Showing results for "The" in Architecture

The Sydney Opera House is a breathtaking building, recognised around the world as a symbol of modern Australia. Along with the Taj Mahal and other World Heritage sites, it is celebrated for its architectural grandeur and the daring and innovation of its design. It showcases the incomparable talents involved in its conception, construction and performance history. But this stunning house on Bennelong Point also holds many secrets and scandals. In his gripping biography, Peter FitzSimons marvels at how this magnificent building came to be.

Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson invites listeners on a transformative journey through ancestral innovation and Indigenous ingenuity. Challenging the dominance of high-tech solutions to contemporary environmental crises, Watson reveals how Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) offers sustainable, resilient, and regenerative design strategies rooted in symbiosis with nature.

What makes everyday spaces work, how do they shape us, and what do they say about us? The spaces we live in - whether public areas, housing, offices, hospitals or cities - mediate community, creativity and our very identity, making us who we are. Using insights from environmental psychology, design, and architecture, The Shaping of Us reveals the often imperceptible ways in which our surroundings influence our behaviour.

With the appearance of Grunch of Giants, R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory - his long-gestated myth-of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity.

The theory of architecture implicit in our world today, Christopher Alexander believes, is bankrupt. More and more people are aware that something is deeply wrong. Yet the power of present day ideas is so great that many feel uncomfortable, even afraid, to say openly that they dislike what is happening, because they are afraid to seem foolish, afraid perhaps that they will be laughed at. Now, at last, there is a coherent theory which describes in modern terms an architecture as ancient as human society itself.

Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable - for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment - yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his best-selling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making change in cities, and making it now.

The ruined silhouette of the Parthenon on its hill above Athens is one of the world's most famous images. Its 'looted' Elgin Marbles are a global cause celebre. But what actually are they? In a revised and updated edition, Mary Beard, award winning writer, reviewer and leading Cambridge classicist, tells the history and explains the significance of the Parthenon, the temple of the virgin goddess Athena, the divine patroness of ancient Athens.

Public City/Public Sex examines how the notion that male sexual desire required suitable outlets shaped urban policing and development. Ross traces the struggle to control sex in public and argues that it was the very effort to police the city that created new opportunities for women who sold sex and men who sought sex with other men. Placing public sex at the center of urban history, Ross shows how those who used public spaces played a central role in defining the way the city was understood.

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.

Built in a bygone era, Highclere Castle and its surrounding five-thousand-acre estate is a place where history breathes through its walls and verdant landscapes. From the grandeur of Victorian architecture to the whispers of Anglo-Saxon roots, every stone and tree has a story to tell throughout its sweeping grounds. Lady Carnarvon shares tales of past residents, from Lady Almina's legendary 1920s parties to the enigmatic ghosts that roam the halls of the castle. With the passing months and seasons, Lady Carnarvon reveals what it truly means to live and work in this extraordinary home.

The Colosseum was Imperial Rome's monument to warfare. Like a cathedral of death it towered over the city and invited its citizens, 50,000 at a time, to watch murderous gladiatorial games. It is now visited by two million visitors a year (Hitler was among them). Award-winning classicist Mary Beard, with Keith Hopkins, tells the story of Rome's greatest arena: how it was built; the gladiatorial and other games that were held there; the training of the gladiators; the audiences who revelled in the games, the emperors who staged them and the critics.

Tiny houses on wheels are glamorous and solve a lot of problems for people, but actually building one is a different story entirely. Maybe you've spent a lot of time researching and planning, but you're not quite sure you are ready. Or perhaps you are having a tiny house built for you but don't know what your builder will really do or how to communicate with them. Whatever your situation, this audiobook will arm you with construction knowledge in simple terms.

In this no-holds-barred treatise, Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people. But it doesn't have to be this way.

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.

No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, “another world.” During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival.

Part hands-on archaeological history of Britain, part deeply personal insight into this ancient craft by a stonemason who has worked on Britain's greatest monuments, from Salisbury Cathedral to St Paul's. Following a tradition that dates back hundreds of years, stonemason Andrew Ziminski has worked on many of Britain's greatest monuments, from the Roman ruins of Bath to Salisbury Cathedral's spire to St Paul's, and his three decades of work give a unique perspective on the warp and weft of English history, nature and geology.

Churches are all around us. Their steeples remain landmarks in our towns, villages and cities, even as their influence and authority has waned. They contain art and architectural wonders - one huge gallery scattered, like a handful of jewels, across these isles. Award-winning writer Peter Ross sets out to tell their stories, and through them a story of Britain. Join him as he visits the unassuming Norfolk church which contains a disturbing secret, and London's mighty cathedrals with their histories of fire and love. Meet cats and bats, monks and druids, angels of oak and steel.

From the earliest corrals of the mid-1800s (Union Grounds in Brooklyn was a "saloon in the open air"), to the much mourned parks of the early 1900s (Detroit's Tiger Stadium, Cincinnati's Palace of the Fans), to the stadiums we fill today, Paul Goldberger makes clear the inextricable bond between the American city and America's favorite pastime. In the changing locations and architecture of our ballparks, Goldberger reveals the manifestations of a changing society.

The Citicorp Center, a fifty-nine-story skyscraper built in 1977, immediately became one of the most recognizable features on the New York City skyline with its distinctive inclined roof and oddly placed support columns. Designed by one of the top structural engineers in the field, William LeMessurier, the tower would become the crown jewel of his professional career; In essence, he created a skyscraper on stilts. The building was a modern marvel—until it was revealed that it had a one in sixteen chance of collapse.

What will it take to restore balance to our world, repair past injustices, and support future generations' survival? Looking deeply into the web of life that created and supports us, and drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives, spirited thinkers Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka propose a bold set of regenerative principles with potential to transform how we design, make, and manage our buildings; infrastructure; and communities.