num_pages: 368
description: An essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday livesWe spend most of our days and nights in buildings living and working and sometimes playing. Buildings often overawe us with their beauty. Architecture is both setting for our everyday lives and public art formbut it remains mysterious to most of us.In How Architecture Works  Witold Rybczynski one of our best most stylish critics and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his architectural writing answers our most fundamental questions about how goodand not-so-goodbuildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture he takes us behind the scenes revealing how architects as different as Frank Gehry Renzo Piano and Robert A. M. Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to read plans how buildings respond to their settings and how the smallest detailof a stair balustrade for instancecan convey an architect's vision. Ranging widely from a war memorial in London to an opera house in St. Petersburg from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. to a famous architect's private retreat in downtown Princeton How Architecture Works  explains the central elements that make up good building design. It is an enlightening humanist's toolkit for thinking about the built environment and seeing it afresh.Architecture if it is any good speaks to all of us Rybczynski writes. This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.
language: English
title: How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux