A comprehensive look at the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most influential architects Aldo van Eyck (1918–1999) was a Dutch architect, writer, and teacher who helped redefine Modern architecture in the second half of the 20th century. As an advocate for architecture’s engagement with history, culture, climate, and the lived human experience of buildings and urban spaces, he created designs that privileged place and the daily rituals in the lives of its inhabitants over universal ideals. In this volume, enlivened by 300 illustrations from the Aldo van Eyck archive, Robert McCarter provides the first comprehensive study of van Eyck’s 50-year career since his death, guiding readers through the architect’s buildings and unrealized projects, with a focus on the interior spatial experience and on the design and construction processes. Highlighted projects include the Amsterdam Orphanage, the Roman Catholic Church in The Hague, and some of the hundreds of playgrounds he famously designed over the course of his career. McCarter also investigates how van Eyck’s writings and lectures convey the importance of architecture in the everyday lives of people around the world and throughout history. By presenting his design work together with the principles on which it was founded, McCarter illuminates van Eyck’s ethical interpretation of architecture’s place in the world.

Aldo van Eyck

Arts & Photography

Robert McCarter

Architecture

Yale University Press

This book explores 72 buildings from around the world and throughout history and enables readers to experience the projects through text, photos and drawings; the perfect introduction to reading architectural plans. Intended both as an introductory text for students and professionals in the field as well as an accessible read for the general public, Understanding Architecture addresses the basic principles of architecture. The volume is organized in 12 series of chapters based on a key architectural themes - including space, time, matter, gravity, light, silence, dwelling, ritual, memory, landscape, and place. Each chapter begins with an introductory essay, and includes a wide variety of historical examples from around the world, followed by in-depth analysis of 6 key buildings that further exemplify the theme of that chapter. By combining a broad historical sweep with a jargon-free architectural study of space and the direct experience of architecture, this volume is a unique introduction to the experience of architecture.

Understanding Architecture

Juhani Pallasmaa

Phaidon Press

Comprehensive monograph on one of America's greatest living architects by award-winning author and architecture critic Robert McCarter.
This in-depth monograph is devoted to one of the leading United States architects on the contemporary scene: Steven Holl (b.1947). Richly illustrated with hundreds of colour photographs and Holl's own watercolours, the book introduces the artist's personality and works, and the studio he founded in 1976, Steven Holl architects.
Holl studied architecture at the University of Washington at Seattle, and later in Rome and at the Architectural Association in London. He has worked both in the United States and in Europe, and a great deal in the East, especially in Japan. His most important designs, outstanding in their respect for the cultural and historical environment in which they are set, include the Makuhari residential complex in Japan, the St. Ignatius chapel at the University of Seattle, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the extension of the Cranbrook Institute of Science at Bloomfield Hills in Michigan.
A professor at the Graduate School of Architecture of Columbia University, Holl has held courses and given lectures in several other institutions in the United States. He has won many awards, including the Arnold W Brunner prize for architecture in 1990, and the Alvar Aalto medal in 1998.
Robert McCarter has known and taught with Holl for over 30 years and provides an authoritative and personal examination of Holl and his work.
A must-own book for architects as well as for students of the discipline.

Steven Holl

Individual Artists

This beautifully illustrated volume contains 18 essays that offer an important precedent for design professionals through its collective identification of values, principles, and concepts of hierarchy, order, and appropriate action in various real-world situations. It shows how the four architects are squarely within the modern tradition that views architecture not as a style to be catalogued or copied, but as a discipline that must be practiced through its engagement with reality in order to be grounded, transformed, and reborn within a given context. Lacks an index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Constructed Reality,Tanner, Leddy, Maytum, Stacy Architects

Nancy Eklund

William K Stout Pub

Award-winning Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger (born 1932) is one of the most important and critically influential figures in international architecture of the past half-century. He has consistently championed a fundamentally humanist modern architecture, rooted in its place and history, while simultaneously opening up new possibilities for dwelling. Today Hertzberger is rightly regarded as the world's foremost designer of schools, a building type he has almost singlehandedly redefined, and his innovative and fundamentally humane workplaces constitute some of the most compelling contemporary reinterpretations of this type of building. In this volume, acclaimed author and practicing architect Robert McCarter examines Hertzberger's most important architectural works through an analysis of the architect's design process and guiding ideas, particularly as these reflect Hertzberger's engagement with the modernist tradition, architectural history, urban space and the human experience of architecture.

Herman Hertzberger

nai010 publishers