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In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Home and City Life, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.

We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

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This immensely popular, witty, and highly provocative book is changing people's attitudes about convenience, decor, and technology in home design and furnishing 10 black-and-white illustrations..
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When Witold Rybczynski first heard about New Daleville, it was only a developer's idea, attached to ninety acres of cornfield an hour and a half west of Philadelphia Over the course of five years, Rybczynski met and talked to everyone involved in the building of this residential subdivision -- from the developers to the township leaders, whose approval they needed, to the home builders and engineers and, ultimately, the first families who moved in.

Always eloquent and illuminating, the award-winning author of Home and A Clearing in the Distance looks at this "neotraditional" project, with its houses built close together to encourage a sense of intimacy and community, and explains the trends in American domestic architecture -- from where we place our kitchens and fences to why our bathroomsget larger every year.

Last Harvest was voted one of the ten best books of 2008 by the editors of Planetizen, and as Publishers Weekly said, "Rybczynski provides historical and cultural perspectives in a style reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell, debunking the myth of urban sprawl and explaining American homeowners' preference for single-family dwellings.".
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The Best Tool of the Millennium

The seeds of Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying "the best tool of the millennium " An award-winning author who once built a house using only hand tools, Rybczynski has intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- which serves him beautifully on his quest.

One Good Turn is a story starring Archimedes, who invented the water screw and introduced the helix, and Leonardo, who sketched a machine for carving wood screws. It is a story of mechanical discovery and genius that takes readers from ancient Greece to car design in the age of American industry. Rybczynski writes an ode to the screw, without which there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no enlightenment science. One of our finest cultural and architectural historians, Rybczynski renders a graceful, original, and engaging portrait of the tool that changed the course of civilization.

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The Miami estate of Vizcaya, like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power.

In Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, a celebrated architecture critic and writer and an award-winning landscape architect explore the little-known story of Vizcaya, an extraordinary national treasure. Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin use a rich collection of illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document the creation of this stunning house and landscape. Vizcaya was completed in 1916 as the winter retreat of Chicago industrialist James Deering. The cosmopolitan bachelor, who chose Miami for its warm climate, enlisted the guidance of artist Paul Chalfin, with whom he traveled throughout Italy to survey houses and gardens. With the assistance of architect F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., and garden designer Diego Suarez, the 180-acre site on Biscayne Bay was transformed into a grand estate, complete with lagoons, canals, citrus groves, a farm village, a yacht harbor, and a 40-room Baroque mansion.

The lure of this architectural and landscape masterpiece, named for a Spanish Basque province, is undeniable. John Singer Sargent planned a short visit in 1917 but stayed for several months, producing an inspired series of watercolors, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. The book is further enriched by archival material and by the color images of noted photographer Steven Brooke, paying homage to Vizcaya as a lens through which readers learn about architecture, landscape and garden design, interior decoration, and art.

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What is style in architecture? "Style is like a feather in a woman's hat, nothing more," said Le Corbusier, expressing most modern architects' low regard for the subject But Witold Rybczynski disagrees, and in The Look of Architecture, he makes a compelling case for the importance of style to the mother of the arts.
This is a book brimming with sharp observations--that form does not follow function; that the best architecture is not timeless but precisely of its time; that details do not merely complement the architecture--details are the architecture. But the heart of the book illuminates the connection between architecture, interior decoration, and fashion. Style is the language of architecture, Rybczynski writes, and fashion represents the wide and swirling cultural currents that shape and direct that language. The two--style and fashion--are intimately linked; indeed, architecture cannot escape fashion. To set these ideas in sharp relief, he shows us how style and fashion have been expressed in the work of major architects including Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, Charles McKim, Allan Greenberg, Robert Venturi, Enrique Norten, and many others. He helps us see their works anew and ultimately to look afresh at our surroundings.
Style is one of the enduring--and endearing--aspects of architecture, Rybczynski concludes. Furthermore, an architecture that recognizes the importance of style would not be as introspective and self-referential as are so many contemporary buildings. It would be part of the world: Not architecture for architects, but for the rest of us..
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From "one of our most original, accessible, and stimulating writers on architecture" (Library Journal) comes a captivating account of the life and work of Andrea Palladio, the father of domestic architecture. Once, architectural genius was reserved for temples and palaces, not private houses. But with his beautiful, perfectly proportioned villas, Andrea Palladio changed design forever. His 1570 architectural treatise was studied by Thomas Jefferson and Inigo Jones and proved critical to the design of Monticello and the White House. And his influence can still be seen today--in grand porches and columned porticoes, in our front door pediments and ceiling heights. Palladio's villas, situated along the Brenta river, just a short distance from Venice, are an increasingly popular tourist attraction. In The Perfect House, Rybczynski acts as an enchanted and illuminating tour guide, both to some of the world's most elegant dwellings, and to the man who built them. Combining the compelling biographical narrative of his bestselling A Clearing in the Distance with his renowned architectural insight, Rybczynski's charming meditation explores the dawn of domestic architecture, and provides a new way of looking at every building we inhabit or visit today..
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"Palladio is the Bible," Thomas Jefferson once said. "You should get it and stick to it." With his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, Andrea Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form during the late sixteenth century -- and his influence is still evident in the ample porches, columned porticoes, grand ceilings, and front-door pediments of America today.

In The Perfect House, bestselling author Witold Rybczynski, whose previous books have transformed our understanding of domestic architecture, reveals how a handful of Palladio's houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe. More than just a study of one of history's seminal architectural figures, The Perfect House reflects Rybczynski's enormous admiration for his subject and provides a new way of looking at the special landscapes we call "home" in the modern world.

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Price: $6.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An inspired, engaging look at what architecture is and how we live and work in it--by the acclaimed author of Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World. Rybczynski discusses buildings like the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, demonstrates how architecture actually works, and more..
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