The phrase, ""the Culture of Death"", is bandied about as a catch-all term that covers abortion, euthanasia and other attacks on the sanctity of life. In Architects of the Culture of Death, authors Donald DeMarco and Benjamin Wiker expose the Culture of Death as an intentional and malevolent ideology promoted by influential thinkers who specifically attack Christian morality's core belief in the sanctity of human life and the existence of man's immortal soul. In scholarly, yet reader-friendly prose, DeMarco and Wiker examine the roots of the Culture of Death by introducing 23 of its architects, including Ayn Rand, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, Jack Kevorkian, and Peter Singer. Still, this is not a book without hope. If the Culture of Death rests on a fragmented view of the person and an eclipse of God, the future of the Culture of Life relies on an understanding and restoration of the human being as a person, and the rediscovery of a benevolent God. The personalism of John Paul II is an illuminating thread that runs through Architects, serving as a hopeful antidote.

The definitive monograph on Swedish modernist architect Sigurd Lewerentz. Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975) is one of the most highly revered--as well as one of the most heavily mythologized--protagonists of modern European architecture. Arguably Sweden's most distinguished modernist, he is more influential for architects around the world today than he was during his lifetime. Countless architecture lovers from around the world visit his buildings. Stockholm's woodland cemetery Skogskyrkogården, his most significant contribution to landscape design, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This authoritative new monograph on Sigurd Lewerentz is based on extensive research undertaken at ArkDes, Sweden's national center for architecture and design, where his archive and personal library are kept. It features a wealth of drawings and sketches, designs for furniture and interiors, model photographs, and more from his estate, most of which are published here for the first time, alongside new photographs of his realized buildings. Essays by leading experts explore Lewerentz's life and work, his legacy, and lasting significance from a contemporary perspective. This substantial, beautifully designed book offers the most comprehensive survey to date of Lewerentz's achievements in all fields of his multifaceted work.

The Death of Drawing explores the causes and effects of the epochal shift from drawing to computation as the chief design and communication medium in architecture. Drawing both framed the thinking of architects and organized the design and construction process to place architects at its center. Its displacement by building information modeling (BIM) and computational design recasts both the terms in which architects think and their role in building production. Author David Ross Scheer explains that, whereas drawing allowed architects to represent ideas in form, BIM and computational design simulate experience, making building behavior or performance the primary object of design. The author explores many ways in which this displacement is affecting architecture: the dominance of performance criteria in the evaluation of design decisions; the blurring of the separation of design and construction; the undermining of architects’ authority over their projects by automated information sharing; the elimination of the human body as the common foundation of design and experience; the transformation of the meaning of geometry when it is performed by computers; the changing nature of design when it requires computation or is done by a digitally-enabled collaboration. Throughout the book, Scheer examines both the theoretical bases and the practical consequences of these changes. The Death of Drawing is a clear-eyed account of the reasons for and consequences of the displacement of drawing by computational media in architecture. Its aim is to give architects the ability to assess the impact of digital media on their own work and to see both the challenges and opportunities of this historic moment in the history of their discipline.

Rudolf Hoss has been called the greatest mass murderer in history. As the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, he supervised the killing of more than 1.1 million people. Unlike many of his Nazi colleagues who denied either knowing about or participating in the Holocaust, Hoss remorselessly admitted, both at the Nuremberg war crimes trial and in his memoirs, that he sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers, frankly describing the killing process. His "innovations" included the use of hydrogen cyanide (derived from the pesticide Zyklon B) in the camp's gas chambers. Hoss lent his name to the 1944 operation that gassed 430,000 Hungarian Jews in 56 days, exceeding the capacity of the Auschwitz's crematoria. This biography follows Hoss throughout his life, from his childhood through his Nazi command and eventual reckoning at Nuremberg. Using historical records and Hoss' autobiography, it explores the life and mind of one of history's most notorious and sadistic individuals.

In the eighteenth century Paris underwent a remarkable transformation in Western attitudes about life and death. The Architecture of Death traces this change through six pivotal decades, and analyzes the intellectual and social concerns that led to the establishment of a new kind of urban institution - the municipal cemetery. Drawing heavily on new materials and archival sources, supported by nearly 270 plans, photographs, and drawings, the book is not only a definitive work on the design of cemeteries but is also the cultural history of an age.

This is a study of buildings created to honour the dead. It explores the links between socio-religious and existential perceptions of death and how this has been interpreted in architecture over the 20th century.

Ultimately this would lead to the sinister 'adjusting' of the ratio between what were perceived as 'productive' and 'unproductive' population groups.".