[PDF] Civitas By Design eBook

Author : Howard Gillette, Jr.
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 15,76 MB
Release : 2011-06-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0812205286

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Since the end of the nineteenth century, city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but also to strengthen civic ties through better design of built environments. From Ebenezer Howard and his vision for garden cities to today's New Urbanists, these visionaries have sought to deepen civitas, or the shared community of citizens. In Civitas by Design, historian Howard Gillette, Jr., takes a critical look at this planning tradition, examining a wide range of environmental interventions and their consequences over the course of the twentieth century. As American reform efforts moved from progressive idealism through the era of government urban renewal programs to the rise of faith in markets, planners attempted to cultivate community in places such as Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York; Celebration, Florida; and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast. Key figures—including critics Lewis Mumford and Oscar Newman, entrepreneur James Rouse, and housing reformer Catherine Bauer—introduced concepts such as neighborhood units, pedestrian shopping malls, and planned communities that were implemented on a national scale. Many of the buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures that planners envisioned still remain, but frequently these physical designs have proven insufficient to sustain the ideals they represented. Will contemporary urbanists' efforts to join social justice with environmentalism generate better results? Gillette places the work of reformers and designers in the context of their times, providing a careful analysis of the major ideas and trends in urban planning for current and future policy makers.

Author : Malcolm Moor
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 582 pages
File Size : 37,89 MB
Release : 2006-09-27
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1134366558

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The last decade has seen the rise of urban design which has taken a central position in the new agendas for urban regeneration and renaissance. Urban design has moved from marginality to mainstream. The principles espoused by urban designers over the past thirty years are now accepted as key to a better urban environment and as we move towards greater sustainability, different ideas are emerging that are challenging some of the accepted urban design norms; urban design is at a watershed. Urban Design Futures presents essays from an international cast of authors to review progress and explore emerging ideas: should urban design reflect the future rather than recreate the past? What are the new driving forces that will shape urban living and hence urban design in the future? This book explores new concepts and points the way towards a series of urban design paradigms for the twenty-first century.

Author : Douglas Caywood
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 15,90 MB
Release : 2007-06-07
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1136358455

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The Designer's Workspace presents an extensive resource of distinguished firms' responses to the design of their own offices. Featuring everything from technical detail to interior design, it illustrates what these designers see as the major considerations for modern workplace design. This book reveals design solutions, details, and concepts that have been explored and used by design firms from around the world. From the first impressions at the Reception area and Lobby, to the appeal and diverse uses of the meeting areas, to the functionality and sleekness of the Design Studio itself, it illustrates how the designer's office can be quite unique in style, function, and character whilst also varying from culture to culture. No two designers will produce the same atmosphere. With this objective, The Designer's Workspace showcases an array of designs from the traditional to the contemporary, from the historic renovation to the new office tower and serves as a portfolio of the varied responses and solutions found to the challenge of designing the modern office.

Author : Mark C. Childs
Publisher : UNM Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 18,2 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9780826330048

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This discussion of what makes public places appealing and useful will inspire those involved with public planning and design.

Author : Katrin Dziekan
Publisher : Waxmann Verlag
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 39,69 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 3830978812

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Based on the authors' rich experiences, this book demonstrates that evaluation of measures aimed at more sustainable mobility is a useful task which can be learned by everybody. By integrating theory and practice it offers richly-illustrated case examples and cartoons to provide hands on advice. It offers a framework for thinking about evaluation of mobility-related measures and outlines the necessary steps for good evaluation practice. Key Features •Richly illustrated by comics and on real measure examples. •A step-by-step hands on guide for practitioners.

Author : Miles Orvell
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 23,35 MB
Release : 2012-10-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0807837563

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For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

Author : Don Norman
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 49,10 MB
Release : 2007-03-20
Category : Design
ISBN : 0465004172

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Why attractive things work better and other crucial insights into human-centered design Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed. In this book, he takes his thinking several steps farther, showing that successful design must incorporate not just what users need, but must address our minds by attending to our visceral reactions, to our behavioral choices, and to the stories we want the things in our lives to tell others about ourselves. Good human-centered design isn't just about making effective tools that are straightforward to use; it's about making affective tools that mesh well with our emotions and help us express our identities and support our social lives. From roller coasters to robots, sports cars to smart phones, attractive things work better. Whether designer or consumer, user or inventor, this book is the definitive guide to making Norman's insights work for you.

Author : Nicholas De Monchaux
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 379 pages
File Size : 38,91 MB
Release : 2011-03-18
Category : Design
ISBN : 026201520X

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How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex"—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics. Playtex's spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA's engineers. It was only when those attempts failed—when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements—that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job. In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

Author : Larry Beasley
Publisher : On Point Press
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 22,99 MB
Release : 2019-05-15
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0774890339

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Until the 1980s, Vancouver was a typical mid-sized North American city. But after the city hosted Expo 86, something extraordinary happened. This otherwise unremarkable urban centre was transformed into an inspiring world-class city celebrated for its livability, sustainability, and competitiveness. This book tells the story of the urban planning phenomenon called “Vancouverism” and the philosophy and practice behind it. Writing from an insider’s perspective, Larry Beasley, a former chief planner of Vancouver, traces the principles that inspired Vancouverism and the policy framework developed to implement it. A prologue, written by Frances Bula, outlines the political and urban history of Vancouver up until the 1980s. The text is also beautifully illustrated by the author with 200 colour photographs depicting not only the city’s vibrancy but also the principles of Vancouverism in action.