Revealing pairings of a chair and a building by each architect—featuring fifty-five stars from Calatrava to Hadid Does an architect’s style always come across, regardless of medium? Pairing great buildings with great chairs by the same architect, Chairs by Architects demonstrates how the defining qualities of a building’s style can also be evident in that architect’s furniture designs. Pieces of furniture, like manifestos, become signatures of architectural style. The fifty-five architects featured here include early modern architectural pioneers such as Otto Wagner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Antoni Gaudí, and Walter Gropius, together with more recent modern masters such as Oscar Niemeyer, Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind. The book contains interviews on Designing (in conversation with David Adjaye), Manufacturing (with David E. Bright, Knoll, Inc.), Selling (with Zeev Aram), Collecting (with Richard Wright), and Preserving (with Susanne Graner, Vitra Design Museum). This is essential reading for everyone concerned with design, architecture, and the relationship between creators and their creations.

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 reveals the history of chairs to be a social history--of different ways of sitting, of changing manners and attitudes, and of varying tastes. The history of chairs is the history of who we are. We learn how the ancient Chinese switched from sitting on the floor to sitting in a chair, and how the iconic chair of Middle America--the Barcalounger--traces its roots back to the Bauhaus. Rybczynski weaves a rich tapestry that draws on art and design history, personal experience, and historical accounts. And he pairs these stories with his own delightful hand-drawn illustrations: colonial rockers and English cabrioles, languorous chaise longues, and no-nonsense ergonomic task chairs--they're all here. The famous Danish furniture designer Hans Wegner once remarked, "A chair is only finished when someone sits in it." As Rybczynski tells it, the way we choose to sit and what we choose to sit on speak volumes about our values, our tastes, and the things we hold dear.

While there are a vast number of books which illustrate contemporary design, almost none shows how they are made or the details of the technology and materials employed. On the contrary, 50 Chairs: Innovations in Design and Materials reveals an amazing collection of machines for seating. Exploded drawings are accompanied by factory-location photographs, many taken especially for this book.

Based on an exhibition created by The Architectural League of New York.

Building a better future locally and globally is the topic of this user's guide written by a diverse collaborative of innovators. "Worldchanging" demonstrates that the means for making a difference lie all around.