Building Types and Built Forms weaves two books together in alternating chapters: one about the history of building types, the other about their geometry. The first book follows the histories of some common types of building: houses, hospitals, schools, offices and prisons. Examples are drawn from the 19th and early 20th centuries in France, America and Britain, with the central focus on London. They include the 'pavilion hospitals' associated with the name of Florence Nightingale, English Board and Modernist schools of the 1920s and 30s, tall office buildings in Chicago and New York, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon penitentiary, and 'radial prisons' on the model of Cherry Hill and Pentonville. The second book takes these histories and uses them to explore how the forms of these buildings are constrained by some of the basic functions of architecture: to provide daylight and ventilation to the interior, to provide access to all rooms, or to allow occupants to see from one part of a building to another. A new way of thinking about these 'worlds of geometrical possibility' is introduced, in which the forms of many buildings can be catalogued and laid out systematically in 'morphospaces', or theoretical spaces of forms. As building types change over time, they come to occupy different positions within the worlds of possible forms. Building Types and Built Forms is filled with over 400 illustrations, many drawn especially for the book. It offers a new theoretical approach, combined with a series of historical accounts of building types, some well known, some less familiar. It should appeal to academics, practitioners, historians and students of architecture.

A superb visual reference to the principles of architecture Now including interactive CD-ROM! For more than thirty years, the beautifully illustrated Architecture: Form, Space, and Order has been the classic introduction to the basic vocabulary of architectural design. The updated Third Edition features expanded sections on circulation, light, views, and site context, along with new considerations of environmental factors, building codes, and contemporary examples of form, space, and order. This classic visual reference helps both students and practicing architects understand the basic vocabulary of architectural design by examining how form and space are ordered in the built environment.? Using his trademark meticulous drawing, Professor Ching shows the relationship between fundamental elements of architecture through the ages and across cultural boundaries. By looking at these seminal ideas, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order encourages the reader to look critically at the built environment and promotes a more evocative understanding of architecture. In addition to updates to content and many of the illustrations, this new edition includes a companion CD-ROM that brings the book's architectural concepts to life through three-dimensional models and animations created by Professor Ching.

An ideal design is site-specific, which is the only way architecture can create or connect with a specific sense of identity. This requires addressing the structural and local circumstances. This method handbook offers a playful way in which to systematically ascertain a complex framework and use it for your own design. The "9 x 9 method" takes all relevant factors and their alternate interaction into consideration: location, structure, shell, program, and materiality, all which, in a matrix with various intersections, produce exactly 9 "fields of action" for the design. The individual "fields" are not only illustrated visually with meaningful and eidetic pictures, but are also discussed in texts by leading specialists. For this book, the "9 x 9 method" was completely re-worked and redesigned. Authors: Florian Aicher, Jia Beisi, Adam Caruso, Dietmar Eberle, Franziska Hauser, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Michele Lanza, Arno Lederer, Silvain Malfroy, Adrian Meyer, Marcello Nasso, Fritz Neumeyer, András Pálffy, Miroslav Šik, Laurent Stalder, Eberhard Tröger.

This is a digitally reprinted edition of Urban Space and Structures, first published in 1972. This first volume in the Cambridge Urban and Architectural Studies series is a compilation outlining the growth of a particular line of research work which was taking place at the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies in Cambridge at the time. It attempted to understand some of the factors which, at a theoretical level, condition the range of choices that are available, whether in a building, the nodal point in a city or the complete urban system.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

Framing Places investigates how the built forms of architecture and urban design act as mediators of social practices of power. It is an account of how our lives are "framed" within the clusters of rooms, streets and cities we inhabit.

In recent years, questions of space have gained renewed momentum inarchitecture and urban design, as adaptation, densification andsustainable regeneration have become an increasing priority. Whilemost computing-based design tends to emphasise the formal aspectsof architecture, overlooking space and its users, the‘original’ computational design approaches firstspearheaded in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s tended to be focusedon behavioural and occupational patterns. Over the last decade, anew generation of design research has emerged that has started toimplement and validate previous investigations into spatialcomputation, aiming to understand how to design spatialconfigurations based on user experiences. This revives an interestin the experiential that was first explored in the early 20thcentury by German and Nordic organic architects, who inventeddesign methods that correlated cognitive responses of buildings'occupants to spatial structure. The current revival ofhuman-centric design, however, represents the first design approachthat synthesises spatial design and algorithmic techniques withorganic design thinking, which could also be regarded as a returnto the ‘first principles' of architectural design. Contributors include: Paul Coates, Christian Derix, Olafur Eliasson, Lucy Helme, BillHillier, Åsmund Izaki, Prarthana Jagannath, Dan Montello,Juhani Pallasmaa, Philip Steadman and Guy Theraulaz. Featured Architects/Designers: Jussi Ängeslevä (Art+Com), Stan Allen, Aedas|R&D,Markus Braach (Kaisersrot), Hermann Hertzberger, Kazuhiro Kojima(Cat), Pablo Miranda and Rafi Segal.