The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Vintage $16.00
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes...

Architecture: Form, Space, and Order by Wiley $45.00
The Second Edition of this classic introduction to the principles of architecture is everything you would expect from the celebrated architect, author, and illustrator, Francis D. K. Ching. Each page has been meticulously revised to incorporate contemporary examples of the principles of form, space, and order-the fundamental vocabulary of every designer. The result is a beautifully illustrated...

The Architecture of Happiness by Penguin Group(CA) $22.00
Bestselling author, Alain de Botton has written about love, travel, status and how philosophy can console us. Now, he turns his attention to one of our most intense but often hidden love affairs: with our houses and their furnishings. He asks: What makes a house truly beautiful? Why are many new houses so ugly? Why do we argue so bitterly about sofas and pictures - and can differences of taste...

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Cess Center for Environmental) by Oxford University Press $65.00
"Brilliant....Here's how to design or redesign any space you're living or working in--from metropolis to room. Consider what you want to happen in the space, and then page through this book. Its radically conservative observations will spark, enhance, organize your best ideas, and a wondrous home, workplace, town will result"--San Francisco Chronicle. This classic handbook presents a language...

The Works: Anatomy of a City by Penguin (Non-Classics) $22.00
Read Kate Ascher's posts on the Penguin Blog. A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The...

High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky by FSG Originals $29.95
How two New Yorkers led the transformation of a derelict elevated railway into a grand—and beloved—open space The High Line, a new park atop an ele-vated rail structure on Manhattan’s West Side, is among the most innovative urban reclamation projects in memory. The story of how it came to be is a remarkable one: two young citizens with no prior experience in planning and development...

The Image of the City (Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies Series) by The MIT Press $22.00
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion--imageability--and shows its...

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by North Point Press $19.00
A manifesto by America's most controversial and celebrated town planners, proposing an alternative model for community design.There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that...

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Viking Adult $35.00
This book on buildings asks the question why so many buildings punish and restrict us because almost none of them adapt well. In real use, buildings need to adapt because their uses are constantly changing. All buildings are predictions, and yet more high-style buildings are designed not to change, not to accommodate new use. A good portion of how buildings learn will be a natural history of how...

S M L XL by Monacelli Press $85.00
S,M,L,XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural...