Category: architecture

Draw 50 Buildings and Other Structures: The Step-by-Step Way to Draw Castles and Cathedrals, Skyscrapers and Bridges, and So Much More…

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Draw 50 Buildings and Other Structures teaches aspiring artists how to draw with ease by following simple, step-by-step instructions. Celebrated author Lee J. Ames shows readers how to draw famous structures from all over the world, as well as an igloo, a barn and silo, a windmill, and even a teepee. Ames’s illustration style and renowned drawing method has made him a leader in the step-by-step drawing manual, and the 31 books in his Draw 50 series have sold more than three million copies. Ames’s instruction allows seasoned artists to refine their technique and guides amateurs to develop their own artistic abilities. Even the youngest artists can draw the tallest, grandest structures. It’s easy to construct any type of building when it’s done the Draw 50 way. 

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A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture

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Here at last: the fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture—in print since its publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential reference to American houses.

Focusing on dwellings in urban and suburban neighborhoods and rural locations all across the continental United States—houses built over the past three hundred years reflecting every social and economic background—this guide provides in-depth information on the essentials of domestic architecture with facts and frames of reference that will enable you to look in a fresh way at the houses around you. With more than 1,600 detailed photographs and line illustrations, and a lucid, vastly informative text, it will teach you not only to recognize distinct architectural styles but also to understand their historical significance. What does that cornice signify? Or that porch? The shape of that door? The window treatment? When was this house built? What does the style say about its builders and their eras? You’ll find the answers to these and myriad other questions in this encyclopedic and eminently practical book.

Here are more than fifty styles and their variants, spanning seven distinct historical periods. Each style is illustrated with a large schematic drawing that highlights its most important identifying features. Additional drawings and photographs provide, at a glance, common alternative shapes, principal subtypes, and close-up views of typical small details—windows, doors, cornices, etc.—that can be difficult to see in full-house illustrations. The accompanying text explains the identifying features of each style, describing where and in what quantity they can be found, discussing all of its notable variants, and tracing their origin and history.

The book’s introductory chapters provide invaluable general discussions of construction materials and techniques, house shapes, and the various traditions of architectural fashion that have influenced American house design through the past three centuries. A pictorial key and glossary simplifies identification, connecting easily recognized architectural features—the presence of a tile roof, for example—to the styles in which that feature is likely to be found.
           
Among the new material included in this edition are chapters on styles that have emerged in the thirty years since the previous edition; a groundbreaking chapter on the development and evolution of American neighborhoods; an appendix on approaches to construction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings throughout.
           
Here is an indispensable resource—both easy and pleasurable to use—for the house lover and the curious tourist, for the house buyer and the weekend stroller, for neighborhood preservation groups, architecture buffs, and everyone who wants to know more about their own homes and communities. It is an invaluable book of American architecture, culture, and history. 

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How to Draw and Paint Fantasy Architecture: From Ancient Citadels and Gothic Castles to Subterranean Palaces and Floating Fortresses

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Advice and instruction from a leading fantasy illustrator guides art students who intend to pursue careers illustrating computer games, children’s books, graphic novels, and other related media. This book’s opening chapter analyzes traditional architectural shapes that include arches, columns, towers, vaults, and buttresses. Chapters that follow apply principles of lighting, shadow, and perspective to the architectural forms, and discuss ways of creating surface textures and adding dramatic atmosphere to illustrations. Readers are then guided through a series of projects of increasing complexity in which they create illustrations dominated by fantasy castles, palaces, dungeons, and more. Here is comprehensive instruction in the techniques required for capturing fantastic buildings, alien architecture, and alternate realities. More than 250 enlightening color illustrations.

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Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects Create a Snug and Playful Pod-Shaped Home

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Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, house I, japanese architecture, open plan layout, curved walls, locally milled stone, single family house, unconventional architecture, contemporary home
Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, house I, japanese architecture, open plan layout, curved walls, locally milled stone, single family house, unconventional architecture, contemporary home
Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, house I, japanese architecture, open plan layout, curved walls, locally milled stone, single family house, unconventional architecture, contemporary home
Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, house I, japanese architecture, open plan layout, curved walls, locally milled stone, single family house, unconventional architecture, contemporary home
Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, house I, japanese architecture, open plan layout, curved walls, locally milled stone, single family house, unconventional architecture, contemporary home
Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, house I, japanese architecture, open plan layout, curved walls, locally milled stone, single family house, unconventional architecture, contemporary home
Hiroyuki Shinozaki Architects, house I, japanese architecture, open plan layout, curved walls, locally milled stone, single family house, unconventional architecture, contemporary home

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Discovering Architecture: How the World’s Great Buildings Were Designed and Built

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This exceptionally produced art book with die-cut windows, overlays, and blueprints identifies, decodes, and explains the world’s architectural masterpieces. Based on the successful format of Discovering the Great Masters, this is an accessible reference for anyone interested in great spaces and spectacular buildings and for anyone keen to know more about architecture. Each of the architectural works features clever overlays and die-cut windows that allow the reader to identify and focus on specific design elements. Each featured window includes a thoughtful caption explaining the significance of the highlighted area: building materials, historical context, and insights into the planning and architectural influences. Including such works as the Tower of London, Notre-Dame de Paris, and the Taj Mahal in India, the book is organized chronologically and presents buildings from all genres, covering more than two millennia of architectural history. In addition to the clever die-cut captions, each building is featured in an essay filled with essential information on the construction, as well as the social, political, cultural, and geographical considerations of the architect. Stunning photographs allow the reader to appreciate the technical feats and aesthetic brilliance of both the buildings and architects past and present.

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Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

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On August 19, 1418, a competition concerning Florence’s magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore–already under construction for more than a century–was announced: “Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome….shall do so before the end of the month of September.” The proposed dome was regarded far and wide as all but impossible to build: not only would it be enormous, but its original and sacrosanct design shunned the flying buttresses that supported cathedrals all over Europe. The dome would literally need to be erected over thin air.

Of the many plans submitted, one stood out–a daring and unorthodox solution to vaulting what is still the largest dome (143 feet in diameter) in the world. It was offered not by a master mason or carpenter, but by a goldsmith and clockmaker named Filippo Brunelleschi, then forty-one, who would dedicate the next twenty-eight years to solving the puzzles of the dome’s construction. In the process, he did nothing less than reinvent the field of architecture.

Brunelleschi’s Dome is the story of how a Renaissance genius bent men, materials, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural wonder we continue to marvel at today. Denounced at first as a madman, Brunelleschi was celebrated at the end as a genius. He engineered the perfect placement of brick and stone, built ingenious hoists and cranes (among some of the most renowned machines of the Renaissance) to carry an estimated 70 million pounds hundreds of feet into the air, and designed the workers’ platforms and routines so carefully that only one man died during the decades of construction–all the while defying those who said the dome would surely collapse and his own personal obstacles that at times threatened to overwhelm him. This drama was played out amid plagues, wars, political feuds, and the intellectual ferments of Renaissance Florence– events Ross King weaves into the story to great effect, from Brunelleschi’s bitter, ongoing rivalry with the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti to the near catpure of Florence by the Duke of Milan. King also offers a wealth of fascinating detail that opens windows onto fifteenth-century life: the celebrated traditions of the brickmaker’s art, the daily routine of the artisans laboring hundreds of feet above the ground as the dome grew ever higher, the problems of transportation, the power of the guilds.

Even today, in an age of soaring skyscrapers, the cathedral dome of Santa Maria del Fiore retains a rare power to astonish. Ross King brings its creation to life in a fifteenth-century chronicle with twenty-first-century resonance.Filippo Brunelleschi’s design for the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence remains one of the most towering achievements of Renaissance architecture. Completed in 1436, the dome remains a remarkable feat of design and engineering. Its span of more than 140 feet exceeds St Paul’s in London and St Peter’s in Rome, and even outdoes the Capitol in Washington, D.C., making it the largest dome ever constructed using bricks and mortar. The story of its creation and its brilliant but “hot-tempered” creator is told in Ross King’s delightful Brunelleschi’s Dome.

Both dome and architect offer King plenty of rich material. The story of the dome goes back to 1296, when work began on the cathedral, but it was only in 1420, when Brunelleschi won a competition over his bitter rival Lorenzo Ghiberti to design the daunting cupola, that work began in earnest. King weaves an engrossing tale from the political intrigue, personal jealousies, dramatic setbacks, and sheer inventive brilliance that led to the paranoid Filippo, “who was so proud of his inventions and so fearful of plagiarism,” finally seeing his dome completed only months before his death. King argues that it was Brunelleschi’s improvised brilliance in solving the problem of suspending the enormous cupola in bricks and mortar (painstakingly detailed with precise illustrations) that led him to “succeed in performing an engineering feat whose structural daring was without parallel.” He tells a compelling, informed story, ranging from discussions of the construction of the bricks, mortar, and marble that made up the dome, to its subsequent use as a scientific instrument by the Florentine astronomer Paolo Toscanelli. –Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk

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From the Land: Backen, Gillam, & Kroeger Architects

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Elegant rusticity meets unpretentious luxury in the work of this award-winning architecture firm. Howard Backen, principal of the architecture firm Backen, Gillam & Kroeger, is at the center of a popular movement in home design that emphasizes elegant simplicity and embraces the rustic charm of natural materials. This volume, the first on his work and that of the firm, is an artful exploration of this aesthetic, featuring farmhouses in the Napa Valley, hilltop homes, seaside retreats, and lakeside hideaways. Throughout the work, a sense of intimacy, warmth, and informality pervades. Natural materials, such as wood, stone, and brick, form the foundations, walls, and ceilings of these subtly luxurious spaces, while nature itself plays a considered role that is at once complementary and also intricately conjoined with the work. Sensitive, alluring, and wonderfully resonant with the suggestion of invitation, the work of Backen, Gillam & Kroeger is both thrilling to the eye and restorative to the soul.

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Architecture in Photographs

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From the invention of photography in 1839, architecture was second only to portraiture as the most favored subject for the camera. The fact that buildings were immobile was advantageous for the long exposures needed in the early days, but architectural images were popular for other reasons: they documented dynastic, civic, and religious achievements; educated architects about construction and decorative details; and whetted curiosity about distant lands. Later photographers found innovative ways to depict structures of every era and type.

Arranged chronologically, Architecture in Photographs spans the history of the medium and includes works in a variety of photographic processes by such distinguished nineteenth-century practitioners as Henri le Secq, Gustave Le Gray, and Roger Fenton; twentieth-century photographers Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, and Walker Evans; contemporary artists Ed Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, and Steven Shore; and younger image makers Catherine Opie and Michael Wesely.

The seventy-five images presented here, all from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, form a panoply of architectural structures and styles, from Egyptian ruins to Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals, and from skyscrapers and Modernist schools to mundane vernacular dwellings.

The book is published to coincide with the exhibition In Focus: Architecture, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from October 15, 2013, to March 2, 2014.

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