Using language - speaking and understanding it - is a defining ability of human beings, woven into all human activity. It is therefore inevitable that it should be deeply implicated in the design, production and use of buildings. Building legislation, design guides, competition and other briefs, architectural criticism, teaching and scholarly material, and the media all produce their characteristic texts. The authors use texts about such projects as Berlin's new Reichstag, Scotland's new Parliament, and the Auschwitz concentration camp museum to clarify the interaction between texts, design, critical debate and response.

Award-winning author, Michèle Phoenix, weaves an unforgettable tale of hope and survival in The Space Between Words. “Several scenes in The Space Between Words will leave readers without words, the ability of speech replaced by the need to absorb all the feels.” —RT Book Reviews, 4½ stars, TOP PICK! “There were seconds, when I woke, when the world felt unshrouded. Then memory returned.” When Jessica regains consciousness in a French hospital on the day after the Paris attacks, all she can think of is fleeing the site of the horror she survived. But Patrick, the steadfast friend who hasn’t left her side, urges her to reconsider her decision. Worn down by his loving insistence, she agrees to follow through with the trip they’d planned before the tragedy. “The pages found you,” Patrick whispered. “Now you need to figure out what they’re trying to say.” During a stop at a country flea market, Jessica finds a faded document concealed in an antique. As new friends help her to translate the archaic French, they uncover the story of Adeline Baillard, a young woman who lived centuries before—her faith condemned, her life endangered, her community decimated by the Huguenot persecution. “I write for our descendants, for those who will not understand the cost of our survival.” Determined to learn the Baillard family’s fate, Jessica retraces their flight from France to England, spurred on by a need she doesn’t understand. Could this stranger who lived three hundred years before hold the key to Jessica’s survival? “An unforgettable portrait of courage and reclaimed hope.” —Kristy Cambron, award-winning author of the Lost Castle series

Silent reading is now universally accepted as normal; indeed reading aloud to oneself may be interpreted as showing a lack of ability or understanding. Yet reading aloud was usual, indeed unavoidable, throughout antiquity and most of the middle ages. Saenger investigates the origins of the gradual separation of words within a continuous written text and the consequent development of silent reading. He then explores the spread of these practices throughout western Europe, and the eventual domination of silent reading in the late medieval period. A detailed work with substantial notes and appendices for reference.

An essential collection which you'll want to gift to friends and family and return to multiple times, Between Words & Space is the debut collection of poetry by curator, writer and educator Péjú Oshin. It explores performativity, a fear of vulnerability both in public and private spheres and relationships in their varying complexities through the nuances of culture, liminality and where we find home. This collection speaks to anyone who has ever felt that they didn't quite fit in, had thoughts and feelings that you were too afraid dare utter aloud and those reflecting on womanhood to offer reaffirming mantras and prayers to aid the process of healing.

What if the house you are about to enter was built with the confessed purpose of seducing you, of creating various sensations destined to touch your soul and make you reflect on who you are? Could architecture have such power? This was the assumption of generations of architects at the beginning of modernity. Exploring the role of theatre and fiction in defining character in architecture, Louise Pelletier examines how architecture developed to express political and social intent. Applying this to the modern day, Pelletier considers how architects can learn from these eighteenth century attitudes in order to restore architecture's communicative dimension. Through an in-depth and interdisciplinary analysis of the beginning of modernity, Louise Pelletier encourages today's architects to consider the political and linguistic implications of their tools. Combining theory, historical studies and research, Architecture in Words will provoke thought and enrich the work of any architect.

This newly updated (2012) reference book defines words and terms commonly used in discussing outer space--from Apollo Program to Zodiac.

Reflections on architecture and the exchange of information in the spaces and places of the city, from the necessity of skyscrapers in an age of Web sites to cities as talent magnets, from architectural bling to the neo-minimalism of the new MoMA. The meaning of a message, says William Mitchell, depends on the context of its reception. "Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater produces a dramatically different effect from barking the same word to a squad of soldiers with guns," he observes. In Placing Words, Mitchell looks at the ways in which urban spaces and places provide settings for communication and at how they conduct complex flows of information through the twenty-first century city. Cities participate in the production of meaning by providing places populated with objects for words to refer to. Inscriptions on these objects (labels, billboards, newspapers, graffiti) provide another layer of meaning. And today, the flow of digital information -- from one device to another in the urban scene -- creates a digital network that also exists in physical space. Placing Words examines this emerging system of spaces, flows, and practices in a series of short essays -- snapshots of the city in the twenty-first century. Mitchell questions the necessity of flashy downtown office towers in an age of corporate Web sites. He casts the shocked-and-awed Baghdad as a contemporary Guernica. He describes architectural makeovers throughout history, listing Le Corbusier's Fab Five Points of difference between new and old architecture, and he discusses the architecture of Manolo Blahniks. He pens an open letter to the Secretary of Defense recommending architectural features to include in torture chambers. He compares Baudelaire, the Parisian flaneur, to Spiderman, the Manhattan traceur. He describes the iPod-like galleries of the renovated MoMA and he recognizes the camera phone as the latest step in a process of image mobilization that began when artists stopped painting on walls and began making pictures on small pieces of wood, canvas, or paper. The endless flow of information, he makes clear, is not only more pervasive and efficient than ever, it is also generating new cultural complexities.