In this extraordinary story the author digs and digs until she finds the whole story. Along the way she discovers that not only was her great-grandfather murdered by the husband of Evelyn Nesbitt, a showgirl at the time, who was enraged with jealously, only to be acquitted on the grounds of insanity, but that the repercussions of this event and of her great-grandfather's behaviour on the rest of the family and its subsequent generations was devastating. Throughout the gripping narrative snippets of information about Stanford are woven into the incredible tale of the author's own upbringing and the whole family. By the end the story of the murder and its sordid circumstances are revealed. A beautifully written and extraordinary powerful book.

While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp - one of the twentieth century's most beguiling artists - the subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, Duchamp's fascination with architectural design is clearly evident. As his unconventional architectural influences - Niceron, Lequeu and Kiesler - and diverse legacy - Tschumi, OMA, Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Nicholson - indicate, Duchamp was not as much interested in 'built' architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, re-constructing the imagination through drawing and testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic and philosophical possibilities. Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.

In an era of brash, expensive, provocative new buildings, a prominent critic argues that emotions—such as hope, power, sex, and our changing relationship to the idea of home—are the most powerful force behind architecture, yesterday and (especially) today. We are living in the most dramatic period in architectural history in more than half a century: a time when cityscapes are being redrawn on a yearly basis, architects are testing the very idea of what a building is, and whole cities are being invented overnight in exotic locales or here in the United States. Now, in a bold and wide-ranging new work, Rowan Moore—former director of the Architecture Foundation, now the architecture critic for The Observer—explores the reasons behind these changes in our built environment, and how they in turn are changing the way we live in the world. Taking as his starting point dramatic examples such as the High Line in New York City and the outrageous island experiment of Dubai, Moore then reaches far and wide: back in time to explore the Covent Garden brothels of eighteenth-century London and the fetishistic minimalism of Adolf Loos; across the world to assess a software magnate’s grandiose mansion in Atlanta and Daniel Libeskind’s failed design for the World Trade Center site; and finally to the deeply naturalistic work of Lina Bo Bardi, whom he celebrates as the most underrated architect of the modern era.

The story of Stanford White--his scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"--has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. The premier neoclassical architect of his day, White's legacy to the world were such masterpieces as New York's original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square Arch, and the Players, Metropolitan, and Colony clubs. He was also responsible for the palaces of such clients as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers, the robber barons of the Gilded Age whose power and dominance shaped the nation in its heady ascent at the turn of the century. As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family. Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, one that, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.

By locatingthe architecture already hidden within deconstructive discourse, Wigley opens up more radical possibilities for both architectureand deconstruction.