| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
› Find signed collectible books: 'City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World'
More editions of City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World:
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century'
More editions of A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Home: A Short History of an Idea'
You'll see how social and cultural changes influenced styles of decoration and furnishing, learn the connection between wall-hung religious tapestries and wall-to-wall carpeting, discover how some of our most welcome luxuries were born of architectural necessity, and much more. Most of all, Home opens a rare window into our private livesand how we really want to live.
More editions of Home: A Short History of an Idea:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Look of Architecture'
What is style in architecture? "Style is like a feather in a woman's hat, nothing more," said Le Corbusier, expressing most modern architects' low regard for the subject. But Witold Rybczynski disagrees, and in The Look of Architecture, he makes a compelling case for the importance of style to the mother of the arts.
This is a book brimming with sharp observations--that form does not follow function; that the best architecture is not timeless but precisely of its time; that details do not merely complement the architecture--details are the architecture. But the heart of the book illuminates the connection between architecture, interior decoration, and fashion. Style is the language of architecture, Rybczynski writes, and fashion represents the wide and swirling cultural currents that shape and direct that language. The two--style and fashion--are intimately linked; indeed, architecture cannot escape fashion. To set these ideas in sharp relief, he shows us how style and fashion have been expressed in the work of major architects including Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, Charles McKim, Allan Greenberg, Robert Venturi, Enrique Norten, and many others. He helps us see their works anew and ultimately to look afresh at our surroundings.
Style is one of the enduring--and endearing--aspects of architecture, Rybczynski concludes. Furthermore, an architecture that recognizes the importance of style would not be as introspective and self-referential as are so many contemporary buildings. It would be part of the world: Not architecture for architects, but for the rest of us. [via]
More editions of The Look of Architecture:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture'
From the opening sentences of his first book on architecture, Home, Witold Rybczynski seduced readers into a new appreciation of the spaces they live in. He also introduced us to "an unerringly lucid writer who knows how to translate architectural ideas into layman's terms" The Dallas Morning News . Rybczynski's vast knowledge, his sense of wonder, and his elegantly uncluttered prose shine on every page of his latest meditation on the art of building. Looking Around is about architecture as an art of compromise-between beauty and function, aspiration and engineering, builders and clients. It is the story of the Seagram Building in New York and the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio-a museum that opened without a single painting on view, so that critics could better appreciate its design. But what of the visitors who want a building that displays art well? What of those who work in the building? Looking Around explores the notion of the architect as superstar and assesses giants from Palladio to Michael Graves, styles from classicism to high tech. It demonstrates how architecture actually works-or doesn't-in corporate headquarters, airports, private homes, and the special buildings designed to represent our civilization. For all its erudition, Looking Around is also bracingly straightforward. Rybczynski looks closely and critically at structures that may once have dazzled us with their ostentation and expense, and sees them as triumphs or failures-of aesthetic ideals and of lasting function. This is a fascinating and illuminating book about an art form integral to our lives. [via]
More editions of Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Most Beautiful House in the World'
The author provides an eloquent examination of the links between being and building, as he tells the story of the designing and building of his own house. 4 cassettes. [via]
More editions of Most Beautiful House in the World:

› Find signed collectible books: 'One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw'
In 1999, an editor of the New York Times Magazine approached Witold Rybczynski, the well-known student of architecture and urban design, and asked him to write a short essay on the best and most useful common tool of the past millennium. Rybczynski took the assignment, but when he began to look into the history of the items in his workshop--hammers and saws, levels and planes--he found that almost all of them had pedigrees that extended well into antiquity. Nearly ready to admit defeat, he asked his wife for ideas. Her answer was inspired: "You always need a screwdriver for something."
True enough. And, Rybczynski discovered, the screwdriver is a relative newcomer in humankind's arsenal of gadgetry, an invention of the late European Middle Ages and the only major mechanical device that the Chinese did not independently invent. Leonardo da Vinci got to it early on, of course, as he did so many other things, designing a number of screw-cutting machines with interchangeable gears. Still, it took generations for the screw (and with it the screwdriver and lathe) to come into general use, and it was not until the modern era that such improvements as slotted and socket screws came into being.
Rybczynski's explorations into that lineage, here expanded to book length, are highly entertaining, and sure to engage readers interested in the origins of everyday things. --Gregory McNamee [via]
More editions of One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Paper Heroes: A Review of Appropriate Technology'
More editions of Paper Heroes: A Review of Appropriate Technology:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Paper Heroes: Appropriate Technology Panacea or Pipe Dream?'
Paper Heros: Appropriate Technology: Panacea or Pipe Dream? [via]
More editions of Paper Heroes: Appropriate Technology Panacea or Pipe Dream?:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Taming the Tiger'
More editions of Taming the Tiger:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to Control Technology'
More editions of Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to Control Technology:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Waiting for the Weekend'
[This is the MP3CD audiobook format.]
[Read by Wanda McCaddon]
Explore the history and the nature of the time we consider ''our own''.
''We work,'' Aristotle wrote, ''in order to have leisure.'' Today, this is still true. But is the leisure that Aristotle spoke of--the freedom to do nothing--the same as the leisure we look forward to each weekend?
There have always been breaks from the routine of work--taboo days, market days, public festivals, holy days--we couldn't survive without them. In Waiting for the Weekend, Witold Rybczynski unfolds the history and evolution of leisure time in Western civilization, from Aristotle, through the Middle Ages, to the present. Along the way, he explores how the psychological needs that leisure time seeks to fulfill have changed as the nature of work has changed. [via]
More editions of Waiting for the Weekend:
Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site:
Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.
