About this item
An essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday livesWe spend most of our days and nights in buildings living and working and sometimes playing Buildings often overawe us with their beauty Architecture is both setting for our everyday lives and public art form--but it remains mysterious to most of us 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 detail--of a stair balustrade for instance--can 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 DC 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 Architecture if it is any good speaks to all of us Rybczynski writes This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.
About the Author
Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed book Home and the award-winning A Clearing in the Distance. His latest book is The Biography of a Building. The recipient of the National Building Museum's 2007 Vincent Scully Prize, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Read his blog at http://www.witoldrybczynski.com.
