What are the ingredients of robust, elegant, flexible, and maintainable software architecture? Beautiful Architecture answers this question through a collection of intriguing essays from more than a dozen of today's leading software designers and architects. In each essay, contributors present a notable software architecture, and analyze what makes it innovative and ideal for its purpose. Some of the engineers in this book reveal how they developed a specific project, including decisions they faced and tradeoffs they made. Others take a step back to investigate how certain architectural aspects have influenced computing as a whole. With this book, you'll discover: How Facebook's architecture is the basis for a data-centric application ecosystem The effect of Xen's well-designed architecture on the way operating systems evolve How community processes within the KDE project help software architectures evolve from rough sketches to beautiful systems How creeping featurism has helped GNU Emacs gain unanticipated functionality The magic behind the Jikes RVM self-optimizable, self-hosting runtime Design choices and building blocks that made Tandem the choice platform in high-availability environments for over two decades Differences and similarities between object-oriented and functional architectural views How architectures can affect the software's evolution and the developers' engagement Go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to design elegant software architecture, and how it can shape the way you approach your own projects, with Beautiful Architecture.

A truly inclusive celebration of architecture around the world and across the ages.

Beauty provides the dynamic catalyst for sixteen very charged and individual discussions about architecture and design. Based on a series of interviews by Yael Reisner, Architecture and Beauty has been developed into sixteen individual chapter/portraits, written up by Fleur Watson, that eloquently recount the thoughts of some of the world's most creative designers. Each interviewee candidly expresses their beliefs and experiences and espouses their own distinctive position on aesthetics. Offering up rare and often highly personal insights into the minds of today's most progressive and high-profile architects, the book is lusciously illustrated with the works that the architects discuss. Featured architects: Will Alsop, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Peter Cook, Odile Decq, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Zvi Hecker, Mark Goulthorpe, Kolatan/MacDonald Studio, Greg Lynn, Tom Mayne, Juhani Pallasmaa, Gaetano Pesce, Eric Owen Moss, Wolf Prix and Lebbeus Woods.

"For centuries, men and women have sought to express beauty in architecture and art. But, it is only recently that neuroscience has helped determine how and why beauty plays such an important role in our lives. Founded on a series of lectures architect Donald H. Ruggles has given over the past ten years, Beauty, Neuroscience and Architecture: Timeless Patterns and Their Impact on Our Well-Being postulates that beauty can and does make a vital difference in our lives, including improving many aspects of our health. In this volume, Ruggles suggests that a new, urgent effort is needed to refocus the direction of architecture and art to include the quality of beauty as a fundamental, overarching theme in two of humanity's most important fields of endeavor--the built and artistic environments."--Provided by the publisher.

Dazzling beautiful, this new hardcover book is a tour de force of the latest European-inspired homes designed by Bassenian/Lagoni Architects of Newport Beach, California's premier residential architecture firm. Here the reader will discover ruggedly handsome exteriors reminiscent of the hill towns of Tuscany and richly appointed interiors that echo the great rooms of Andalusia--all with very modern floor plans and amenities. This milestone book will serve as a valuable resource for anyone seeking ideas for a home design, landscaping, interiors and furnishings in the Old World Style.

This beautifully illustrated volume presents Ferguson & Shamamian's finest work, including new houses, apartments, alterations and additions, and unbuilt design plans.

This study looks at the architectural transformation of Cleveland during its "golden age"--roughly the period between Civil War reconstruction and World War I. By the early twentieth century, Cleveland, which would evolve into the fifth largest city in America, hoped to shed the gritty industrial image of its rapid growth period. Encouraged by the spectacle and enthusiastic response to the Beaux-Arts buildings of the Chicago World's Exposition of 1893, the city embarked upon a grand scheme to construct new governmental and civic structures known as the Cleveland Plan of Grouping Public Buildings, one of the earliest and most complete City Beautiful planning schemes in the country. The success of this plan led to a spillover effect that prompted architects to design all manner of new public buildings that adopted similar Beaux-Arts architectural characteristics over the ensuing decades.