What does a collective process in architecture entail and how does it influence the planning of our built environment? Although the hierarchically organized office with its claim to individual authorship is still the dominant form of architecture firm, more and more horizontally organized collectives with alternative approaches to architectural planning are emerging. In this insightful survey of renowned European collectives, Natalie Donat-Cattin offers an overview of their working methods, organizational forms, goals, and projects. The book includes statements and projects by: A-A Collective, (ab)Normal, Assemble, baukuh, CNCRT, Colectivo Warehouse, Collectif Etc, constructLab, false mirror office, Fosbury Architecture, la-clique, Lacol, n'UNDO, orizzontale, raumlabor, X=(T=E=N), and Zuloark.

Available again in paperback, this first survey of building types ever written remains an essential guide to vital and often overlooked features of the architectural and social inheritance of the West. Here Nikolaus Pevsner shares his immense erudition and keenly discerning eye with readers curious about the ways in which architecture reflects the character of society. He describes twenty types of buildings ranging from the most monumental to the least, from the most ideal to the most utilitarian. More than seven hundred illustrations illuminate the text. Both Europe and America have been covered with examples chosen largely from the nineteenth century, the crucial period for diversification. Included are national monuments, libraries, theaters, hospitals, prisons, factories, hotels, and many other public buildings; churches and private dwellings have been excluded for practical reasons. The author is concerned not only with the evolution of each type in response to social and architectural change, but also with differing attitudes toward function, materials, and style.

Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Göttingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and champion of Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing range, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of 14 for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart).Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind.Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself. He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the rigour of German scholarship, he became an Everyman in his copious commissions, publications, broadcasts and lectures on art, architecture, design, education, town planning, social housing, conservation, Mannerism, the Bauhaus, the Victorians, Zeitgeist, Englishness and how a nation's character may, or must, be reflected in its art. His life - as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history - illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.

A previously unpublished work by Nikolaus Pevsner, much of which was published as journal articles in the Architectural Review in the 1940s and 1950s during Pevsner's term as editor.

A classic examination of superb design through the centuries. Widely regarded as a classic in the field, Experiencing Architecture explores the history and promise of good design. Generously illustrated with historical examples of designing excellence—ranging from teacups, riding boots, and golf balls to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of Beijing's Winter Palace—Rasmussen's accessible guide invites us to appreciate architecture not only as a profession, but as an art that shapes everyday experience. In the past, Rasmussen argues, architecture was not just an individual pursuit, but a community undertaking. Dwellings were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use, resulting in “a remarkably suitable comeliness.” While we cannot return to a former age, Rasmussen notes, we can still design spaces that are beautiful and useful by seeking to understand architecture as an art form that must be experienced. An understanding of good design comes not only from one's professional experience of architecture as an abstract, individual pursuit, but also from one's shared, everyday experience of architecture in real time—its particular use of light, color, shape, scale, texture, rhythm and sound. Experiencing Architecture reminds us of what good architectural design has accomplished over time, what it can accomplish still, and why it is worth pursuing. Wide-ranging and approachable, it is for anyone who has ever wondered “what instrument the architect plays on.”