Forced to interact with the natural elements that invigorate a built structure and co-determine a building's experiential reality during construction, one ought to keep in mind their brute powers - earth's crushing heaviness, the erratic character of water, air's thermo-dynamic cataclysms, or the dangerous benignity of fire. Affective in a direct way, they act as guiding principles in the process of realization: While the earth targets the foundations, the roof shields from water, the openings control the flow of air, and the walls protect from the gleaming sun.

"The Four Elements are the pillars that uphold the manifest world and anchor spirit to matter. They are associated with a wide range of spiritual entities from small elementals to divine beings. The Elements provide a system of understanding that undergirds most of the magic of the West and Paganism. This book explores each of the Elements in depth, then shows how they interact and change as they rise on the planes. Practical applications for working with the Elements are also woven throughout the book"--

Air, Water, Earth, Fire. All life on earth depends on and survives because of the four elements of nature. Poets and painters alike have captured their allure and our desire for beauty. But how do artists render the essence of atmosphere and light, the sky, fog and mist, and wind and snow, as well as different terrain, mountains, wildfire, and festive fireworks? Now, over 50 contemporary artists and more than 400 paintings reveal the secret in every possible style. Here's what is available to you here: Each topic is analyzed according to its specific properties and uses. You find the resources, methods, and styles most suited to represent each element. Each chapter offers step-by-step exercises and tutorial videos. This is magic and method all wrapped into one volume. The artists here will speak to you and you can learn from their insight and the direction in which they pursue their artistic goals.

This craft book for children shows how to make a waterwheel, paddle-steamer, propeller plane, parachute, windmill, simple pendulum clock, spinning tops, a little hot-air carousel, a hot-air balloon and lots more.

In The Book of Air, award-winning astrologer Steven Forrest continues his investigation of the four elements which began with The Book of Fire and The Book of Earth. In this third volume of the series, he focuses on what seems to be a very simple idea: the fine art of truly paying attention. He writes, "Air is what connects our hearts and our minds to the world around us. Astrologically - but also in plain speech - it is the linking element, telegraphing an endless stream of information to us - and letting us send a few telegrams in return. Air makes a mockery of the delusion that we are separate from each other - or, for that matter, from anything else. Air connects. It is what allows us to pay attention, and perhaps to create some good reasons for other people to pay attention to us." In these pages, Forrest offers a detailed exploration of Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, along with their planetary rulers and their associated astrological houses: the third, the seventh, and the eleventh. Together, these powerful words in astrology's magical vocabulary are the key to nothing less than aligning your mind with reality as it actually is.

Published in seminar format, this volume acts as a companion to the CPA Press volume, Water and Fire. It focuses on the astrological elements of earth and air.

For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.