5 comments about Building Big.

1. This book is outstanding! It's informative, yet easy to read. I have used it as the textbook for my high school engineering class for two years, and the students love it!



2. I bought this book for my 6 year old son who is an avid builder. I knew that the text would be above his head, so I read the book before giving it to him so I could summarize the paragraphs for him. He asks to look at this book every night and loves it. This is not a picture book as it has a lot of text, but the pictures are well done, and he has gained some basic building concepts that he uses with his Legos and blocks. He likes to look at the book about how they build a structure (he is really fascinated by the Hoover dam and Petronas Towers) and they we look online at the completed pictures. It's a great book for older children (or if you want to take the time with a younger child to explain it) and I recommend it.



3. I gave this book as a gift to someone who loves and understands architecture. He found it most interesting. It contains many facts that are not generally know about large, historical structures.



4. David Macaulay takes the reader on a tour of some of the really big civil engineering structures of our time. Building Big has sections on Bridges, Tunnels, Dams, Domes, and Skyscrapers. Each part of the book describes the design and construction of from four to ten outstanding examples of the structure highlighted. The examples in each category are described in chronological order with some going back to the time of ancient Rome. The drawings that accompany the text are excellent at focusing on the details and techniques described. The integration of text and graphics is wonderful. In each case, Macaulay describes the design objectives, the interplay between the structure and the environment, and the engineering solutions used to bring the structures into being. This is a wonderful book for anyone interested in structural engineering and design. I have not seen the related PBS video series, but I can say that the book stands on its own very well. Highly recommended.



5. Macaulay fans are going to be amazed and impressed by this, his best book yet. It's a companion to the PBS series that's better than the films! A must see and better yet, must buy.

No comments about Creating Great Town Centers and Urban Villages.

No comments about 25 Apartments and Lofts Under 2500 Square Feet.

1 comments about Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (Morningside Book Series).

1. For some reason, this visionary book has kept its relevance for over fifty years (revised early Sixties). A work of Goodman's youth, around the time he taught at Black Mountain College, Communitas is by turns common sensical, prophetic, poetic, absurdly idealistic, & frequently (deliberately) hilarious.

   What was so terribly dehumanizing about American cities (the model here is New York) in the Forties has not been corrected in any major way. In the aftermath of 9/11, with that horrible, gaping hole where the Towers stood, one turns again to Communitas & reads about banning cars from New York, making the the city's avenues pedestrian & bike friendly, preserving good neighborhoods with indigenous personalities, & transforming other harsh, declining or gentrifying areas into safe, humane areas that are welcoming & which provide homes, schools & shopping areas that erase racial & class divides.

   The Goodmans eagerly to take on Frank Lloyd Wright, Bucky Fuller, the international & all the other various schools of designs for living then current. They reach back to earlier American, British & European models of community that showed promise through their partial successes.

   This is a deeply felt & humane call for holistic, human-sized communities within our cities. Ultimately, the solutions may not be so grandiose as some of those suggested here. But the World Trade Center Towers, awesome as they were, were coldly & absurdly beyond human scale; symbols of our subservience to a system of economics that is usually blind to basic human requirements; gigantic obstacles to the simple warmth of an afternoon's sunshine. I suspect Paul Goodman despised them.

3 comments about Principles of Urban Structure (Design/science/planning).

1. I first read Nikos Salingaros many years ago via his web site and was very moved by his work. In this book he presents valuable and important information to help us create better urban spaces and buildings. The key here is that the information is practical and useable. This is in contrast with most architectural theory work, which are more about the intellectual journey of the authors than architecture as medium to serve people. Salingaros presents design principles and ideas grounded in actual needs of human beings rather than ego based artistic pretensions.



2. The most relevant and significant ideas pertaining to planning and design today. Salingaros discusses concepts that are necessarily fundamental to a successful and responsible structure of the urban form. His work establishes guidelines that are progressive but highly rational and that I wish my own formal planning and design education focused more on rather than on principles that now seem out of date. Principles of Urban Structure sets the frame of mind from which any student or professional should approach their work.



3. Nikos Salingaros is moving the field of urbanism to a new and more complete understanding of the urban landscape. The articles in this book present clear ideas of complex issues in a manner that is accessible to anyone that has ever read anything on urban theory. The concepts can and should be employed by anyone concerned with the planning, design, and management of an urban landscape. Highly recommended to students, professors, and practitioners in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and planning.

No comments about Temporary Urban Spaces: Concepts for the Use of City Spaces.

No comments about Gritty Brits: New London Architecture.

1 comments about Hegemann and Peets American Vitruvius (Reprint Series).

1. This is an incredible achievement. It absolutely must be in the library of every architect and architecture student in the world, because we have lost contact with the beauty and social glory of living urbanistically. The architecture we produce supports this suburbanized lifestyle, and the anti social results of this new pattern of living can be seen daily on the news in all manner of bizarre murders and cultist activity. Well then! Without advocating a style of architecture in particular, this book advocates a type of planning that, if we are intelligent enough to understand this book, could save this country, and save the world. I do not exaggerate. Buy the book. You'll be a different person for having purchased it.

1 comments about Paris, Capital of Modernity.

1. Implicitly taking his start from Benjamin's sketches of Paris as the "capitol" of the 19th century, Harvey analyses the elements that transformed Paris from medieval labrynth to modern bourgeois metropolis and the corresponding effect that this had on all levels of the class structure, men and women, and the spatial geography of the city itself. He starts with Balzac and Baudelaire, as all such studies must; but quickly moves out of literature and into history, looking at the changes in the city geography begun by Hausmann. Harvey uses his familiar metaphor of changes in geography as a symbol of the changes wrought by modernity. Excellent, pointed read for those interested in Paris and French history, urban development, and the effects of capital on capitols. Great bibliography too!

4 comments about The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany.

1. In this masterful and original account the author takes the reader on a virtual tour de force examination of the way in which nature was changed, conquered, preserved, destroyed and manipulated in Germany between the time of Fredrick the Great and the present. The author notes that to "write about the shaping of the modern German landscape is to write about how modern Germany itself was shaped." It begins with the tale of the draining of the Oderburch, a great swamp on the river Oder from Oderberg to Lebus. This swamp along with others was progressively drained and settled in the 18th century. Colonists were brought in and the wolves were hunted to extinction. This was a frontier like any other and the author compares it to other conquests of nature in the New World and South Africa. It was a "conquest from barbarism". This use of science and technology to tame the wild beast of nature is as old as man itself but found a special expression in Germany.
   
   The next section of the book examines the taming of the Rhine river and the harnessing of it to agriculture and the state. The book takes the reader on a wonderful journey alongside the German engineers and statesmen and visionaries who tried the utmost to control flooding and build ports and canals such as Wilhelmshaven. Land reclamation followed. Once again people had to settle and colonize the new areas. The same was being done across Europe, for instance South of Rome where in the 1920s and 1930s colonists would be set to colonizing the Malarial swamps.
   
   But where once colonizing and reclamation were peaceful pursuits they eventually turned sinister with the advent of Nazism and the decision to reclaim the East for German settlers. The idea was that the `barbaric' Slavic peoples could be harnessed as well or removed from the swamps they were `indigenous' to. Propaganda saw them as growing out of the swamps themselves. The `dead space' of the Pripet marshes. Everywhere German `model villages' were designed to replace the `natural' villages that seethed with disease and closed spaces in the `east'.
   
   A brilliant book that weaves together so many topics and is hard to put down, the subject seems staid, but is fascinating.
   
   Seth J. Frantzman



2. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE: WATER, LANDSCAPE, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN GERMANY is a recommended pick for any library strong in modern Western history in general and German history and culture in particular. Both college-level and general-interest lending collections will appreciate the fine reproductions of paintings, maps and photos which go into a survey linking culture, politic and environmental issues in German history to modern times. It's a key component of any comprehensive collection on German issues and background.



3. This is quite a book.
   
   There are a number of books on how the he U.S. Army Corp of Engineers has modified rivers like the Mississippi in the United States (with more or less success, witness Katrina). This is the first one I've seen on what was done in Northern Europe. The projects in Germany were monumental in scale, taking some 250 years to accomplish. This is part of what made Germany into a nation.
   
   It is quite interesting as it talks not only about what was done but about other aspects such as the health, econonic, cultural, and political aspects. The Nazi's for instance looked at the work done as proof of the natural superiority of the German people.
   
   With all of the success of the projects, the book at the end turns to the problems the efforts have caused: flooding, fish habitat destroyed. In essence all of the problems we are having with these same areas in the United States.



4. There are many fine environmental histories of North America but seemingly very few of Europe. Following a brief description of how the end of the Ice Age produced the sodden, water-filled plains of central and northern Germany, this book explores how man created the modern German landscape by straightening the Rhine River and "reclaiming" the southern coast of the North Sea and other watery regions. The maps are useful. Great stuff, I wish there were more books on the transformation of the European environment over the past 12,000 years.