An inviting exploration of architecture across cultures and centuries by one of the field’s eminent authors.

In this sweeping history, from the Stone Age to the present day, Witold Rybczynski shows how architectural ideals have been affected by technological, economic, and social changes—and by changes in taste. The host of examples ranges from places of worship such as Hagia Sophia and Brunelleschi’s Duomo to living spaces such as the Katsura Imperial Villa and the Alhambra, national icons such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Sydney Opera House, and skyscrapers such as the Seagram Building and Beijing’s CCTV headquarters. Rybczynski’s narrative emphasizes the ways that buildings across time and space are united by the human desire for order, meaning, and beauty.

This is the story of architecture’s physical manifestation of the universal aspiration to celebrate, honor, and commemorate, and an exploration of the ways that each building is a unique product of patrons, architects, and builders. Firm in opinion, even-handed, and rooted in scholarship, this book will delight anyone interested in understanding the buildings they use, visit, and pass by each day.

This is a collection of provocative essays that journey into the vexed circumstance of contemporary architectural practice.

The nature of the great cultural, social, political, environmental, and consumerist challenges facing the contemporary architect are explored, interpreted, and questioned, while drawing connections from architecture theory, philosophy, science, literature, and film sources in an attempt to negotiate the territory between the truth and lies in architecture.

These essays written by a leading Australian architect represent a level of comprehensive critical awareness rarely found within the architectural profession and one would be hard pressed to find another comparable figure in contemporary architectural practice. The entire argumentation is impressive, challenging, intellectually at the highest level and beautifully written.

Co-Designing Publics brings together a mix of academics, activists, and practitioners to discuss and debate discourses from scholarly research, grassroots activism, and design ideas for future action.

The “Co-Designing Publics” global research network, funded by a grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, has a sustained focus on the public realm and its production through informal strategies in cities of the global south. As cities are increasingly confronted by multiple crises [e.g. Covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis] and conditions of precarity [e.g. urban inequality, inadequate public infrastructure], such circumstances call for more interactive, collaborative, and creative approaches for [re]designing their public realm.

Based on these premises, the book integrates discussions of three critical and interrelated phenomena: creative ways of mobilizing communities around common concerns and desires [i.e. co-designing publics], deployment of grassroots tactics and social innovations [i.e. informal strategies], and production of spatial networks of public spaces intertwined with their ongoing governance [i.e. public realm]. Contextually grounding these discussions in cities of the global south enables us to learn how innovative co-design practices operate around issues such as homelessness and affordable housing, sustainable and equitable energy systems, waste management, cooperative models of property ownership, the promotion and protection of human rights, and the production of peace in contexts of violence.

Explores how revolutionary ideas were translated into landscape design, encompassing liberty, equality, improvement and colonialism.

Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property structures and landscape design across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and evolving concepts of plantation and improvement within imperial ideology. Revolutionaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Washington, Arthur Young, Lord Edward FitzGerald and Pierce Butler constructed houses, farms and landscape gardens—many of which have since been forgotten or selectively overlooked. How did the new republics and revolutionaries, having overthrown social hierarchies, translate their principles into spatial form?

As the eighteenth-century ideology of improvement was applied to a variety of transatlantic and enslaved environments, new landscape designs were created—stretching from the suburbs of Dublin to the sea islands of the state of Georgia. Yet these revolutionary ideas of equality and freedom often contradicted reality, particularly where the traditional design of the great landed estate—the building block of aristocratic power throughout Europe—intersected with that of the farm and the plantation.

A landmark publication which celebrates humanity's ability to create buildings that have responded ingeniously to cultural and environmental conditions for millennia—now in a compact hardcover edition.

There has never been a more important time to understand how to make the best use of local natural resources and create buildings that do not rely on stripping our planet or transporting materials across the globe. First published in 2017, Habitat gathers the world’s leading experts on vernacular architecture to examine how local buildings have stood the test of time and offer lessons for the future.

Arranged by climate zone—Tropical, Dry, Temperate, Continental, and Polar—each regional section presents buildings in their environments, showing how climatic conditions and vegetation affect the evolution of building styles. This central part of Habitat is bookended by a range of essays exploring the economic and anthropological aspects of shelter, while the book’s reference section offers information on materials science and engineering, including how buildings have been adapted to contend with natural disasters.

The traditions of vernacular architecture have much to teach us. Given our ecosystem’s increasing frailty, the architecture and building trade’s new role in a post-digital era, and the desperate need to record fading cultural traditions, the relevance of this book is more significant than ever.

A master plan for Antarctica

Accounting for approximately 10% of the land mass of Planet Earth, the Antarctic is a global commons we collectively neglect. Far from being a pristine natural landscape, the continent is a contested territory which conceals resources that might prove irresistible in a world with ever-increasing population growth. The 26 quadrillion tons of ice accumulated on its bedrock, equivalent to around 70% of the fresh water on our planet, represent at once the most significant repository of scientific data available, providing crucial information for future environmental policies, and the greatest menace to global coastal settlements threatened by the rise in sea levels induced by anthropogenic global warming.

Antarctic Resolution advocates the rejection of the pixelated view of Antarctica offered to us by big data companies and urges the construction of a high-resolution image focusing on the continent’s unique geography, unparalleled scientific potential, contemporary geopolitical significance, experimental governance system and its extreme inhabitation model. Only the concerted determination of a transnational network of multidisciplinary polar experts―represented here in the form of authored texts, photographic essays and data-based visual portfolios―could construct such an image and reveal the intricate web of growing economic and strategic interests, tensions and international rivalries, which are enveloped in darkness, as is the continent for six months of the year.

Learning from Antarctica’s spirit of cooperation, Antarctic Resolution aspires to launch a platform, an agency for change, where citizens can undertake a true Antarctic resolution and engage in a unanimous effort―independent of nation―to shape the future of the Antarctic and, in turn, of our planet.

The first exploration of the artistic and cultural intersections of the African continent and the Byzantine world.

Medieval art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire, but less known are the profound artistic contributions of Nubia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had an indelible impact on the medieval Mediterranean world. Bringing together more than 170 masterworks in a range of media and techniques—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, panel paintings, and religious manuscripts—Africa and Byzantium recounts Africa’s centrality in transcontinental networks of trade and cultural exchange. With incisive scholarship and new photography of works rarely or never before seen in public, this long-overdue publication sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of late antique Africa. It reconsiders the continent’s contributions to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of Africa as a vibrant, multiethnic society of diverse languages and faiths that played a crucial role in the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.