Written by a successful practitioner of both residential and commercial architecture, this hands-on resource enables you to transfer and expand your architectural design skills and successfully integrate single-family residential design into your professional practice.

The Architect’s Guide to Residential Design discusses typical residential design issues, such as budgets and construction schedules, and offers guidelines for interacting with design-conscious clients. This detailed handbook presents a comprehensive methodology for the process of designing, pricing, and constructing single-family homes. Six real-world case studies, each featuring a unique site, budget, program, and set of circumstances, are included. Read the rest of this entry »

The Architecture of Light makes lighting design approachable. This vivid, image packed text of lighting concepts and techniques serves as the perfect companion for lighting design students and professionals alike.

Built around a successful teaching curriculum, this text provides a logical step by step progression through the phases of conceptualizing, refining, drafting and presenting lighting design. Written by a practicing professional lighting designer who is also an award winning design instructor, The Architecture of Light presents a perfect blend of visual design tools and fundamental lighting knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

A handsome and practical source of inspiration for designing, building or remodeling. There are thousands of new styles and components in house construction. Homeowners enjoy an unprecedented number of options thanks to the availability of products originating in other modes of architecture. While these are certainly exciting, such a wide variety brings challenging choices at every step in project management.

200 Outstanding House Ideas is packed with ideas for creating the dream house. Illustrated with more than 750 color photographs and over 200 floor plans, the book is rich with examples of houses and their interiors constructed and finished with a great range of traditional and innovative materials. The houses have been chosen from a pool of the world’s most interesting residential architecture. Together, they create a valuable catalog of exciting designs. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first English translation of a book written in 1935 in German and translated into 18 languages. Thirty years later, a second German edition was published with a new final chapter. In 40 brief chapters, Gombrich relates the history of humankind from the Stone Age through World War II.

In between are historic accounts of such topics as cave people and their inventions (including speech), ancient life along the Nile and in Mesopotamia and Greece, the growth of religion, the Dark Ages, the age of chivalry, the New World, and the Thirty Years’ War. Much of this history is told through concise sketches of such figures as Confucius, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Jesus Christ, Charlemagne, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and Columbus. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have ever considered building your dream home, here is a step-by-step guidebook that will take you through the design process. Designing Your Perfect House: Lessons from an Architect concerns the thought process of planning and creating a house, the methodology of the design, and how to get everything right.

Reading this book, you will gain insights about how to:

• Gain control of the design and building process
• Choose a perfect site for your house
• Avoid costly mistakes
• Unify an architectural design
• Not just design a house, but how to design a home
• Budget in a realistic manner

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The book presents very detailed historical material of the evolution of science and Christianity from the time of their origins up to the late 1800s, and concludes that Christianity, during most that time, severely hampered the vigor and freedom of scientific inquiry.

The essence of the author’s thesis is that in trying to explain everything about everything Christianity had, in large part, stepped on ground that would have been better served by observation and experimentation. In its determination to maintain the upper-hand, and in vacating the ideational ground upon which Christ stood, Christianity ultimately killed people, stifled free thinking and stymied the progress of civilization for at least a millennium before the Protestant Reformation. At least the author implies as much. Read the rest of this entry »

There are four stages in the development of an enterprise, each with its own challenges; Michael Masterson gives us a complete picture of them giving us each step methods, tips and tricks to meet and exceed our company 100 million euros in turnover, or more.

In an introduction much like that of The 4-Hour Workweek, Michael Masterson began by explaining that he owns dozens of companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Germany, Spain, Africa South and India in various fields ranging from the sale of vitamins up to a newsletter on the business read by hundreds of thousands of people, to property management companies, public relations, or Health … Read the rest of this entry »

This umpteenth volume from the highly regarded Vietnamese Zen monk really has nothing new, but that is precisely the author’s point: just do a few simple things, and keep doing them.

True love—the real thing—is actually hard to practice, and so Nhat Hanh begins with a short Buddhist explanation on the components of love—loving kindness, compassion, joy and freedom—and then offers a series of practices, including mantras, deep listening and a variety of meditations. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura Parkerson is a reputable art critic and gallery owner. Jordan Brodie, is a very charming and fun loving artist who courts Laura. She is swept off her feet and they become engaged. About two months later Laura finds Jordan in bed with another woman and she terminates the engagement, a fact that is kept secret from Jordan’s family.

The next day Jordan dies in an automobile accident. Jordan has an identical twin brother, Jed, who is building a bridge deep in the Amazon basin of Brazil. It takes nearly three months for Jed to learn of the tragedy and to discover he is the executor of his brother’s estate. Read the rest of this entry »

The things that engineers design are everywhere, and the influence that engineers have on daily life is far out of proportion to their numbers. In this expanded version of a remarkable essay published in Science more than a decade ago, Eugene Ferguson takes a probing look at the process of engineering design, arguing that despite modern technical advances, good engineering is still as much a matter of intuition and nonverbal thinking as of equations and computation.

Ferguson, who has been successively a mechanical engineer, a technical museum curator, and a teacher of the history of technology, uses examples ranging from the development of the American axe to the collapse of the Hartford Coliseum and the performance of the Hubble space telescope to illustrate the ways in which visual thinking enriches engineering and the ways in which engineering that relies solely on technical sophistication can go wrong. Read the rest of this entry »