This is a practical guide for software developers, and different than other software architecture books. Here's why: It teaches risk-driven architecting. There is no need for meticulous designs when risks are small, nor any excuse for sloppy designs when risks threaten your success. This book describes a way to do just enough architecture. It avoids the one-size-fits-all process tar pit with advice on how to tune your design effort based on the risks you face. It democratizes architecture. This book seeks to make architecture relevant to all software developers. Developers need to understand how to use constraints as guiderails that ensure desired outcomes, and how seemingly small changes can affect a system's properties. It cultivates declarative knowledge. There is a difference between being able to hit a ball and knowing why you are able to hit it, what psychologists refer to as procedural knowledge versus declarative knowledge. This book will make you more aware of what you have been doing and provide names for the concepts. It emphasizes the engineering. This book focuses on the technical parts of software development and what developers do to ensure the system works not job titles or processes. It shows you how to build models and analyze architectures so that you can make principled design tradeoffs. It describes the techniques software designers use to reason about medium to large sized problems and points out where you can learn specialized techniques in more detail. It provides practical advice. Software design decisions influence the architecture and vice versa. The approach in this book embraces drill-down/pop-up behavior by describing models that have various levels of abstraction, from architecture to data structure design.

Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice. At a time when many commentators are noting that alternative and richer approaches to architectural practice are required if the profession is to flourish, this book provides multiple examples from across the globe of how this has been achieved and how it might be achieved in the future. Particularly pertinent in the current economic climate, this book offers the reader new approaches to architectural practice in a changing world. It makes essential reading for any architect, aspiring or practicing.

An important part of the New Deal, the Modernization Credit Plan helped transform urban business districts and small-town commercial strips across 1930s America, but it has since been almost completely forgotten. In Modernizing Main Street, Gabrielle Esperdy uncovers the cultural history of the hundreds of thousands of modernized storefronts that resulted from the little-known federal provision that made billions of dollars available to shop owners who wanted to update their facades. Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes, such as stimulating public consumption, extending the New Deal’s influence, reviving a stagnant construction industry, and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable, woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression, but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces, Esperdy concludes, consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.

Designing Architecture is an indispensable tool to assist both students and young architects in formulating an idea, transforming it into a building, and making effective design decisions. This book promotes integrative and critical thinking in the preliminary design of buildings to inspire creativity, innovation, and design excellence. This compendium of individual wisdom and collective experience offers explicit guidance to students and young professionals on how to approach, analyze, and execute specific tasks; develop and refine a process to facilitate the best possible design projects; and create meaningful architectural form. Here the design process – from orchestrating client participation to finalizing schematic design – is explored and illuminated. The following material is presented to make the book a useful didactic tool for professional development: explicit strategies for doing design rather than simply reviewing principles and precedents creative ideas in approaching and framing problems in design terms specific methods to translate ideas to culturally significant, socially responsive, and environmentally sensitive buildings techniques to integrate all levels of cognition from analysis to epiphany counsel on developing a personalized process for engaging design projects case studies augment the text and chronicle fascinating applications of the design process. The essence of this book lies in an integrated and holistic approach to each unique project as well as fostering curiosity and exploration – a departure from algorithms, easy generalities, or a formula for design. Designing Architecture will inspire readers to elevate the quality of preliminary designs and unravel some of the mystery of creating the most beautiful, responsive, and responsible architectural design possible.

"An eye opener. The subject of homelessness has often been discussed, but no one before has cut such a broad swath through the subject. There is no other book that deals with the architecture of homelessness."—Robert Gutman, author of Architectural Practice: A Critical View "Davis lays out a compelling case for us all, especially designers, to get involved in solutions for the problem of homelessness. He discusses the plight of the homeless in terms that make them real, and his chapter on the costs of homelessness lays out the argument for involvement in very practical terms."—Michael Underhill, Professor, School of Architecture at Arizona State University