The prize-winning scholar's "expert, holistic, down-to-earth guide" to the beauty and function of architecture ( Booklist , starred review).We spend most of our days and nights in buildings. They are the setting of our everyday lives as well as a public art form. Yet architecture remains a mystery to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, a renowned critic and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize f...

In City Life, Witold Rybczynski, bestselling author of Now I Sit Me Down, looks at what we want from cities, how they have evolved, and what accounts for their unique identities. In this vivid description of everything from the early colonial settlements to the advent of the skyscraper to the changes wrought by the automobile, the telephone, the airplane, and telecommuting, Rybczynski reveals how our urban spaces have been shaped by the landscapes and lif...

The Best Tool of the MillenniumThe seeds of Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying "the best tool of the millennium." The award-winning author of Home, A Clearing in the Distance, and Now I Sit Me Down, Rybczynski once built a house using only hand tools. His intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- serve...

A deep exploration of modern life that examines our cities, public places, and homes.Following How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski casts a seasoned critical eye over the modern scene with Mysteries of the Mall. His subject is nothing less than the broad setting of our metropolitan world.In thirty-five discerning essays, Rybczynski ranges over subjects as varied as shopping malls, Central Park, the Paris opera house, and America's shrin...

"Palladio is the Bible," Thomas Jefferson once said. "You should get it and stick to it." With his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, Andrea Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form during the late sixteenth century -- and his influence is still evident in the ample porches, columned porticoes, grand ceilings, and front-door pediments of America today.In The Perfect House, bestselling author Witold Rybczynski, whose previous bo...

In this new work, prizewinning author, professor, and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski returns to the territory he knows best: writing about the way people live, just as he did in the acclaimed bestsellers Home and A Clearing in the Distance. In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique.

**“[A] compact epic.… Brisk, lucid and enjoyable.” —Richard Snow, Wall Street JournalThe renowned design writer on the extraordinary history of car design.**In this lively and entertaining work, Witold Rybczynski—hailed as “one of the best writers on design working today” by Publishers Weekly—tells the story of the most distinctive cars in history and the artists, engineers, dreamers, and gearheads who created them. Delving into more than 170 years of inge...

An inviting exploration of architecture across cultures and centuries by one of the field’s eminent authorsIn this sweeping history, from the Stone Age to the present day, Witold Rybczynski shows how architectural ideals have been affected by technological, economic, and social changes—and by changes in taste. The host of examples ranges from places of worship such as Hagia Sophia and Brunelleschi’s Duomo to living spaces such as the Katsura Imperial Villa and the ...

A study of the life, work, and extraordinary influence of an innovative architectAlbert Simons came of age during the vibrant years of the Charleston Renaissance in the early twentieth century. His influential social circle included artists, musicians, writers, historians, and preservationists, many supporting the cultural revival that was reshaping the city. Through his architectural design and passion for preservation, Simons contributed tremendously to the cultu...

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Home and City Life, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of...

Have you ever wondered where rocking chairs came from, or why cheap plastic chairs are suddenly everywhere?In Now I Sit Me Down, the distinguished architect and writer Witold Rybczynski chronicles the history of the chair from the folding stools of pharaonic Egypt to the ubiquitous stackable monobloc chairs of today. He tells the stories of the inventor of the bentwood chair, Michael Thonet, and of the creators of the first molded-plywood chair, Charles and Ray Eames. He re...

In Last Harvest, the award-winning author of Home and A Clearing in the Distance tells the compelling story of New Daleville, a brand-new residential subdivision in rural Pennsylvania. When Witold Rybczynski first heard about New Daleville, it was only a developer's idea, attached to ninety acres of cornfield an hour and a half west of Philadelphia. Over the course of five years, Rybczynski met everyone involved in the transformation of this land...