This book summarizes a long career in architecture conducted by Stein, a leader in sustainable design for several decades in New York City. The book culminates and illustrates several of his earlier publications, including Architecture and Energy (1977) and Energy Conscious Architecture (2001). Stein argues adamantly and persuasively that new construction is not a sustainable strategy for architecture, design, or construction around the world. Rather, renovation, preservation, and restoration of existing buildings represent the best possible strategies for economic and ecological survival, regardless of climate and economy, global or local. The aesthetic implications of this argument are especially evident in the Cubist style buildings of Stein's active New York City firm, called Elemental Architecture. Unfortunately, the writing needs some editing, and the book's bibliography includes just one recent publication, A. Bahamon and M. Sanjines's Rematerial (CH, Sep'10, 48-0085). This book will be valuable for architecture, design, real estate, and development libraries serving commercial, residential, business, and industrial markets throughout the world. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. General Readers; Lower-division Undergraduates; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Two-year Technical Program Students; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by P. Kaufman.

Modernism in the Green traces a trans-Atlantic modernist fascination with the creation, use, and representation of the modern green. From the verdant public commons in the heart of cities to the lookout points on mountains in national parks, planned green spaces serve as felicitous stages for the performance of modernism. In its focus on designed and public green zones,Modernism in the Green offers a new perspective on modernism’s overlapping investments in the arts, politics, urbanism, race, class, gender, and the nature-culture divide. This collection of essays is the first to explore the prominent and diverse ways greens materialize in modern literature and culture, along with the manner in which modernists represented them. This volume presents the idea of "the green" as a point of exploration, as our contributors analyze social-organic spaces ranging from public parks to roadways and refuse piles. Like the term "green," one that evokes both more-than-human natural zones and crafted public meeting places, these chapters uncover the social and spatial intersection of nature and culture in the very architecture of parks, gardens, buildings, highways, and dumps. This book argues that such greens facilitate modernists’ exploration of how nature can manifest in an era of increasing urbanization and mechanization and what identities and communities the green now enables or prevents.

Contemporary architecture, and the culture it reflects dependent as it is on fossil fuels, has contributed to the cause and necessity of a burgeoning green process that emerged over the past half century. This text is the first to offer a comprehensive critical history and analysis of the greening of architecture through accumulative reduction of negative environmental effects caused by buildings, urban designs and settlements. Describing the progressive development of green architecture from 1960 to 2010, it illustrates how it is ever evolving and ameliorated through alterations in form, technology, materials and use and it examines different places worldwide that represent a diversity of cultural and climatic contexts. The book is divided into seven chapters: with an overview of the environmental issues and the nature of green architecture in response to them, followed by an historic perspective of the pioneering evolution of green technology and architectural integration over the past five decades, and finally, providing the intransigent and culturally pervasive current examples within a wide range of geographic territories. The greening of architecture is seen as an evolutionary process that is informed by significant world events, climate change, environmental theories, movements in architecture, technological innovations, and seminal works in architecture and planning throughout each decade over the past fifty years. This time period is bounded on one end by the awareness of environmental problems beginning in the 1960's, the influential texts by Rachel Carson, E.F. Schumacher, Buckminster Fuller and Steward Brand, and the impact of the OPEC Oil Embargo of 1973, and on the other end the pervasiveness of the necessary greening of architecture that includes, systemic reforms in architectural and urban design, land use planning, transportation, agriculture, and energy production found in the 2000's. The greening process moves from remediation to holistic models of architecture. Geographical landscapes give a global account of the greening process where some examples are parallel and sympathetic, and others are in clear contrast to one another with very individuated approaches. Certain events, like the Rio Summit in 1992 and Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and themes, such as the Hannover Principles in 2000, provide a dynamic ideological critique as well as a formal and technical discussion of the embodied and accumulative content of greening principles in architecture.

In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism.

This valuable reference for today’s green building movement examines twentieth-century modern architecture, including buildings by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, through the lens of sustainability. The hottest topics in contemporary architectural design and architectural history—the focus on sustainability and the evaluation of the modern movement—meet in Lessons from Modernism, a partnership with The Cooper Union that explores the ways in which the straightforward functional approach of modernist design creates environmentally sensitive solutions. Lessons from Modernism provides new insights into 25 buildings by a diverse selection of architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Jean Prouvé, and Arne Jacobsen, and demonstrates how these architects integrated environmental concerns into their designs. Buildings are located across the United States, Central and South America, Cuba, Japan and more—and include houses, art centers, commercial buildings, and civic buildings. Lessons from Modernism is an affordable reference work for all interested in how architecture intersects with the green movement, pairing full descriptions of all buildings with analytical essays, featuring charts of climate zones and solar movement, and concluding with a comprehensive chronology that details how environmental consciousness evolved throughout the twentieth century.

This accessible and engaging text is the first to offer a comprehensive critical history and analysis of the greening of architecture through accumulative reduction of negative environmental effects caused by buildings, urban designs and settlements. Describing the progressive development of green architecture from 1960 to 2010, it illustrates how it is ever evolving and ameliorated through alterations in form, technology, materials and use and it examines different places worldwide that represent a diversity of cultural and climatic contexts.

One of the first studies to explore the relationship between environmental criticism and British modernism, Green Modernism explores the cultural function of nature in the modernist novel between 1900 and 1930. This theoretically engaged, historically informed book brings new materialist insights to novels by Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, and Butts.