30 Second Architecture

If you would like to know your arch from your elevation, and your Baroque from your Brutalism, or you wish to end your next dinner party with a stirring speech about Sustainable Architecture, this is the quickest way to construct your argument.

Offers a fresh approach to learning about those subjects you feel you should really understand. This title presents you with the foundations of architectural knowledge.

Discover underground London, secret London, suburban London, and much more, on a revealing whistlestop city tour.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Most architectural standards references contain thousands of pages of details, overwhelmingly more than architects need to know to know on any given day. The updated and revised edition of Architecture Reference & Specification contains vital information that's essential to planning and executing architectural projects of all shapes and sizes, all in a format that is small enough to carry anywhere. It distills the data provided in standard architectural volumes and is an easy-to-use reference for the most indispensable--and most requested--types of architectural information.

This innovative and unique book is a visual guide to the buildings that surround us, naming all the visible architectural features so that, unlike other architectural dictionaries, the reader doesn't have to know the name before looking it up. Clear line drawings and extensive colour photographs illustrate each of the main building types, from forts to churches, stately homes to skyscrapers. The individual structural elements and materials common to all buildings are then explained, whether in Classical, Gothic or Modernist style, before delving into the inner architectural details such as doors and windows, roofs and staircases. A comprehensive glossary completes the book. An original and accessible take on the architectural dictionary, this book takes you on a visual tour of the buildings around us, and will be useful not only to students but to anyone with a general interest in architecture.

An examination of the influential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri's historical construction of contemporary architecture. The influential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) invoked the productive possibilities of crisis, writing that history is a "project of crisis" (progetto di crisi). In this entry in the Writing Architecture series, Marco Biraghi explores Tafuri's multifaceted and often knotty oeuvre, using the historian's concept of a project of crisis as a lens through which to examine his historical construction of contemporary architecture. Mindful of Tafuri's statement that there is no such thing as criticism, only history, Biraghi carefully maps the influences on Tafuri's writing—Walter Benjamin, Karl Krauss, Massimo Cacciari, and the architect Ludovico Quaroni, among others—in order to create a portrait of one of the most complex minds in twentieth-century architecture and architectural history. Tracing an arc from Tafuri's first articles in the magazine Contropiano to the idea of contradiction at the center of the project of crisis, Biraghi cites Tafuri's writing on some of his contemporaries, including Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and the "Five Architects" (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier). Tafuri's historical construction of the contemporary, Biraghi explains, is based on the idea that the past is open, providing the present with ever-changing and indeterminate form. There is no contradiction between Tafuri the historian and Tafuri the contemporary critic, only the greatest possible integration. The importance of Tafuri's interpretation of architecture goes beyond mere academic or historiographic interest, Biraghi argues; Tafuri's notion of the project of crisis is fundamentally important in understanding our present-day architectural condition