Forced to interact with the natural elements that invigorate a built structure and co-determine a building's experiential reality during construction, one ought to keep in mind their brute powers - earth's crushing heaviness, the erratic character of water, air's thermo-dynamic cataclysms, or the dangerous benignity of fire. Affective in a direct way, they act as guiding principles in the process of realization: While the earth targets the foundations, the roof shields from water, the openings control the flow of air, and the walls protect from the gleaming sun.

Published in seminar format, this volume acts as a companion to the CPA Press volume, Water and Fire. It focuses on the astrological elements of earth and air.

Uses myths, legends, images, and ideas from around the world to tell how four basic natural elements have inspired people in the past.

The result of a five-year airborne odyssey across five continents and sixty countries, The Earth from the Air is the bestselling and most popular book of aerial photography ever published. This updated edition of the internationally acclaimed original features an updated text and over 100 breathtaking new photographs. New editorials by such renowned authors as Jane Goodall, Matthieu Ricard and Olivier Blond consider such perpetual issues as agriculture, climate and biodiversity, as well as the latest concerns - refugees, new technologies and environmental movements. A classic of its kind, this book will heighten everyone's awareness of today's urgent ecological issues. Now more than ever, The Earth from the Air stands as a call to action.

The book describes the structure, composition and evolution of the Earth, the main geological processes occurring on it, and how some crucial environmental matters that are amply debated in the media (e.g. pollution, greenhouse effect) can be fully understood by placing them in the holistic context of the system Earth as a whole. It provides basic information on a series of key geological issues, from the structure and composition of the Earth to the large-scale processes that characterize our planet, such as rock alteration and sedimentation, magmatism, geomagnetism, seismicity, plate tectonics, cyclical migration of chemical elements through various Earth reservoirs (Geochemical Cycles), and evolution of the planet from Hadean to present. It intends to reach a wide readership, which is interested in our planet and wish to have a general and comprehensive view of its origin, evolution and activity. Potential readership includes undergraduate and advanced undergraduate students in Geology and other scientific disciplines, and any moderately- to well-educated people interested in the surrounding world and eager to gain a basic knowledge of the Earth and to reach an integrated view of how our planet is working.

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.

This craft book for children shows how to make a waterwheel, paddle-steamer, propeller plane, parachute, windmill, simple pendulum clock, spinning tops, a little hot-air carousel, a hot-air balloon and lots more.