San Antonio College Library

Available again in paperback, this first survey of building types ever written remains an essential guide to vital and often overlooked features of the architectural and social inheritance of the West. Here Nikolaus Pevsner shares his immense erudition and keenly discerning eye with readers curious about the ways in which architecture reflects the character of society. He describes twenty types of buildings ranging from the most monumental to the...

Buildings are not benign; rather, they commonly manipulate and abuse their human users. Architectural Agents makes the case that buildings act in the world independently of their makers, patrons, owners, or occupants. And often they act badly. Treating buildings as bodies, Annabel Jane Wharton writes biographies of symptomatic structures in order to diagnose their pathologies. The violence of some sites is rooted in historical trauma; the unhealthy...

Contains seventy-seven duotone photographs in which David Plowden revisits small American towns to record the changes that have occurred since he first photographed them forty years earlier.

Visitors to the New York Public Library's main reading room are not likely to gaze enraptured at ornamental moldings, cherubs and vast, uninterrupted ceilings as they cope with poor lighting, uncomfortable chairs and often slow service. Reed's room-by-room architectural tour, a panegyric to the Fifth Avenue building, asks us to believe it is "a people's palace," even though its ornate turn-of-the-century style modeled on classical Paris and Rome has...