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 »

Profusely illustrated with fine instances of architectural experimentation through the centuries, Experiencing Architecture manages to convey the intellectual excitement of superb design. From teacups, riding boots, golf balls and underwater sculpture to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of the Peking Winter Palace, the author ranges over the less-familiar byways of designing excellence.

At one time, writes Rasmussen, “The entire community tool part in forming the dwellings and implements they used. The individual was in fruitful contact with these things; the anonymous houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use and the result was a remarkably suitable comeliness. Today, in our highly civilized society, the houses which ordinary people are doomed to live in and gaze upon are on the whole without quality. We cannot, however, go back to the old method of personally supervised handicrafts. We must strive to advance by arousing interest in and understanding of the work the architect does. The basis of competent professionalism is a sympathetic and knowledgeable group of amateurs, of non-professional art lovers”. Read the rest of this entry »

For more than thirty years, the beautifully illustrated Architecture: Form, Space, and Order has been the classic introduction to the basic vocabulary of architectural design. The updated Third Edition features expanded sections on circulation, light, views, and site context, along with new considerations of environmental factors, building codes, and contemporary examples of form, space, and order.

This classic visual reference helps both students and practicing architects understand the basic vocabulary of architectural design by examining how form and space are ordered in the built environment.? Using his trademark meticulous drawing, Professor Ching shows the relationship between fundamental elements of architecture through the ages and across cultural boundaries. By looking at these seminal ideas, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order encourages the reader to look critically at the built environment and promotes a more evocative understanding of architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

High school and college students who have a budding interest in architectural design will value this book for its solid foundational orientation and instruction. Author Mo Zell introduces readers to architecture’s visual language, showing them how to think spatially and getting them started in architectural drawing with a series of instructive tutorials.

Presenting three-dimensional design problems, she coaches students through the fundamentals of proportion and scale, space and volume, path and place, and materials and textures. A series of 40 work units covers virtually every aspect of architectural drawing, including:

• Learning to see and sketch with accuracy
• Developing fundamental drawing and modeling skills
• Mastering subjective representation and rules of perspective
• Employing spatial strategies: rendering and diagramming ideas

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Architectural detailing makes a building unique and an architect outstanding. This book provides analysis of both the technical and the aesthetic importance of details in the development of contemporary domestic architecture from 2000 to 2005.

Featuring many of the world’s most highly acclaimed architects, the book presents over 50 of the most recently completed and influential house designs. For each house there are color photographs, plans of every floor, sections and elevations, and numerous construction details. The book also features in-depth information for each project, including the size, the client, the architectural project team, main consultants, and contractors. With CD-ROM. Read the rest of this entry »

Colquhoun, an eminent scholar in the field of architecture, offers here a new account of international modernism that explores the complex motivations behind this revolutionary movement and assesses its triumphs and failures.

The book focuses on the work of the main architects of the movement such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, re-examining their work and shedding new light on their roles as acknowledged masters.

Each of the chapters focuses on a theme or a region, ranging from the artistry of Loos to the social engineering of Scandinavia. Though most of the examples are familiar, the author gives them a fresh spin-starting with the cover illustration of Hans Scharoun’s Schminke house of 1933, now restored and used as a day care center. It embodies the daring and idealism that powered the modern movement and is now being rediscovered. Read the rest of this entry »

Does it seem you’ve formulated a rock-solid strategy, yet your firm still can’t get ahead? If so, construct a solid foundation for business execution—an IT infrastructure and digitized business processes to automate your company’s core capabilities. In Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, authors Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson show you how.

The key? Make tough decisions about which processes you must execute well, then implement the IT systems needed to digitize those processes. Citing numerous companies worldwide, the authors show how constructing the right enterprise architecture enhances profitability and time to market, improves strategy execution, and even lowers IT costs. Though clear, engaging explanation, they demonstrate how to define your operating model—your vision of how your firm will survive and grow—and implement it through your enterprise architecture. Their counterintuitive but vital message: when it comes to executing your strategy, your enterprise architecture may matter far more than your strategy itself. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the classic visual guide to the basics of building construction, now with the most current information. For nearly three decades, Building Construction Illustrated has offered an outstanding introduction to the principles of building construction. This new edition of the revered classic remains as relevant as ever – providing the latest information in Francis D.K. Ching’s signature style. Its rich and comprehensive approach clearly presents all of the basic concepts underlying building construction and equips readers with useful guidelines for approaching virtually any new materials or techniques they may encounter.

Laying out the material and structural choices available, it provides a full understanding of how these choices affect a building’s form and dimensions. Complete with more than 1,000 illustrations, the book moves through each of the key stages of the design process, from site selection to building components, mechanical systems, and finishes. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re involved in planning IT infrastructure as a network or system architect, system administrator, or developer, this book will help you adapt your skills to work with these highly scalable, highly redundant infrastructure services. While analysts hotly debate the advantages and risks of cloud computing, IT staff and programmers are left to determine whether and how to put their applications into these virtualized services. Cloud Application Architectures provides answers — and critical guidance — on issues of cost, availability, performance, scaling, privacy, and security. With Cloud Application Architectures, you will:

Understand the differences between traditional deployment and cloud computing Determine whether moving existing applications to the cloud makes technical and business sense Analyze and compare the long-term costs of cloud services, traditional hosting, and owning dedicated servers Learn how to build a transactional web application for the cloud or migrate one to it Understand how the cloud helps you better prepare for disaster recovery Change your perspective on application scaling. Read the rest of this entry »