2 comments about AutoCAD Architecture 2008.

1. Before purchasing this book, I looked online for professional reviews by architects and engineers dealing with CAD. This book was very well regarded and I was not disappointed. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in a well written learning tool for AutoCAD Architecture 2008.



2. Great Book! The best one I've tried so far. Very useful and easy to read and understand.

1 comments about The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft.

1. The movie screen, the TV screen, and the computer screen have become part of our everyday experience - substitutes for the architectural window that frames a view, and for the frame around a painting. But only in the last two decades have multiple screens become familiar. Typically film and TV both display a single frame on a single screen, despite other possibilities. What does it mean to "frame" an idea or experience using the new digital technologies? How does it change our "perspective"? Anne Friedberg takes up these issues with extraordinary theoretical sophistication and an impressive knowledge of history.

5 comments about Cities For A Small Planet (An Icon Edition).

1. There's probably a great truth in the fact that the last 50 years of planning have enrich few and impoverished many.
   Zoning is simple, clear, fast and economically definable, but it isolates the people who are destined to live there, and enslaves them to the use of car.
   Overlapping and dense urbanism is historically a step back, is more work for planners, more difficult to understand for the laymen and developers and will cost more, but it will ultimately favor humane contact, regenerate sense of community, diminish the slavery of people on machine and last but not least reduce pollution.
   We have to reconsider the word coined by the Polish American Architect Lubicz of Nycz: Urbantecture.
   Urbanism & architecture are very delicate matters, intimately tided they create the frame for the world we live in.
   This is a great book for planner, politicians and people, because everybody today is oblige to look at cities as sustainable places where life can prosper only in respect of nature.



2. "Cities for a Small Planet give me the reassurance that there are influential people trying to reduce the destructive impact of human activities on the world. The case study of Curitiba, Brazil is particularly inspirational.
   
   Author Richard Rogers looks for ways to make city centers more sustainable and points out the importance of public space within a city. He makes a case against single-use developments, the sprawl of the suburbs and the need for automobiles. I can't help but to wonder, though, about the average family living in a suburb in their own house with a backyard garden, two dogs and a cat. Those average people are quite happy to be away from the city centers, from the panhandlers and predators, from unsafe feelings while riding public transportation, from the sounds of police sirens and honking horns. Will dense sustainable city developments change that?
   
   Not everyone is cut out to live in dense cities. A more appropriate question (at least in the United States) might be, "What can we do to make our suburbs more sustainable?"
   
   Just an aside: I found the font size of this book to be a bit on the small side, and the captions under the pictures to be small to the point of near unreadability.



3. It is a good book, small but with lots of information. It introduces in a simple form the urban problems of the world and tries to focus in it's solutions. After I read it I showed it to teachers at my school and they now quote it in class.



4. Unusual and very well thought-out propositions for the architectural/urbanization problems that arise today as society everywhere struggles with increasing overpopulation. EWspecially noteworthy is the inclusion of small town issues, a topic normally overlooked by other architects/scholars who write on urban planning. Some interesting research, and of course the intriguing sketches and drawings I associate with Rogers, Foster, Piano, and all thoes other postindustrial architects. It's a small little book that is great for reading on the plane. Usually something not too common with architecture books.



5. After reading this book, I wanted to pack my bags and head to London to study with Richard Rogers. His observations on the importance of balancing population, resources and the environment is right on. He identifies the need for compact cities, but seeks to reinvent the dense city model to be a cleaner, greener, more integrated place. Rogers pays specific attention to positive social changes that compact cities can make, and he addresses the importance of regionalism to acheiving sustainability goals. Also, he explains how proximity allows for creative reuse of resources and efficient building design. The book is unique; Rogers makes concrete suggestions and offers actual examples of ways to acheive sustainability.

No comments about Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic.

No comments about The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization.

1 comments about Building Type Basics for Healthcare Facilities (Building Type Basics).

1. Great book for designing hospitals and such. Helped a lot to understand what goes inside these extremely complex buildings.

5 comments about Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred.

1. This book makes the case for both traditional urbanism and new urbanism by laying the solid philosophical foundation that has been lacking up to now in writings in the field. Philip Bess takes the Aristotelian tradition running from Aristotle to the brilliant contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and links this tradition to the practical necessities of building sustainable communities that create the optimal setting for human fulfillment. He establishes an objective and convincing basis to show how traditional urbanism and its "new urbanist" adaptations promote the common good in an age when that concept has almost vanished. Bess, in calm and measured tones, establishes a balanced and fulfilling world view as an alternative to a world currently fixated on private greed running amok in unfettered markets distorted by subsidies granted by governments commandeered by special interests. Bess not only shows us how to make places that we can love, he shows us that this art, almost lost in the modern world, is the way to an environmentally sustainable future that creates meaning and purpose in life. He reaches back to timeless traditions to show how we can transform our current world, complete with modern conveniences and cars, into a better place. This book is both practical and philosphical, and will appeal to thinking people, but not to those who just are looking for a "quick fix." This book, if read and understood by enough people, can transform the world.



2. Architecture is visual. In this book, the emphasis is on the abstract. As such, the subject and its presentation seem disconnected. Granted, the book has illustrations; however, they're generally tiny compared to what one normally sees in a presentation on a visual art. The text also contains numerous tiny footnotes throughout. These footnotes are distracting. The author makes numerous references other writers, coming across as someone who's collected a bunch of interesting quotes and wanted an excuse put them together in a book. It gives something of an intellectual stream of consciousness effect. I've read other books on architecture such as Tom Wolfe's From Our House to Bauhaus, Michael Rose's Ugly as Sin, and Lewis Mumford's Sticks and Stones, and got a lot of enjoyment and insight from them. I thought I'd really like this book but found it so boring and hard to read I gave up before finishing the first chapter.



3. Philip Bess (Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, University of Notre Dame School of Architecture) presents Till We Have Built Jerusalem, a scholarly examination of the relationship between traditional architecture, urbanism, and human flourishing, as well as the types of culture necessary to sustain traditional towns and city neighborhoods. Chapters analyze questionable intellectual assumptions of contemporary architecture, and reveals how the individualist philosophy of modern societies is physically expressed through suburban sprawl, to such an extent that it undercuts urbanism's ability to sustain itself. Till We Have Built Jerusalem concludes that the natural law tradition and communal religion can both provide the needed intellectual and spiritual depth to modern attempts to build new (and revive existing) towns and cities. Urban locales, at their best, help fulfill the human drive for order, beauty, and community, Bess argues, in this fascinating study of old versus new urbanism. Black-and-white and a few color illustrations add a visual touch to this persuasive manifesto of the common links between improving the human condition through better urban architecture and the bonds of shared religion.



4. In this interesting but highly abstract collection of essays, Bess tries to teach cultural and religious conservatives (and indeed, religious people of all political leanings) about the virtues of traditional urbanism and its 21st-century heir, the New Urbanist movement. Bess argues that traditional neighborhoods where churches and other civic institutions are the highest buildings ennoble us by teaching us what we should cherish; by contrast, in 20th-century suburban sprawl churches look no different from Wal-Marts.
   
   One of the best things about this book is its use of quotes. Some of my favorites:
   
   *"To value anything simply because it occurs, is in fact to worship success, like Quislings or men of Vichy." (quoting C.S. Lewis).
   
   *"If a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once upon this downward path, you never know when to stop. Many a man has dated his own ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time." (qutoing Thomas de Quincey)
   
   *"the gratification in climbing consists of the conquering of one's own inert heaviness for the purpose of attaining a high goal- an experience inevitably endowed with symbolic connotations. Climbing is a heroic, liberating act; and height spontaneously symbolizes things of high value." (quoting psychologist Rudolf Arnheim to explain why height and beauty often go together)
   
   *"It is not only insufferable arrogance to think that one can begin theologizing in sovereign disregard of history; it is also extremely uneconomical. It seems rather a waste of time to spend, say, five years working out a position, only to find that it has already been done by a Syrian monk in the fifth century. The very least that a knowledge of religious traditions has to offer is a catalogue of heresies for possible home use." (quoting Peter Berger)
   
   *"The utter failure to create any meaningful pedestrian environment (that is, a rewarding public realm} defines the heart of Atlanta today. Every bad idea in the service of contemporary urban design [has come] together [in Atlanta] with a public attitude that can be summed up as the outside doesn't matter." (quoting James Howard Kunstler)
   
   *And once from William Penn that he (wisely) criticizes: "The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God, but in cities little else but the works of men." As Bess points out, human endeavor, like the natural world, is infused with divine presence.
   
   One possible weakness: Because this is a collection of essays rather than a freestanding book, Bess doesn't engage defenders of the sprawl status quo as thoroughly as I would like.



5. If the following paraphrase is not too crude a summary of Philip Bess' brilliant synthesis in this book, the author believes that we all carry a kind of moral DNA within us which not only urges us not to murder but not to allow urban sprawl to devour our landscape and kill our authentic civic life. How ironic that we Americans hunger for the beauty of European small towns, for example, but don't realize that their "human scale" is related to ancient notions of what cities are for -- to make people good (i.e., excellent). This is not a political nor a polemical tract: Bess takes the reader into serious philosophical waters and his emphasis on virtues-based theories of human behavior mirrors the current work of leading philosophers and psychologists like Alasdair MacIntyre and Martin Seligman.

1 comments about XS: Small Structures, Green Architecture.

1. Note carefully the words in the title of this book, 'Small Structures.' In spite of the copy on the back of the book, this is not a book concentrating on small houses. This a book on all kinds of small structures. They may be viewing platforms, a bridge, a pigeon loft, a monument, an emergency shelter made out of an ocean shipping container, a camera obscura, a work of art, or indeed there are a few houses here.
   
   What this book is really trying to do is push the state of the architectural art just as far as it can be pushed. Here are structures that are ecologically responsible, wildly creative and showcase the advanced thinking that the premier architectural firms can do when removed from the restrictions of building yet another McMansion.
   
   As you look at these structures, some give you ideas that you'd really like to try in your next building, some of the others just look weird and don't fit into anything that seems reasonable.
   
   All in all, I found it a stay up late and look at every picture just to see what they might think of next kind of book.

1 comments about New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape.

1. New Orleans is an "inevitable city on an impossible
   site" is what Pierce Lewis said in his book Making Of An Urban Landscape.
   
   I would add to that "an inevitable party on an impossible site by illicite and illogical people.'
   
   Most of what is there now was not there prior to WWII. The early settlers (1699) understood the land and built appropriately.
   
   If anyone is to blame it is the French! But it is a most wonderful book about the growth and development of a wonderful city.

2 comments about Jean Prouve, 1901-1984: The Dynamics of Creation (Basic Architecture Series).

1. very good introduction to Prouvre's work.
   
   This book is really just an overview of his career but it is very well laid out and informative. I think that the conciseness of the book is a real advantage. That said I really want to find out more.



2. This is the twentieth volume in the German Publishing Company Taschen's Basic Architecture Series. In previous volumes, Taschen has done an excellent job of summing up the careers of most the world's greatest modernist architects. It is fitting that after the first round of iconic masters, (Mies, Corbusier, Wright, Gropius) that Taschen has now moved on to other important modernist architects and designers.
   
   In most surveys of modern architecture, Jean Prouve's buildings are not prominently featured. He did not design the iconic buildings with which other great architects are usually closely identified. Today, Jean Prouve is probably best known for his furniture designs. However, Prouve contributed to the modernist agenda in other ways. As a designer, he produced some of the first modular metal buildings. Most of the metal buildings we see today are the grandchildren of the designs he first originated in the 1930's. However, his single greatest accomplishment is as one of the inventors of curtain walls. We may not be aware of them but they are all around us.
   
   Jean Prouve's work is not an easily accesible as some of the other great architects and designers of the period. Nevertheless, he was a powerful, inovative figure whose vision helped shaped the modern world. At a ten dollars a volume, this book is another Taschen success.