Palm Beach: An Architectural Legacy by Polly Earl, The Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach
$65.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780847825103
Palm Beach: An Architectural Legacy details the meticulous restorations of over twenty great houses and public buildings on what has been called "America's Riviera." These houses were restored from 1988 to the present, and each house has won the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach's coveted Ballinger Award. The glorious photography showcased here respectfully documents the superb restoration of these houses, many of which have never before been published.
The cycle of building and restoration chronicled here encompasses one of America's enduring architectural landscapes, as well as the dynamics of its social history. Public and private structures designed by some of the style-setting early architects are depicted, including the works of Addison Mizner, Joseph Urban, and Maurice Fatio, as well as anonymous designers whose feats of imagination rivaled those of the most celebrated professionals.
The Study of Architectural Design by John F. Harbeson
$45.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780393731286
Originally published in 1926, The Study of Architectural Design by John F. Harbeson offers an insight into the early 20th century training methods of American architects. Now reissued by W.W. Norton and the publishing program of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America, it is the only text in English that describes, step by step, the system of architectural education developed in France and commonly known as the Beaux-Arts method as it was adapted and refined to suit the structure and demands of American schools of architecture. Used to train every architect in America until the late 1940s, it was supplanted by the advent of mod-ernism.
With Harbeson's clear approach to teaching the system, students and practitioners can recover the classic course of study for use today, from the making of the initial sketch, through development, to the rendering of the project for presentation to clients.
A native of Philadelphia, John Frederick Harbeson (1888–1986) attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied in the Department of Architecture under Paul-Philippe Cret, the great exponent of the Beaux-Arts method. Harbeson passed from gifted pupil to master of design and partner in the Cret firm. As professor of design and, eventually, chair at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught by the Beaux-Arts method and, with the publication of The Study of Architectural Design, became its principal historian.
The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts by Joseph Rykwert
$45.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780226732619
Is architecture art? This vexed question has been posed since the 1700s, when – breaking from earlier centuries in which there were no divisions between visual artist, architect, and engineer – architects and laypeople alike began to see these vocations as distinct. Exploring how this sepa-ration of roles occurred, and how in the 20th century the arts and architecture began to come to-gether again, The Judicious Eye is the definitive history of the relationships between painting, sculpture and architecture as they have shifted over the past three centuries.
The current Paul-Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of Pennsyl-vania Joseph Rykwert locates the first major shift during the Enlightenment, when key philoso-phers drew implied and explicit distinctions between the visual arts and architecture. As time progressed, architects came to see themselves as part of an established profession, while visual artists increasingly moved toward society’s margins, widening the chasm between them. Detail-ing the eventual attempts to heal this breach, Rykwert concludes his book in the mid-twentieth century, when the artistic avant-garde turned to architects in its battle against a stagnant society. The Judicious Eye, then, provides a necessary foundation for understanding architecture and vis-ual art in the twenty-first century, as they continue to break new ground by growing closer to their intertwined roots.
The Civilized Jungle: Residential Landscapes of Sanchez and Maddux by Bradford McKee
$50.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780967914374
Presents some of the most extravagant and lush gardens created by a team who draw on classical references to create compact yet richly detailed and planted gardens.
Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone by Vaughan Hart
$65.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780300119299
This engaging and beautifully illustrated book looks at the remarkable life and work of Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726)—by turns businessman, soldier, playwright, and (despite lacking either training or qualifications) the architect of some of the most important country houses of his era. Architectural historian Vaughan Hart examines Vanbrugh’s surviving, destroyed, and unrealized buildings—among them Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace—outlining the contemporary political and social events that influenced their design and showing how these strikingly original buildings can be interpreted through reference to classical mythology, Renaissance fortifications, and medieval houses.
Vaughan Hart is Professor of the History of Architecture at the University of Bath.
On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change by Ada Louise Huxtable
$35.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780802717078
Known for her well-reasoned and passionately held beliefs about architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable has captivated readers across the country for decades, in the process becoming one of the best-known critics in the world. Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating.
In her new book which gathers together the best of her writing, from one of her first pieces in the New York Times in 1962 on Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard, to essays in the New York Review of Books, to more recent writing in the Wall Street Journal Huxtable bears witness to some of the twentieth century’s best and worst architectural masters and projects.
With a perspective of more than four decades, Huxtable examines the century’s modernist beginnings and then turns her critic’s eye to the seismic shift in style, function, and fashion that oc-curred mid-century all leading to a dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century.
Booklist reviewed it saying “this thoughtfully structured retrospective collection reprints pieces for the first time and offers quotable lines and arresting observations on every page.”
Architecture: Elements, Materials, Form by Francesca Prina
$29.95 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780691141503
Art historian Francesca Prina, through tackling more than 2,000 years of architectural history, shows all the major components of the art - from theory, plans, and models to structural elements such as columns, arches, and domes, to materials and decorative elements. With color photo-graphs on virtually every page, and precise captions that point directly to important aspects of each photo, this book provides an easy-to-use visual grammar of the nearly infinite variety with which the elements of architecture have been used in buildings across the ages and around the world - from Western Europe and Greece to the Americas, the Middle East, China, Japan, India, and Africa. Each entry includes a definition, illustrated examples, and detailed analysis and ex-planation, all presented in the context of architecture's historical evolution. The book frequently juxtaposes famous and lesser-known buildings from widely different times and places, providing delightful surprises for the expert as well as a fresh, informative, and pleasurable introduction for general readers and students.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
$21.95 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780679600473
Described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint
$27.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9781400066742
To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. The activist, writer, and mother of three grew so fond of her bustling community that it became a touchstone for her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York’s most monumental development projects, saw things differently: neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village were badly in need of “urban renewal.” Notorious for exacting enormous human costs, Moses’s plans had never before been halted–not by governors, mayors, or FDR himself, and certainly not by a housewife from Scranton.
The epic rivalry of Jacobs and Moses, played out amid the struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. In Wrestling with Moses, acclaimed reporter and urban planning policy expert Anthony Flint recounts this thrilling David-and-Goliath story, the legacy of which echoes through our society today.
The first ordinary citizens to stand up to government plans for their city, Jacobs and her colleagues began a nationwide movement to reclaim cities for the benefit of their residents. Time and again, Jacobs marshaled popular support and political power against Moses, whether to block traffic through her beloved Washington Square Park or to prevent the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a ten-lane elevated superhighway that would have destroyed centuries-old streetscapes and displaced thousands of families and businesses.
Like A Civil Action before it, Wrestling with Moses is the tale of a local battle with far-ranging significance. By confronting Moses and his vision, Jacobs forever changed the way Americans understood the city, and inspired citizens across the country to protest destructive projects in their own communities. Her story reminds us of the power we have as individuals to confront and defy reckless authority.
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford
$29.00 suggested retail price.
ISBN # 9780156180351
Famed New Yorker architecture critic Lewis Mumford's analysis of the city’s development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award in 1962. Called "one of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century” by the Christian Science Monitor.