and sources – the buildings, the documents, the discourses, the agents and the archives.

The rich and diverse architectural traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and adjacent regions are the subject of this book. Representing the visual residues of a "forgotten" Middle Ages, the social and cultural developments of the Byzantine Empire, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East parallel the more familiar architecture of Western Europe. The book offers an expansive view of the architectural developments of the Byzantine Empire and areas under its cultural influence, as well as the intellectual currents that lie behind their creation. The book alternates chapters that address chronological or regionally-based developments with thematic studies that focus on the larger cultural concerns, as they are expressed in architectural form.