Set within an insightful analysis, this book describes the genesis, ideas and ideologies which influenced La Construction des Villes by Le Corbusier. This volume makes the important theoretical work available for the first time in English, offering an interpretation as to how much and in what way his ‘essai’ may have influenced his later work. Dealing with questions of aesthetic urbanism, La Construction des Villes shows Le Corbusier’s intellectual influences in the field of urbanism. Discontent that the script was not sufficiently avant-garde, he abandoned it soon after it was written in the early 20th century. It was only in the late 1970s that American historian H. Allen Brooks discovered 250 pages of the forgotten manuscript in Switzerland. The author of this book, Christoph Schnoor, later discovered another 350 handwritten pages of the original manuscript, consisting of extracts, chapters, and bibliographic notes. This splendid find enabled the re-establishment of the manuscript as Le Corbusier had abandoned it, unfinished, in the spring of 1911. This volume offers an unbiased extension of our knowledge of Le Corbusier and his work. In addition, it reminds us of the urban design innovations of the very early 20th century which can still serve as valuable lessons for a new understanding of contemporary urban design.

This book provides a detailed historical and design analysis of the development of parks and modern landscape architecture in late 20th century China. It questions whether the fusion of international influences with the local Chinese design vocabulary in late 20th century China has created a distinctive and novel approach to the design of public parks. Hybrid Modernity proposes a new theory for examining the design of public parks built in post-Mao China since the reforms and sets the various processes for China’s late 20th century socio-cultural context. Drawing on modernization theory, research on China’s modernity, local and global cultural trends, it illustrates through a range of case studies ways hybrid modernity defines a new design genre and language for the spatial forms of parks that emerged in China’s secondary cities. Featured case studies include the Living Water Park in Chengdu, Sichuan province, Zhongshan Shipyard Park in Guangdong Province, Jinji Lake Landscape Master Plan in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and the West Lake Southern Scenic Area Master Plan in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. This book argues that these forms represent a new stage in China’s history of landscape architecture. The work reveals that as a new profession, landscape architecture has greatly contributed to China’s massive urban experiment. This book is an ideal read for students enrolled in landscape architecture, architecture, fine arts and urban planning programs who are engaged in learning the arts and international design education.

Aldo Rossi was a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza and one of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city's construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.

With Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcretre (1928)—published now for the first time in English—Sigfried Giedion positioned himself as an eloquent advocate of modern architecture. This was the first book to exalt Le Corbusier as the artistic champion of the new movement. It also spelled out many of the tenets of Modernism that are now regarded as myths, among them the impoverishment of nineteenth-century architectural thinking and practice, the contrasting vigor of engineering innovations, and the notion of Modernism as technologically preordained.

Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was the most significant architect of the twentieth century. Every architecture student examines the Swiss master's work. Yet, all too frequently, they rely on reproductions of faded drawings of uneven size and quality. Le Corbusier Redrawn presents the only collection of consistently rendered original drawings (at 1:200 scale) of all twenty-six of Le Corbusier's residential works. Using the original drawings from the Le Corbusier Foundation's digital archives, architect Steven Park has beautifully redrawn 130 perspectival sections, as well as plans, sections, and elevations of exterior forms and interior spaces. These remarkable new drawings-which combine the conceptual clarity of the section with the spatial qualities of the perspective-not only provide information about the buildings, they also help students experience specific works spatially as they learn to critically examine Le Corbusier's works.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.