How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit

$27.00

Rybczynski, Witold. How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013

SKU 96705

In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, one of our best, most stylish critics and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his architectural writing, answers our most fundamental questions about how good and not-so-good buildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, he takes us behind the scenes, revealing how architects as different as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Robert A. M. Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to read plans, how buildings respond to their settings, and how the smallest detailof a stair balustrade, for instancecan convey an architects vision. Ranging widely from a war memorial in London to an opera house in St. Petersburg, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to a famous architects private retreat in downtown Princeton, How Architecture Works, explains the central elements that make up good building design. It is an enlightening humanists toolkit for thinking about the built environment and seeing it afresh.

368 pp. Cl.