The Anatomy Of Architecture

Blier illuminates the extraordinary architecture of the Batammaliba people of Western Africa, revealing these buildings as texts through which we can read the beliefs, psychology, traditions, and social concerns of their inhabitants. In doing so, she explores the role of vernacular architecture as an expression of culture. "A splendid analysis of the centrality of architecture in the daily lives of the Batammaliba and its integral role in articulating social values....The story is beautifully told in the best of anthropological traditions."—Judith R. Blau, Contemporary Society "A remarkable study....Blier's volume carries the study of African architecture to a qualitatively new level of scholarship. It introduces a new dimension whereby the architectural medium can be used to illuminate much of the entire belief system of any culture."—Labelle Prussin, African Arts "In this excellent book Blier provides a richly detailed and searching account of what architecture means to the Batammaliba of northern Togo and Benin....The finest account I have yet read of the relations between systems of beliefs, ritual practices, and African aesthetics and plastic arts....The ethnography and basic insight should be the envy of any social anthropologist."—T.O. Beidelman, Man

This book makes visible the axes along which architectural knowledge circulates through books into buildings and back.

Examines the great architectural styles, the background to their evolutions, and the means by which the buildings within them were achieved. The many superb pieces of specially commissioned cut-away artwork, researched with the aid of computer techniques, provide an intriguing and informative study of the world's greatest structures from the Great Pyramid of Cheops to examples of modern architectural styles, and, together with the clear and informative text, make this a fascinating book for both expert and layman.--From publisher description.

Taking inspiration from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, this book elucidates the theory and practice of a selected group of key Japanese architects by situating them within a wider cultural context of art, technology, literature, and politics. Illustrated with rarely seen images and interspersed with previously untranslated texts, the book uses biographical profiles and comparative analyses to trace the evolution of spatial, aesthetic, and behavioral concepts in Japanese architecture over the postwar decades. In particular, the political activism of architects in the 1960s and the social criticism of architects in the 1970s provide a vital source of inspiration for the protean creativity of the Japanese architectural world today.

Sabkhas (salt flats) are natural phenomena—a unique result of converging climates, winds, and river flow—with the potential to rehabilitate the natural global order. The ancient term sabkha originates in the Arab world. Today, it has become well-established in the global lexicon of geological and ecological discussions around sustainability: These overlooked ecological networks of wetland plants can sequester more carbon per square meter than rainforests. The Anatomy of Sabkhas investigates how these precious resources form, how they have aided the development of human civilization throughout history, and how they have subsequently infiltrated our traditions, rituals, festivals, smartphones, and cities today. Written and edited by urbanists and architects, the book examines the ways that sabkhas might actively contribute to more sustainable built environments and how, in tandem, sabkhas can not only support our natural environment but also heal it.

Thomas Sharp was a key figure in mid-C20 British planning whose renown stems from two periods in his career. First, he came to attention as a polemical writer in the 1930s on planning issues, including as a virulent opponent of garden cities. His prose tempered over time and this phase perhaps culminated in Town Planning, first published in 1940 and reputed to have sold over 250,000 copies. Subsequently the plans he produced for historic towns in the1940s, such as Oxford, were very well known and were influential in developing ideas of townscape. Started as an official manual on village planning, The Anatomy of the Village followed on from the Scott Report, for which Sharp had been one of the Secretaries. When the Ministry decided not to proceed with the publication, Sharp himself published in it 1946. It became one of Sharp's best known works, with lucid prose and generous illustration by photograph and beautiful line-drawings of village plans. The aim of The Anatomy of the Village was to set out the main principles of village planning, especially in relation to physical design. Anatomy became a key text in thinking about villages in the post-war period; a period when there was great concern that settlements should develop in more sensitive ways than inter-war ribbon and suburban development patterns. The problems of poor quality development, unrelated to settlement form, was to continue to stimulate books such as Lionel Brett’s Landscape in Distress and campaigns from the Architectural Review. Reading the text today it still has much to offer: while some of its assumptions about the level of services a village might support clearly belong to another era, its beautiful and simple typological analyses of village form continue to be of relevance.

This ultimate renovation guide identifies hundreds of parts of a house to help home owners understand the elements of construction, decorative detail and convey ideas to suppliers, contractors, or designers. B & W illustrations throughout.

A key book for the golfer's library, exploring the intricacies of golf architecture--and how this knowledge can improve your golf game.