Архитектура

A compact overview of one of the world's greatest architect

Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) was not only influenced by the landscape of his native country, but by the political struggle over Finland's place within European culture. After early neoclassical buildings, Alvar Aalto turned to ideas based on Functionalism, subsequently moving toward more organic structures, with brick and wood replacing plaster and steel. In addition to designing buildings, furniture, lamps, and glass objects with his wife Aino, he painted and was an avid traveller. A firm believer that buildings have a crucial role in shaping society, Aalto once said, "The duty of the architect is to give life a more sensitive structure."

About the Series:

Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture Series features:

- approximately 120 images, including photographs, sketches, drawings, and floor plans
- introductory essays exploring the architect's life and work, touching on family and background as well as collaborations with other architects
- the most important works presented in chronological order, with descriptions of client and/or architect wishes as well as construction problems and resolutions
-an appendix including a list of complete or selected works, biography, bibliography, and a map indicating the locations of the architect's most famous buildings

The Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza is one of the world’s most respected architects. The recipient of many awards, including the US Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1992, Siza has built and taught in Portugal and internationally since the late 1950s. This monograph is a comprehensive study of Siza’s work, from his early built work – the Boa Nova Tea House, Portugal (1958–63) – to his latest projects. Siza has received critical acclaim for works in Germany (Schlesisches Tor, Berlin), Spain (Galician Centre of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela), Italy (restoration of the Campo di Marte, Venice) and Portugal (Portuguese Pavilion at Expo ’98, Lisbon). His projects have been exhibited widely. Siza’s architecture is vigorous and coherent – able to respond to the environment without detracting from its functional and stylistic identity. The book charts over forty years of work and includes built works, projects, writings, photographs, drawings and many of Siza’s sketches. An introduction by Kenneth Frampton describes the works’ evolution, while writings by Siza are interspersed throughout the book, offering a unique personal perspective to his work and to twentieth-century architecture as a whole.

Complex simplicity. The seminal book on Portugal's master architec

When Álvaro Siza, one of the great figures of contemporary architecture, won the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1992, the Jury described his forms as “molded by light, [with] a deceptive simplicity about them; they are honest. They solve design problems directly…. That simplicity, upon closer examination however, is revealed as great complexity. There is a subtle mastery underlying what appears to be natural creations.”

Born in Matosinhos, Portugal, in 1933, Siza created his own practice in Porto in 1954, and he has been a Professor of Construction at the University of Porto since 1976. The architect can fill shelf afer shelf with his awards and prizes to-date: He received the European Community’s Mies van der Rohe Prize in 1988 and the Praemium Imperiale in Japan in 1997, the 2009 RIBA Gold Medal, and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.

He has built a large number of projects in Portugal, and worked on the restructuring of the Chiado area of Lisbon following a devastating fire in 1988. Siza designed both the Portuguese Pavilion for the 1998 Lisbon World’s Fair and the 2005 Serpentine Pavilion in London in collaboration with Eduardo Souto de Moura. He completed the Serralves Foundation in Porto, 1998, and the Museum for the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2008.

As for all previous TASCHEN architect’s monographs, this book was realized in close collaboration with the architect and includes a full catalogue of his work to date.

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The author:

Philip Jodidio (born 1954) studied art history and economics at Harvard, and edited Connaissance des Arts for over 20 years. His books include TASCHEN’s Architecture Now! series, and monographs on Tadao Ando, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, and Zaha Hadid. He is internationally renowned as one of the most popular writers on the subject of architecture.

This is a monograph on celebrated interior design firm Ricky C T Wong Design. It features 24 recent projects Ricky and Simon Chong live by the philosophy, 'Ambience is a passion that cannot be expressed, but experienced'. They regard it as something surpassing physical beauty, an indulgence that delivers unique vitality, stimulation, and spiritual aestheticism to an interior space. It is the concerted coordination of the whole interior environment: the harmony between spatial proportion, illumination, materials and colours that attains a peak of artistic sensation with which to stimulate people's passions and sublime responses. This powerful ambience is demonstrated in projects including clubhouses, flats, houses and retail spaces.

‘As good a treatment of this subject as one could ever hope for’ – Los Angeles Times

After its initial explosion in mid-1920s Europe, American designers began to make their own contribution to the style of Art Deco. Most of the important buildings of the 1930s were embellished with Art Deco ornamentation — from the Oviatt Building in Los Angeles to New York’s romantic Chrysler Building. The style was adopted in Hollywood and Art Deco became part of the background of ordinary people.

A dynamic American tradition developed in virtually all the applied arts, as demonstrated by the dazzling illustrations in this book. In chapters covering subjects such as furniture, silverware, glass, architecture, sculpture and painting, jewelry and world fairs, Alastair Duncan explores this wide and exuberant subject, reassessing the work of such gifted artists as Donald Deskey, Paul Manship, Gilbert Rohde, Walter von Nessen, and many others whose vision helped to transform American art and design.

A lavishly illustrated survey of American Art Deco architecture.

Art deco architecture flourished in large cities and small towns throughout America in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the best examples office buildings, movie theaters, hotels, and churches are still in use. Deco architects, artists, and designers drew on European styles but were most committed to a style that grew organically, as they saw it, from their native soil. Two themes bound Deco buildings and their decorative schemes together: a regional pride that tied buildings to their specific locales and functions, and a growing national symbolism that asserted the buildings' identity as uniquely, independently American.

American Art Deco features description sand over 500 color photographs of seventy-five lavish and innovatively designed buildings across the country that have been preserved both outside and in, giving the full scope of this beloved, exciting style.

In a career that spanned the first half of this century, Philip Trammell Shutze produced over 750 architectural works. Because his production was so large, this first book to examine his buildings concentrates on the more important ones, which as a body represent an architectural achievement of a very high order of refinement, grace, and beauty.

Although Shutze practiced from 1912 to 1968, covering the period of the ascendancy of modernism through its final triumph, he remained a firmly committed classicist, practicing out of an office in Atlanta where he produced an extraordinary body of monumental commercial and institutional buildings and country villas.

After graduating from Georgia Tech, Shutze stayed a year at Columbia University before he won the prestigious Rome Prize in 1915. Travelling to Rome later that year, he became a member of one of the earliest classes of fellows to occupy the recently completed American Academy on the Janiculum overlooking the city. The magnificent palazzo designed by America's most renowned architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, did not, however, please the fellows, who found it "too new," and therefore not authentic (Shutze would later devote much attention to techniques for instantly aging building facades).

With the coming of the First World War, Shutze and most of his classmates stayed in Rome as Red Cross volunteers, but when the war was over they returned to the Academy and to their studies. During his five years in Rome, Shutze immersed himself in learning everything he could about the great buildings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He painstakingly measured those buildings as well as the monuments of the Roman Empire, committing the smallest of details to paper and to memory.

Returning to the U.S. in 1920, Shutze worked in New York for Mott Schmidt, who designed townhouses for such families as the Astors, Morgans, and Vanderbilts, and he also worked for F. Burrall Hoffman, whose masterpiece is Villa Vizcaya in Miami. Within a few years, though, he returned to Georgia where he remained as the epitome of the "gentleman architect," designing some of the most beautiful buildings ever to grace the American landscape.

Interior designer and decorative arts and antiques expert Thomas Jayne follows up his essential 2010 compendium The Finest Rooms in America with this new collection of his own work.

Thomas Jayne possesses a unique dual vision—he keeps one eye focused on the aesthetic traditions of the past, and the other looking forward: innovating, creating, and imagining interiors to suit modern sensibilities. His reverence for traditional ideas does not restrict Jayne’s understanding of what makes a beautiful room—rather than seeking to replicate and repeat the exact décor from past, Jayne finds inspiration in the distinctive histories of the spaces in which he works. In every project he undertakes, he draws on his rich academic background in the decorative arts to design interiors that harmonize with their historical settings, yet also connect intimately to the active and modern lives of families who call these remarkable buildings home.

Jayne believes that American interior decoration is unique in its combination of elements from European and Asian cultural traditions with indigenous ideas and materials, in its emphasis on comfort and livability, and in its human scale. Presented here for the first time, his projects reflect this sensibility, drawing from established traditions and reinterpreting them for contemporary life. Drawing on the legacies of Albert Hadley and Sister Parish, Jayne insists on authenticity and comfort, incorporating elegant antiques and art with a subtle but warm palette and a welcoming setting.

In this richly illustrated collection of both city and country residences, Jayne reveals the inspiration and thought behind each design, identifying elements from the architecture, the clients’ collections of art and antiques, and from the site itself that serves as the basis for the decoration of the rooms.

American Fashion Designers at Home offers an intimate look into the private quarters of more than 100 members of the Council of Fashion Designers of America - from the classic elegance of Carolina Herrera's Louis XV–influenced New York apartment to the pink-mirrored, flower-filled flat of Betsey Johnson. This collectible, one-of-a-kind sneak peek into the lives of CFDA stars reveals that fashion’s most creative minds also take their work home them.

Rima Suqi has been described as having “shopping in her soul,” however she is much more than just shopping. She’s a self-proclaimed “numbers junkie” who – through key relationships with retailers and designers – has developed a keen understanding of the business behind retail. She knows it’s not enough to be a pretty product; it’s got to be a product that sells. For this reason, companies large and small have sought out this trend expert to help brand themselves, name their products, write press releases, brochures, catalogs and advertising copy. Television producers love her natural on-camera style and often book her for lifestyle segments on everything from travel to fashion trends; she also hosts in-store events, product launches and shopping tours on request. A contributing writer for Alef and Organic Spa magazines, Suqi writes “Best Bets” for New York Magazine’s online edition, has authored three style books and and regularly writes for national magazines.

Anne Fairfax and Richard Sammons are at the forefront of a movement among architects today who draw inspiration from the wellspring of the classical traditions in architecture. 

They have developed a body of work that reflects and adheres to the long-held theories of proportion and order passed down through many past generations of scholarship and practice. The firm's office also served as the headquarters for Henry Hope Reid's Classical America, the only organization offering an alternative to modernist aesthetics until the establishment of the Institute of Classical Architecture in 1992. 

The twenty-four projects in this volume show the firm's consistent focus on classical architectural beauty, whether the chosen style be Palladian, Tuscan, Mediterranean, Georgian, Adamesque, Neo-classical, British or Dutch Colonial, Colonial Revival, or even East Coast Shingle Style, in all of which Fairfax & Sammons are eminently proficient. 

The projects selected out of the firm's large body of work include country houses located in Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Florida, including the renovation of townhouses and apartments in New York City — all presented in new color photography.

About the Author:

Mary Miers is Architectural Writer for the London-based journal Country Life. She lives in London and Scotland. Adele Chatfield-Taylor is president of the American Academy in Rome. She lives in New York City.

Designer and merchant, collector and tastemaker, Thomas O’Brien has made a career of translating cool notions of modernism into an easy and generous array of modern styles that anyone can attain. Now he introduces readers to a range of those styles - from casual to formal, vintage to urban - alongside stunning photography and charming design stories.

O’Brien carefully describes the design process of his chosen projects, including a downtown New York City loft, a traditional Connecticut estate, and a converted schoolhouse in eastern Long Island. Each home explores a view on the modern design spectrum he has created, as well as the individual choices that make the design unique and its mix essentially American. He explains not only what was at work to create a given style, but how readers can import those practices to their own homes and personal design sensibilities. Important design principles such as architectural authenticity, color relationships, correctness of scale, and informed collecting are threaded through a practical narrative that reads like a master class in interior design.

American Modern is an inspiring design volume that will redefine the way readers think about modern interiors.

About the Author:

Thomas O’Brien is an interior and home furnishings designer based in New York City. He is the founder and president of Aero Studios, one of America’s most respected design firms, and is the author of Library House and Aero.