5 Architecture eBooks

Veranda Decorating
Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning: A Multi-Scale Approach
Media Architecture : Using Information and Media As Construction Material
Urban Redevelopment : A North American Reader
The Creative Destruction of New York City : Engineering the City for the Elite

Veranda Decorating
English | 7 May 2018 | ISBN: 1618372637 | 224 Pages | EPUB | 54.16 MB

From beautiful design details that inspire to pretty personal spaces you'll want to call your own, this stunning volume from 'Veranda' takes you on an AZ journey through the essentials of decorating - from Antiques and Art to Zoning. Spectacular photographs showcase sophisticated furnishings and design aesthetics, while the authors teach you how to create a glorious home. This book perfectly juxtaposes practical decorating advice with inspiring images of fabulous rooms, chic home accents and more

Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning: A Multi-Scale Approach
English | 2015 | ISBN: 1610916921 | PDF | 157 Pages | 68.0 mb


From New York City's urban forest and farmland in Virginia to the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona and riverside parks in Vancouver, Washington, green infrastructure is becoming a priority for cities, counties, and states across America. Recognition of the need to manage our natural assets-trees, soils, water, and habitats-as part of our green infrastructure is vital to creating livable places and healthful landscapes. But the land management decisions about how to create plans, where to invest money, and how to get the most from these investments are complex, influenced by differing landscapes, goals, and stakeholders.
Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning addresses the nuts and bolts of planning and preserving natural assets at a variety of scales-from dense urban environments to scenic rural landscapes. A practical guide to creating effective and well-crafted plans and then implementing them, the book presents a six-step process developed and field-tested by the Green Infrastructure Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. Well-organized chapters explain how each step, from setting goals to implementing opportunities, can be applied to a variety of scenarios, customizable to the reader's target geographical location. Chapters draw on a diverse group of case studies, from the arid open spaces of the Sonoran Desert to the streets of Jersey City. Abundant full color maps, photographs, and illustrations complement the text.
For planners, elected officials, developers, conservationists, and others interested in the creation and maintenance of open space lands and urban green infrastructure projects or promoting a healthy economy, this book offers a comprehensive yet flexible approach to conceiving, refining, and implementing successful projects.

Media Architecture : Using Information and Media As Construction Material
by Alexander Wiethoff and Heinrich Hussmann
English | 2017 | ISBN: 3110451379 | 219 Pages | PDF | 4.4 MB

The augmentation of urban spaces with technology, commonly referred to as Media Architecture, has found increasing interest in the scientific community within the last few years. At the same time architects began to use digital media as a new material apart from concrete, glass or wood to create buildings and urban structures. Simultaneously, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers began to exploit the interaction opportunities between users and buildings and to bridge the gaps between interface, information medium and architecture. As an example, they extended architectural structures with interactive, light-emitting elements on their outer shell, thereby transforming the surfaces of these structures into giant public screens. At the same time the wide distribution of mobile devices and the coverage of mobile internet allow manifold interaction opportunities between open data and citizens, thereby enabling the internet of things in the public domain. However, the appropriate distribution of information to all citizens is still cumbersome and a mutual dialogue not always successful (i.e. who gets what data and when?). In this book we therefore provide a deeper investigation of Using Information and Media as Construction Material with media architecture as an input and output medium.

Urban Redevelopment : A North American Reader

English | 2018 | ISBN: 1138786411 | 192 Pages | PDF | 7.3 MB

Urban redevelopment plays a major part in the growth strategy of the modern city, and the goal of this book is to examine the various aspects of redevelopment, its principles and practices in the North American context.

Urban Redevelopment: A North American Reader seeks to shed light on the practice by looking at both its failures and successes, ideas that seemed to work in specific circumstances but not in others.

The book aims to provide guidance to academics, practitioners and professionals on how, when, where and why, specific approaches worked and when they didn't. While one has to deal with each case specifically, it is the interactions that are key. The contributors offer insight into how urban design affects behavior, how finance drives architectural choices, how social equity interacts with economic development, how demographical diversity drives cities' growth, how politics determine land use decisions, how management deals with market choices, and how there are multiple influences and impacts of every decision.

The book moves from the history of urban redevelopment, The City Beautiful movement, grand concourses and plazas, through urban renewal, superblocks and downtown pedestrian malls to today's place-making: transit-oriented design, street quieting, new urbanism, publicly accessible, softer, waterfront design, funky small urban spaces and public-private megaprojects. This history also moves from grand masters such as Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses through community participation, to stakeholder involvement to creative local leadership. The increased importance of sustainability, high-energy performance, resilience and both pre- and post-catastrophe planning are also discussed in detail.

Cities are acts of man, not nature; every street and building represents decisions made by people. Many of today's best recognized urban theorists look for great forces; economic trends, technological shifts, political movements and try to analyze how they impact cities. One does not have to be a subscriber to the 'great man' theory of history to see that in urban redevelopment, successful project champions use or sometimes overcome overall trends, using the tools and resources available to rebuild their community. This book is about how these projects are brought together, each somewhat differently, by the people who make them happen.

The Creative Destruction of New York City : Engineering the City for the Elite

English | 2017 | ISBN: 0190610093 | 361 Pages | PDF | 42 MB

Bill de Blasio's campaign rhetoric focused on a tale of two cities: rich and poor New York. He promised to value the needs of poor and working-class New Yorkers, making city government work better for everyone-not just those who thrived during Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. But well into de Blasio's administration, many critics think that little has changed in the lives of struggling New Yorkers, and that the gentrification of New York City is expanding at a record pace across the five boroughs. Despite the mayor's goal of creating more affordable housing, Brooklyn and Manhattan sit atop the list of the most unaffordable housing markets in the country. It seems that the old adage is becoming truer: New York is a place for only the very rich and the very poor.

In The Creative Destruction of New York City, urban scholar Alessandro Busa travels to neighborhoods cross the city, from Harlem to Coney Iland, from Hell's Kitchen to East New York, to tell the story of fifteen years of drastic rezoning and rebranding, updatig the tale of two New Yorks. There is a gilded city of sky-high glass towers where Wall Street managers and foreign billionaires live-or merely store their cash. And there is another New York: a place where even the professional middle class is one rent hike away from displacement. Despite de Blasio's rhetoric, the trajectory since Bloomberg has been remarkably consistent. New York's urban development is changing to meet the consumption demands of the very rich, and real estate moguls'power has never been greater.

Major players in real estate, banking, and finance have worked to ensure that, regardless of changes in leadership, their interests are safeguarded at City Hall. The Creative Destruction of New York City is an important chronicle of both the success of the city's elite and of efforts to counter the city's march toward a glossy and exclusionary urban landscape. It is essential reading for everyone who cares about affordable housing access and, indeed, the soul of New York City.