Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, the latest addition to the Architecture Briefs series, is a handbook on how to write effectively and critically about the contemporary city. The book offers works by some of the best architecture critics of the twentieth century, including Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael So...(展开全部)

The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the city We live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in the twenty-first century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious el...(展开全部)

Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired...(展开全部)

‘An easy introduction to both the grammar and the superstructure of classical orders’ – The Guardian Sir John Summerson's account of classical architecture has every right to be called a classic itself. With the help of diagrams, glossary and a wealth of photographs, the reader is taken easily from the great originals of Greece and Rome through the recapitulations and innovatio...(展开全部)

Classical architecture is a visual "language" and like any other language has its own grammatical rules. Classical buildings as widely spaced in time as a Roman temple, an Italian Renaissance palace and a Regency house all show an awareness of these rules even if they vary them, break them or poetically contradict them. Sir Christopher Wren described them as the "Latin" of arch...(展开全部)

In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centres from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent - a metropolis defyi...(展开全部)