Although loft living once meant converting old industrial warehouses, today it has evolved into a style and approach for modern living spaces. This new volume in the Good Ideas series provides more than 50 recent examples of contemporary lofts from around the world, ranging from remodeled industrial buildings to old farmhouses and garages transformed for today's lifestyle. With 800 photographs, Good Ideas: Lofts is an incredible value for anyone who dreams of owning or living in a loft.

Lofts: Good Ideas

Arts & Photography

Cuito, Aurora

Photography & Video

Harper Design

Newly-issued in the series' paperback format, Pools: Good Ideas surveys both spectacular and affordable pools located all over the world.Hundreds of examples of extraordinary pools are examined in depth through visually appealing images, designer's sketches and descriptive texts. The richness of the architectural elements and the sheer beauty of the pools themselves come through on every page. It is the ultimate reference book for pool design, one of the fastest growing design areas in new home construction and home remodeling. Architects who have featured work include Eli Mouyal (Morocco), Tomas Wegner (Germany), Guillem Mas (Spain), Juan de los Rios (Mexico), Christhopher Taverna (France), Charles Boccara (France), B&B Estudio de Arquitectura (Spain), Bruno Lafforgue (Italy), Marco Emili (Italy), Ramon Esteve (Spain), Françoise Pialoux (France), Bruno Lafourcade (Morocco), Victor Espositio (Chile), Unicorn Architects (USA), and Patrick Genard (USA).

Pools: Good Ideas

Montes, Cristina

Tagavi, Fanny

The term Minimalism has not always been used in a favorable sense, especially in architecture, and even today it may be the cause of some confusion and ambiguity. The problem comes from the word’s use in defining a creative current, school or trend when in fact it refers to an aesthetic. At the same time, this aesthetic is not chronologically well defined either and, moreover, interacts with different disciplines. This explains why we find minimalist buildings in periods very far apart from each other and in architects as different as Tadao Ando, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Jacques Herzog &amp; Pierre de Meuron or Luis Barragán, among others. Minimalism DesignSource investigates the minimalism movement, covering the last years of the decade of the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century to inquires into the origins of the term minimalism and in how the minimalism phenomenon played out in other fields like art, painting, fashion, and sculpture has affected minimalism in architecture, define the result of the use of pure and simple lines, the reduction of language elements and, as far as architecture is concerned, the investigation of the treatment of space and of building possibilities.

Minimalism DesignSource

Castillo, Encarna

New ideas on how to design, build, and decorate a home are always of essential value to architects, designers, and homeowners alike. This book offers an extensive collection of single-family houses from all over the world, devised by distinguished international architects and designers who have worked to achieve practical, innovative, and stunning solutions adapted to the specific needs and particular tastes of their clients. This compilation expresses the diversity of current trends in house design and provides an inspirational source of ideas for those active in the field of design or interested in catching up on the latest in contemporary residential architecture.

150 Best House Ideas

Canizares, Ana G.

An acclaimed interior designer and author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Modern Glamour, Kelly Wearstler presents sumptuous photographs of one of her most incredible design achievements yet -- her family home, the Hillcrest Estate
With her impeccable taste, fearless technique, and discerning eye for color, shape, pattern, and texture, Kelly Wearstler's status as an internationally acclaimed interior designed is unparalleled. With buoyant ease, she will confidently cover walls in iconic graphics, select a captivating animal figure as a focal point, or add a lush expanse of contrasting color to an otherwise monochromatic space. Combining grace and flawless skill, she can change a simple room into a work of art. Her home is no exception. Domicilium Decoratus reveals the most private and challenging undertaking of her career: her family's timeless, astonishingly designed residence.
Domicilium Decoratus is a limited-edition book, each copy hand signed by the author, and features breathtaking photography of Wearstler's most treasured design achievement. Readers' imaginations can wander through this personal haven -- from its fourteen-foot ceilings and windows, walls of glass and layers of warm, opulent color, to its witty details, sophisticated materials and finishes, and ornate collection of artifacts gathered from five continents over many years of travel. Hillcrest Estate is a tour de force, confirming Wearstler's place as an interior designer of consummate skill and singular flair. Domicilium Decoratus discloses her personal masterpiece -- a private and enchanting domestic hideaway.
Kelly Wearstler is the author of Modern Glamour and the founder of the Los Angeles architectural interior design firm kwid (Kelly Wearstler Interior Design). Her designs for the trendsetting Viceroy resorts from California to the Caribbean; such taste-making hotels as Maison 140 and Avalon; unique office, retail, and leisure spaces, including BG restaurant and lounge in Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman; and upscale residences such as the Trousdale Estate have been profiled in House and Garden, House Beautiful, Interior Design, Elle Décor, Vogue, and W. Wearstler is also designer of her own kwid line of furnishings and accessories. She lives in Beverly Hills with her husband, hotelier Brad Korzen, and their sons.

Domicilium Decoratus: Hillcrest Estate, Beverly Hills, California

Wearstler, Kelly

Domicilium Decoratus

An acclaimed interior designer and author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Modern Glamour, Kelly Wearstler presents sumptuous photographs of one of her most incredible design achievements yet -- her family home, the Hillcrest Estate
With her impeccable taste, fearless technique, and discerning eye for color, shape, pattern, and texture, Kelly Wearstler's status as an internationally acclaimed interior designed is unparalleled. With buoyant ease, she will confidently cover walls in iconic graphics, select a captivating animal figure as a focal point, or add a lush expanse of contrasting color to an otherwise monochromatic space. Combining grace and flawless skill, she can change a simple room into a work of art. Her home is no exception. Domicilium Decoratus reveals the most private and challenging undertaking of her career: her family's timeless, astonishingly designed residence.
Originally published as a limited-edition book, Domicilium Decoratus features breathtaking photography of Wearstler's very personal design achievement. Readers' imaginations can wander through this personal haven -- from its fourteen-foot ceilings and windows, walls of glass and layers of warm, opulent color, to its witty details, sophisticated materials and finishes, and ornate collection of artifacts gathered from five continents over many years of travel. Hillcrest Estate is a tour de force, confirming Wearstler's place as an interior designer of consummate skill and singular flair. Domicilium Decoratus discloses her personal masterpiece -- a private and enchanting domestic hideaway.
Kelly Wearstler is the author of Modern Glamour and the founder of the Los Angeles architectural interior design firm kwid (Kelly Wearstler Interior Design). Her designs for the trendsetting Viceroy resorts from California to the Caribbean; such taste-making hotels as Maison 140 and Avalon; unique office, retail, and leisure spaces, including BG restaurant and lounge in Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman; and upscale residences such as the Trousdale Estate have been profiled in House and Garden, House Beautiful, Interior Design, Elle Décor, Vogue, and W. Wearstler is also designer of her own kwid line of furnishings and accessories. She lives in Beverly Hills with her husband, hotelier Brad Korzen, and their sons.

The Inspired Home: Interiors of Deep Beauty opens the door to twenty-five of the most beautiful homes in the world—ones owned by top interior designers, fashion designers, artists, and stylists—to reveal how simple principles borrowed from nature can inspire gorgeous, innovative interiors that both calm and embolden us.
To create this unique volume, Karen Lehrman Bloch interviewed renowned aesthetes with homes all over the world, including interior designers Juan Montoya, Darryl Carter, and Vicente Wolf; fashion designers Donna Karan, Alberta Ferretti, and Consuelo Castiglioni; stylist Lori Goldstein; and artist Michele Oka Doner.
The direct and practical advice featured inside, along with a wealth of extraordinary photographs of the homes, teaches us how to feel visually, understand color and texture, and find objects, new and used, with a sense of life. An inspired home, Bloch reveals, fulfills our physical and spiritual needs, provides an enduring sense of rejuvenation and pleasure, and is both easily attainable and timeless.

The Inspired Home: Interiors of Deep Beauty

Lehrman Bloch, Karen

Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals.
For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings―and the patients who lived in them―neglected and abandoned. 
Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors―chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals (The MIT Press)

Payne, Christopher

The MIT Press

A photographic survey of the robotic face of Tokyo buildings and an argument that robot aesthetics plays a central role in architectural history. In Tokyoids, architect Fran ois Blanciak surveys the robotic faces omnipresent in Tokyo buildings, offering an architectural taxonomy based not on the usual variables-size, material, historical style-but on the observable expressions of buildings. Are the eyes (windows) twinkling, the mouth (door) laughing? Is that balcony a howl of distress? Investigating robot aesthetics through his photographs of fifty buildings, Blanciak argues that the robot face originated in architecture-before the birth of robotics-and has played a central role in architectural history. Blanciak first puts the robot face into historical perspective, examining the importance of the face in architectural theory and demonstrating that the construction of architecture's emblematic portraits triggered the emergence of a robot aesthetics. He then explores the emotions conveyed by the photographed buildings' robot faces, in chapters titled "Awe," "Wrath," "Mirth," "Pain," "Angst," and "Hunger." As he does so he considers, among other things, the architectural relevance of Tokyo's ordinary buildings; the repression of the figural in contemporary architecture; an aesthetic of dismemberment, linked to the structure of the Japanese language and local building design; and the influence of automation technology upon human interaction. Part photographic survey, part theoretical inquiry, Tokyoids upends the usual approach to robotics in architecture by considering not the automation of architectural output but the aesthetic properties of the robot.

Tokyoids: The Robotic Face of Architecture

BLANCIAK, François

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory. 
In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers' aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building's shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.

The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time

Smith, Joel

Princeton University Art Museum

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