A deeply personal memoir from one of Canada’s most celebrated architects.In this personal account of A.J. Diamond’s life and work, he shares how he came to be the founder of the leading architecture firm Diamond Schmitt, one of Canada’s most successful architecture companies. He also explains his principles of design, which at their core are about making a positive impact in the world, considering the needs of the content, client, and context. Diamond gives insight...

Vivienne Westwood began Get A Life, her online diary, in 2010 with an impassioned post about Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Since then, she has written two or three entries each month, discussing her life in fashion and her involvement with art, politics and the environment.Reading Vivienne's thoughts, in her own words, is as fascinating and provocative as you would expect from Britain's punk dame - a woman who always says exactly what she believes. And what a l...

Landscape architecture plays an important role in shaping the places in which we live and work. But what is it? Landscape architects are involved, amongst other things, in the layout of business parks, the reclamation of derelict industrial sites, the restoration of historic city parks, and the siting and design of major pieces of infrastructure such as motorways, dams, power stations, and flood defences, as well as the planning of parks and gardens. Taking a historical perspective, Ian Th...

The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the cityWe live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in the twenty-first century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious elements of design, whether of buildings or of space. Erudite and entertaining, he considers...

For the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - are now living in cities. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world's population were urbanites, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for about 1000 years. By 2030, 60 per cent of us will be urban dwellers.City is the ultimate handbook for the archetypal city and contains main sections on 'History', 'Customs and Language', ...

"An excellent and novel exploration of key ideas behind city spaces and the behaviors they engender." — Wall Street JournalFrom the acclaimed landscape designer, historian and author of American Eden, a lively, unique, and accessible cultural history of modern cities.Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the sto...

A groundbreaking history of architecture told through the relationship between buildings and energyThe story of architecture is the story of humanity. The buildings we live in, from the humblest pre-historic huts to today's skyscrapers, reveal our priorities and ambitions, our family structures and power structures. And to an extent that hasn't been explored until now, architecture has been shaped in every era by our access to energy, from fire to farming to fossil...

One of the world’s greatest and most thoughtful architects recounts his extraordinary career and the iconic structures he has built—from Habitat in Montreal to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore—and offers a manifesto for the role architecture should play in societyOver more than five decades, legendary architect Moshe Safdie has built some of the world’s most influential and memorable structures—from the 1967 modular housing scheme in Montreal known as “Habitat” and th...

In an era of brash, expensive, provocative new buildings, a prominent critic argues that emotions—such as hope, power, sex, and our changing relationship to the idea of home—are the most powerful force behind architecture, yesterday and (especially) today.We are living in the most dramatic period in architectural history in more than half a century: a time when cityscapes are being redrawn on a yearly basis, architects are testing the very idea of what a building is, and whole citi...

This insightful title explores children’s relationship with and understanding of architecture and its impact on their world.Children are rarely introduced properly to architecture, but there are in fact few subjects more important—because the quality of the architecture that surrounds us has such an impact on our mood and sense of well-being.The bitter truth is that in modern times we’ve built a world that’s far too often ugly or charmless—and we’ve done so...

In mid-career, Michael Frayn took up his old trade of journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the Observer about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe 'not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday', and his accounts became the starting point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later.From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950...

Do you love the Eurovision song contest? Do you hold a Eurovision party every year? Or do you just want to discover more about the world's premier music competition? If so, you'll love this fantastic eBook featuring more than 100 facts. From the countries who have won the competition the most to the famed entries who received ‘nul points’; from information about the rules to amazing things about the competition you never would have guessed, this fun fact-filled folio has everything you nee...