How Architecture Works

How Architecture Works - Paperback

$25.99
$25.99
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How Architecture Works
  • How Architecture Works
How Architecture Works - Paperback

How Architecture Works - Paperback

by Witold Rybczynski
$25.99
$25.99

Book Overview

An essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday lives

We spend most of our days and nights in buildings, living and working and sometimes playing. Architecture is both the setting for our everyday lives and a public art form--but it remains mysterious to most of us.
In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, one of our best, most stylish critics and the winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his writing on architecture, answers our most fundamental questions about how good--and not so good--buildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, he reveals how architects as diverse as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Robert A. M. Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to "read" plans, how buildings respond to their settings, and how the smallest detail--of a stair balustrade, for instance--can convey an architect's vision. How Architecture Works explains the central elements that make up good building design, ranging from a war memorial in London to an opera house in Saint Petersburg, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to a famous architect's private retreat in Princeton, New Jersey. It is an enlightening humanist's toolkit for thinking about the built environment and seeing it afresh.
"Architecture, if it is any good, speaks to all of us," Rybczynski writes. This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.
ISBN9780374534820
Author Witold Rybczynski
PublisherFarrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
GenreDesign and History
FormatPaperback
PublishedOctober 2014
LanguageENG- English
Pages368
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Architecture History Nonfiction

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More by Witold Rybczynski

How Architecture Works

How Architecture Works - Paperback

How Architecture Works - Paperback

By Witold Rybczynski

About Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of many books, including the award-winning biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, and the best-selling Home: A Short History of an Idea. He has written on architecture and urbanism for the New York Times, New Yorker, Slate, and New York Review of Books. Laurie Olin is Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Principal of the Olin Partnership, a landscape architecture firm in Philadelphia. He is the author of Across the Open Field: Essays Drawn from English Landscapes and a coauthor of La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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