Sunday, August 9, 2009

Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighbourhoods


Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighbourhoods

Description
The city is more than just a sum of its buildings; it is the sum of its communities. The most successful urban communities are very often those that are the most diverse - in terms of income, age, family structure and ethnicity - and yet poor urban design and planning can stifle the very diversity that makes communities successful.

Just as poor urban design can lead to sterile monoculture, successful planning can support the conditions needed for diverse communities. Emily Talen explores the linkage between urban forms and social diversity, and how one impacts the other. Learning the lessons from past successes and failures, and building from detailed case studies of different neighborhoods, Design for Diversity provides urban designers and architects with design strategies and tools to ensure that their work sustains and nurtures social diversity.

* Explores the link between urban form and social diversity
* Based on detailed studies of socially diverse neighbourhoods in cities
* Outlines urban design strategies to support diverse communities

Building Type Basics for Museums

Building Type Basics for Museums

  • Hardcover: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Wiley (January 1, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0471349151
  • ISBN-13: 978-0471349150


Description
The fastest way to straighten out the learning curve on specialized design projects. Building Type Basics books provide architects with the essentials they need to jump-start the design of a variety of specialized facilities. In each volume, leading national figures in the field address the key questions that shape the early phases of a project commission. The answers to these questions provide instant information in a convenient, easy-to-use format. The result is an excellent, hands-on reference that puts critical information at your fingertips.Building Type Basics for Museums provides the essential information needed to initiate designs for art, science, and natural history museums, ethnic art and cultural centers, youth museums, and more. Filled with project photographs, diagrams, floor plans, sections, and details, it combines in-depth coverage of the structural, mechanical, acoustic, traffic, and safety issues that are unique to museums and cultural facilities with the nuts-and-bolts design guidelines that will start any project off on the right track and keep it there through completion.

From the Inside Flap
Tremendous opportunities are opening up as architecture becomes more generalized and firms accept commissions for a widening range of building types. To take advantage of these opportunities, architects need instant information on the general issues, materials, systems, requirements, and general design guidelines associated with different types of structures. Building Type Basics books fulfill this need.

Building Type Basics for Museums is a one-stop source for the essential information architects need to fast-start the design process. In this book, author Arthur Rosenblatt draws upon the expertise of leading architects from around the world to present all aspects of museum and cultural facility design. This book provides critical information on the process, potential problems, design concerns, and recent trends in museum and cultural facility design, along with complete coverage of energy issues, mechanical systems, and structural concerns as well as acoustic control, lighting, internal traffic, security, and other important topics. This indispensable guide:

  • Asks and answers twenty questions that frequently arise in the early phases of a project commission
  • Provides project photographs, diagrams, floor plans, sections, and details
  • Includes guidelines for art, science, and natural history museums; ethnic art and cultural centers; and more

This conveniently organized quick reference is an invaluable guide for busy, dedicated professionals who want to get moving quickly as they embark on a new project. Like every Building Type Basics book, it provides authoritative, up-to-date information instantly and saves architects countless hours of research. Engineering consultants will also find a wealth of information to help them tackle museum commissions of all kinds.


Building Acoustics

Building Acoustics



ARCHI SPEAK

Archispeak: An Illustrated Guide to Architectural Design Terms

Description
Widely used in architectural circles in the heat of discussion, the recurrent use of particular words and terms has evolved a language of design jargon. Commonly found in architectural literature and journalism, in critical design debate and especially in student project reviews, Archispeak can seem insular and perplexing to others and -- particularly to the new architectural student -- often incomprehensible.

There is a need to translate architectural design concepts into spoken and written commentary -- each word in use embodying a precise and universally accepted architectural meaning. If we explore the vocabulary of this language we gain insight to design good practice and to collective understanding of what constitutes a refined architecture. This unique illustrated guide will help students understand the nuances of this specialized language and help them in communicating their own design ideas.

Architectural Design - New Health Facilities

New Health Facilities (Architectural Design (Links))

Description
Hospitals and health centers are a unique category of architecture with clearly defined characteristics. Health architecture must offer imaginative, constructive responses and flexible solutions to the problem raised by this special type of facility: planning, budgets and space as well as the idiosyncrasies arising from each particular field of health. New Health Facilities presents the best examples of health architecture constructed in recent years and each of the architects demonstrates a solid understanding of the need to create new and better health facilities.

Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body



Description
In this book, David Farrell Krell challenges contemporary and traditional theories of architecture with archeticture--spelling it new, by design. The thesis of the book is that the heart of the word architecture, the Greek root tec-, can be traced back to an earlier and more pervasive root, tic-. The verb tiktein means "to love," "to engender," "to reproduce. " In the course of Western history, however, that older root disappeared under the debris of discarded techniques, technologies, architectonics, and architectures, all of them insisting on technical mastery, technological power, and architectonic solidarity. Yet what would happen to the confidence we place in technique if we realized that its dominion is based on a kind of oblivion--an oblivion of the materials, places, situations, and human bodies that not even the mightiest technician can thoroughly dominate, but that he or she must love?

The opening chapter of Archeticture proposes a new reading of Plato's Timaeus, the seminal work in Western philosophy on the architecture of the universe and the human body. It pays close attention to the figures of Chaos, Necessity, and khora in Timaeus, arguing that the Demiurge is less a divine craftsman or technician than a lover and a father--admittedly, a father of an awkward and forgetful sort. Among the things the Demiurge forgets to acknowledge are the elements, spaces, and places, the materiality and the spatiality, in which he finds himself--but which he does not master. Chapter 2 moves from Plato to the modern and contemporary philosophers Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. It sees in the projects of these thinkers a growing liberation of choric space from time, culminating in an ecstatic interpretation of human spatiality. Yet ecstatic spatiality is anything but familiar; it is essentially unhomelike and uncanny. Chapter 3 offers a series of archetictural sections--as opposed to architectural plans or elevations--of Freud and Heidegger on the theme of the uncanny and unhomelike, das Unheimliche. The fourth and final chapter turns to three recent thinkers who, in very different ways, introduce uncanny human bodies into unhomelike spaces: Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, and Irigaray.