Golconde is an astonishing architectural accomplishment. With technical finesse and extraordinary craft, it offers a living testament to the original modernist credo - architecture as the manifest union of technology, aesthetics, and social reform. Here exists an undiluted view of a wholly triumphant tropical Modernism, built during the tumultuous years of the second world war. If ever there was a time when the notion of sanctuary, of a place in the world at a safe remove from its tribulations needed to be manifest, then this certainly is that year. Enforced isolations, mediated encounters, and filtered interfaces have become the norm. An unseen adversary has unmasked our frailty, weaponizing our own breath, making an enemy even of that essential human construct – shared space. The seeking of spatial solace has been a human preoccupation for much of our existence. Golconde is one such exemplar of calm. Created during another tumultuous time of human suffering – at the onset of the second World War - this building continues to offer succor to its residents, even from this latest upheaval. Mira Nakashima, George Nakashima’s daughter, contributes with a new 800 word introduction essay for this new edition.

New thinking is essential if we are to design and occupy buildings that can keep us safe with unpredictable economies, climates, energy systems and resource challenges. For too long designers have relied on mechanical solutions for heating, cooling and ventilating buildings. The 21st century dream has to be of a better architecture that enables buildings to be run for as much of a day or year as possible on local, clean, reliable, affordable natural energy. Examples are included from different climates where the fundamental building design is right, its orientation, opening sizes, mass and its natural ventilation systems and pathways. Many modern buildings are poorly designed for climate as manifested by growing incidences of overheating experienced indoor, explored here. The inability of many rating systems to record and improve the climatic design of buildings raises questions about how they deal with issues of basic building performance. This books points the way towards how we can understand such problems, and move forward from over-mechanised poorly designed buildings to a new generation of adaptable buildings designed and refurbished to run largely on natural energy and capable of evolving over time to keep their occupants safe and comfortable, even in a warming world. The chapters were originally published in Architectural Science Review.

Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. This was true not only of tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) but also its comic counterpart, opéra comique, a form tracing its roots to the seasonal trade fairs of Paris. While historians have long privileged the genre’s popular origins, opéra comique was brought under the protection of the French crown in 1762, thus consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. In The Comedians of the King, Julia Doe traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent prerevolutionary years. Drawing on both musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the royally sponsored Comédie-Italienne. Doe demonstrates how comic theater was exploited in, and worked against, the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular foundations was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a group of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.

This book explores the connection between digital fabrication and the design build studio in both academic and professional studios. The book presents 17 essays and cases studies from well-known scholars and practitioners, including Kengo Kuma, Joseph Choma, Dan Rockhill, Keith Zawistowski, and Marie Zawistowski, whose theoretical and practical work addresses design build at various levels. Four introductory essays trace the history of the design build movement, exploring the emergence of design build in the pedagogy of the Bauhaus, the integration of technology into architectural design, and the influence of the act of making on the design build studio. The rest of the book is divided into two parts; the first part looks at traditional pedagogical models for the design build studio, and the second part focuses on experimental methods used in design build programs. Together, these works discuss human behavior, social-cultural trends, and motivations in socially minded studios which are based on a service-learning model. They look at component-based studios where innovation allows for an increased level of research and testing of new materials and assemblies, sustainable principles, and zero-energy prototypes. Illustrated with over 200 color images, this book will be a valuable resource for architecture students, educators, and practitioners seeking to explore the impact of digital fabrication on the global design build movement.

Illustrates how to connect with and incorporate Japanese design traditions into western homes. Adept at compact living and masters of elegant simplicity, the Japanese embody the principle of doing more with less.

A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country’s socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague’s twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some “end of history,” whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Václav Havel’s greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity’s dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch. In a time when democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates the predicaments of the modern world.