MORE WATER LESS LAND NEW ARCHITECTURE


Book Description

Climate change, and the inevitability of sea level rise, will require much more of us than simply pulling back from the coastline. The thesis of Weston Wright's More Water Less Land New Architecture is that we need to start thinking in an entirely different way about the relationship of cities to waterfront sites and of the relationship of buildings to water, which means rethinking many of architecture's implicit premises. If architecture has been confrontational with water—think bold towers erected beside the sea, as if to dare the water to challenge them—Wright's argument is that we will need to be modest, accommodating, and accepting of the power and presence of water if our cities are to survive. He knows that nature is stronger than we are, and that best chance mankind has to build successfully will be to build with, not against, the reality of water. This is an important book, not least because its quiet, sober tone balances natural history with architectural history, and reaches across the world to show examples of architecture that accommodates to the water ranging from small vernacular houses on stilts to huge megastructures anchored like islands in the sea. Although Wright's argument transcends aesthetics or style, his book is, in the end, a case for the strength that comes from restraint, and perhaps even for the lasting power of gentlenes




Water-works


Book Description

The fresh, clean taste of New York's water is legendary. Less well known is the story of the program of exploration and construction to achieve such purity. The story is told in Water-Works and illustrated with an archive of drawings and photographs documenting the design and construction of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and tunnels.




Architecture of the Cape Cod Summer


Book Description

A monograph on the work on an American architecture firm, famous for capturing the essence of 'The American Summer'.







Design on the Land


Book Description

Resource added for the Landscape Horticulture Technician program 100014.




A Pattern Language


Book Description

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.




Hollow Land


Book Description

Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel’s colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon’s reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. In exploring Israel’s methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.







Inside Outside


Book Description

Inside Outside constructs a framework of interpretation for architecture and landscape architecture in order to disclose relations between them that are normally overlooked. Five operations--reciprocity, materiality, threshold, insertion, and infrastructure--each initiate an alternative way of looking at the construction and representation of relationships between architecture, landscape, city, and individuals. Twenty-four projects each contribute in a unique way to the definition of an operation.




The Landscape Urbanism Reader


Book Description

In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim—who is at the forefront of this new movement—has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field's top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world—including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bolanger, Julia Czerniak, and more—capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners.




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