Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavour to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures, emphasises that "sight" and "site" but also "motion" and "emotion" are irrevocably connected. In so doing, Giuliana Bruno touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Message, the film making of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni, the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, and her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

Plastic Emotions is inspired by the life of Minnette de Silva-a forgotten feminist icon and one of the most important figures of twentieth-century architecture. In a gripping and lyrical story, Shiromi Pinto paints a complex picture of de Silva, charting her affair with the infamous Swiss modernist Le Corbusier and her efforts to build an independent Sri Lanka that slowly heads towards political and social turmoil. Moving between London, Chandigarh, Colombo, Paris and Kandy, Plastic Emotions explores the life of a young, trailblazing South Asian woman at a time of great turbulence across the globe.

A stunning tour of the work of internationally known architect Daniel Libeskind and an investigation of a master artist's creative process. Daniel Libeskind is one of the foremost architects of our time, a self-proclaimed rebel celebrated for innovative, site-conscious designs, including the Jewish Museum Berlin and New York's World Trade Center Redevelopment. He has also emerged as one of architecture's most visible public ambassadors. In Edge of Order, Libeskind opens the door to his unique creative process, guiding us through a selection of his projects never before collected--both built and unrealized, major commissions and unexpected favorites--and revealing how he arrived at their designs through text and a rich array of visuals, including drawings, plans, and photographs. With a voracious appetite for culture and history, and an encyclopedic memory, Libeskind draws on everything from Greek mythology to Emily Dickinson to the Marx Brothers to explain the way he thinks about buildings and cities. Far more than a monograph, Edge of Order is both an essential document of Libeskind's remarkable career and an intimate portrait of an artist that will encourage creative people in any field to discover new points of inspiration.

Why attractive things work better and other crucial insights into human-centered design Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed. In this book, he takes his thinking several steps farther, showing that successful design must incorporate not just what users need, but must address our minds by attending to our visceral reactions, to our behavioral choices, and to the stories we want the things in our lives to tell others about ourselves. Good human-centered design isn't just about making effective tools that are straightforward to use; it's about making affective tools that mesh well with our emotions and help us express our identities and support our social lives. From roller coasters to robots, sports cars to smart phones, attractive things work better. Whether designer or consumer, user or inventor, this book is the definitive guide to making Norman's insights work for you.

Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.

"Zaha Hadid ([born] 1950 in Baghdad), recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, designed and curated a groundbreaking exhibition at Zurich's Galerie Gmurzynska, comparing works of the Russian avant-garde with those of Zaha Hadid Architects. A fierce explosion of Russian works tore through the contemporary works by the architect in a dynamic black and white design. Created specifically for the venue, the projection of a two-dimensional drawing onto a three dimensional space transformed the gallery into a spatial painting in which the threshold of the picture plane expanded and could be entered. Zaha Hadid translated the warped and weightless space of Russian avant-garde painting and sculpture by Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Alexander Rodchenko into her very own architectural language."--Publisher's website.

Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking Art and Visual Perception in 1974, as an authority on the psychologicalinterpretation of the visual arts. Two anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his works in 2009. In The Power of the Center, Arnheim uses a wealth of examples to consider the actors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The Dynamics of Architectural Form explores the unexpected perceptual consequences of architecture with Arnheim's customary clarity and precision.