As organic as the materials with which they are built, these creations allow the living landscape to naturally overtake each structure until it finally decomposes."--BOOK JACKET.

For Arthur Andersson and Chris Wise, the fundamental elements that give buildings meaning are found in nature.Imbuing day-to-day activities with poetry and awe, their designs address both pragmatic needs and the psychological yearning for refuge and contemplation, centering and escape, joy and comfort. Their work is best experienced through the senses. Tactility, expressed through an eloquence of craft, the use of textured materials, and the logical design of structural systems, gives their buildings a rightness within the landscape. In their hands, daylight becomes a building material. Small wall apertures, three-sided dormers, clerestories, and other details grab, bend, and thread sunlight from one end of their houses to the other. Full of light and atmosphere, the houses are the physical embodiment of the great Charles Moore's influential tenet that architecture is about enhancing a sense of place. Natural Houses presents seven of the Austin, Texas-based firm's exquisitely crafted projects. Precise and cool, with forms often derived from the American vernacular of barns and cottages, these are painstakingly crafted houses made from regionally appropriate and aesthetically timeless materials. Natural Houses presents a range of sites and residences—from a small cabin in the woods to a multibuilding camp. Sited on a cliff, the House Above Lake Austin uses terraces to descend its steeply hilly site. The building's simple materials celebrate thesite and climate not by drawing attention to themselves, but by blending in. The stone foundation is similarly tied to the natural stone of the mountain. Smooth plaster walls above the stone foundation appear to have been chiseled from the rock itself. In a deceptively simple boathouse the walls fold down to become impromptu diving platforms. Exceptional photography captures the light and atmosphere of each project setting and illustrates how the firm rigorously expresses the design concept through detailing and construction. An introduction by Rick Sundberg of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects and essays by Jen Renzi and Frederick Steiner chart the firm's evolution and influences.

Our 2007 hit Natural Architecture introduced artists and architects who transform the act of building into a fascinating new art form. Built from humble elements—branches, twigs, straw, bamboo—and fulfilling a wide variety of intentions—sometimes structural, sometimes sculptural, sometimes sacred—their fantastical creations resonate with an innate natural beauty. Natural Architecture Now features all-new site-specific installations by an international list of contributors. From an engineered oasis and climbing structure in Joshua Tree National Park to an intricate bamboo installation on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to a residential mud structure prototype created by Architecture for Humanity Tehran, each project points a way forward for architects to engineer a new organic simplicity of structure and form.

Based on documentation originating in the environmental sciences, history of science, philosophy and art, Architecture of Nature explores the materiality and the effects of the forces at play in the history of the earth through the architect's modes of seeing and techniques of representation. This book presents the research work developed for the past eight years in the Advanced Research graduate studio "Architecture of Nature/ Nature of Architecture," created and directed by Diana Agrest at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union. Architecture of Nature departs from the traditional approach to nature as a referent for architecture and reframes it as its object of study. The complex processes of generation and transformations of extreme natural phenomena such as glaciers, volcanoes, permafrost, and clouds are explored through unique drawings and models, confronting a scale of space and time that expands and transcends the established boundaries of the architectural discipline.

This well-illustrated text is the result of a research project begun in the 1950s, which relates forms of architecture - and even more, the rules and ideas that have charcterized architectural production down the centuries - with the forms of nature.

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture challenges the modern practice of sealing up and mechanically cooling public scaled buildings in whichever climate and environment they are located. This book unravels the extremely complex history of understanding and perception of air, bad air, miasmas, airborne pathogens, beneficial thermal conditions, ideal climates and climate determinism. It uncovers inventive and entirely viable attempts to design large buildings, hospitals, theatres and academic buildings through the 19th and early 20th centuries, which use the configuration of the building itself and a shrewd understanding of the natural physics of airflow and fluid dynamics to make good, comfortable interior spaces. In exhuming these ideas and reinforcing them with contemporary scientific insight, the book proposes a recovery of the lost art and science of making naturally conditioned buildings.

This new paperback, is the first publication to consider the many effects of natural illumination in contemporary buildings. This comprehensive and thoughtful survey begins with a brief introduction to the history of architecture, seen through the advances and experimentation put forward by architects over the centuries.