From 1946 to 1973, Whitney Rowland Smith and his partner, Wayne Williams, designed more than 800 projects, from residential, commercial, and public buildings to housing tracts, multi-use complexes, and parks and master plans for cities. Working in the wake of the first generation of avant-garde architects in Southern California and riding the postwar building boom, their firm, Smith and Williams, developed a pragmatic modernism that, through remarkable planning and design, integrated landscapes with buildings and decisively shaped the modern vocabulary of architecture in Los Angeles. Through a breathtaking array of images, Outside In unveils the core of Smith and Williams’s architectural practice. Their most influential designs, the authors show, are compositions of balanced opposites: shelter and openness, private and public, restraint and exuberance, light and shadow. Smith and Williams created spaciousness in their buildings by layering spaces and manipulating the relationship between structure and landscape. This spaciousness expressed modern ideas about the relationship of architecture to environment, of building to site, and, ultimately, of outside to in.

Completely updated with new listings and statistics throughout, this comprehensive resource goes beyond the current literature on local government performance measurement and provides benchmarks on more than 40 key topics against which performance can be assessed in all areas of operation. "Ammons has assembled a remarkable volume of benchmark data for a comprehensive range of municipal government services. Municipal Benchmarks will be of considerable help for municipalities in laying the groundwork for an accountable government." - Harry Hatry, The Urban Institute "I am delighted to see that ideas for advancing our industry are alive and thriving. Ammons's collection does an incredible service to every municipal manager in the country, and perhaps the world. These benchmarks clearly set standardized ways of looking at measuring the performance of municipal service delivery." - Ted Gaebler, City Manager, Rancho Cordoba, CA (co-author of Reinventing Government)