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A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
Christopher W. Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Image of the City
Kevin Lynch · 194 pages
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion--imageability--and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood · 1,288 pages
Ways of Seeing
John Berger · 166 pages
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever."Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we e
Architecture: Form, Space, & Order
Francis D.K. Ching · 446 pages
Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
Edward R. Tufte · 156 pages
Jacket design: Dmitry Krasny. Other artwork by Bonnie Scranton, Dmitry Krasny, and Weilin Wu. Few would disagree: Life in the information age can be overwhelming. Through computers, the Internet, the media, and even our daily newspapers, we are awash in a seemingly endless stream of charts, maps, infographics, diagrams, and data. Visual Explanations is a navigational guide through this turbule
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Wassily Kandinsky · 92 pages
A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his o
Interaction of Color
Josef Albers · 81 pages
Josef Albers' "Interaction of Color" is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers' unique ideas of colour experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edi
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
Rudolf Arnheim · 485 pages
Since its first publication in 1954, this work has established itself as a unique classic. It applies the approaches and findings of modern psychology to the study of art: it describes the visual process that takes place when people create- or look at- works in the various arts, and explains how the eye organizes visual material according to definite psychological laws. Fresh in thought, clean in
The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst · 350 pages
A readable manual and reference on modern typography, exploring the art and history of the field as well as technical details. Includes b&w illustrations, a glossary, and reference appendices. This second edition includes a new chapter on digital typography, expanded information on typefaces and designers, and a deeper look into the history of lett
After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
Arthur C. Danto · 272 pages
History of Beauty
Umberto Eco, Girolamo De Michele · 438 pages
From the Publisher: What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual
The Power of Art
Simon Schama · 448 pages
Taking eight famous painters and their great masterpieces, this book takes you back to the intense moment in history when these works were conceived and born. In each case the artist is backed into a corner, and given a chance to confound his rivals, enemies and critics.
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.
E.H. Gombrich · 466 pages
"Considered a great classic by all who seek a meeting ground between science and the humanities. Art and Illusion examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of present-day theories of visual perception information and learning. Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines many ideas on the imitation of nature and the function
Rembrandt, 1606-1669: The Mystery of the Revealed Form
Michael Bockemuhl · 96 pages
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
T.J. Clark · 338 pages
Paris in the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a centre of modern life. This book argues that the art of Manet and his contemporaries was an attempt to give form to that modernity.
On Photography
Susan Sontag · 207 pages
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography, among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh · 351 pages
Most unusually among major painters, Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) was also an accomplished writer. His letters provide both a unique self-portrait and a vivid picture of the contemporary cultural scene. Van Gogh emerges as a complex but captivating personality, struggling with utter integrity to fulfil his artistic destiny. This major new edition, which is based on an entirely new translation, rein
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
Van Gogh: The Life
Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith · 953 pages
Seven Days in the Art World
Sarah Thornton · 274 pages
The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Ar
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
Gilles Deleuze · 209 pages