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Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
Peter Geoffrey Hall · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorInfinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Rebecca Solnit, Ben Pease, Shizue Seigel · 161 pages
**"What makes a place?"** *Infinite City*, Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning, culture and history in one locale, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers and cartographers, Solnit has compiled twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates San Francisco and its surroundings as exp
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
Simon Schama · 698 pages
This text explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Examines seventeenth-century Dutch life, history, and culture.
Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo
Margot Mifflin · 160 pages
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson · 560 pages
"As I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how glorious it was that this was exactly how this land must have looked to centuries of people, quietly going about their daily business – eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavouring to be amused – and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mo
Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Robert Hughes · 534 pages
The founding of Rome is shrouded in legend, but current archaeological evidence supports the theory that Rome grew from pastoral settlements and coalesced into a city in the 8th century BC. It developed into the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and finally the Roman Empire. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in the Western
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Robert M. Edsel · 473 pages
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museu
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
Timothy Egan · 368 pages
How a lone man's epic obsession led to one of America's greatest cultural treasures: Prizewinning writer Timothy Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most famous photographs in Native American history and the driven, brilliant man who made them. Edward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. He moved in
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis · 462 pages
Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet
Jennifer Homans · 672 pages
Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and
And the Pursuit of Happiness
Maira Kalman · 471 pages
Filled with original art and photographs by the author who is also an illustrator and designer, each chapter represents a month of Kalman's yearlong travel across the U.S. and her reflections on democracy. She starts with a celebration of Barack Obama's Presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., continues with the month of February and Abraham Lincoln, and explores democracy and the pursuit o
Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture
Ross King · 193 pages
The superb story of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and the design and construction of the Great Cathedral in Florence - one of the most magnificent achievements of the Italian Renaissance.Even in an age of soaring skyscrapers and cavernous sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, with its immense, terracotta-tiled cupola, still retains a rare power to astonish. Yet
The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
Anne-Marie O'Connor
Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O'Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt's 1907 masterpiece -- the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S.
The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story
Janet Gleeson · 324 pages
An extraordinary episode in cultural & scientific history comes to life in the fascinating story of a genius, greed, & exquisite beauty revealed by the obsessive pursuit of the secret formula for one of the most precious commodities of eighteenth century European royalty-fine porcelain.
A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century
Witold Rybczynski · 480 pages
In a collaboration between writer and subject, the author of Home and City life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure and a man 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, Boston's Back Bay Fens, Illinois's
Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter's
R.A. Scotti · 299 pages
It was the splendor--and the scandal--of the age, the defining event of the high Renaissance. In 1506, the ferociously ambitious Renaissance Pope Julius II tore down the most sacred shrine in Europe--the millennium-old St. Peter's Basilica built by the Emperor Constantine over the apostle's grave--to build a better basilica. Construction of the new St. Peter's spanned two centuries, embroiled 27 p
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I
Roger Shattuck · 397 pages
The modernism of our times explained through a study of four significant men.
Blue: The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau · 216 pages
"Blue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. Once considered a hot color, it is now icy cool. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now pick it as their favorite color. In this history, the renowned medievalist Michel Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearances in prehistoric art to its international
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Dawn of the Renaissance
Johan Huizinga · 344 pages
Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body
Hugh Aldersey-Williams · 320 pages
It is the inspiration for art, the subject of science and the source of some of the greatest stories ever told. From ancient body art to plastic surgery, from early anatomists to conceptual artists, grave-robbers to bionic athletes, our changing attitudes to the human body, how it works, what it should look like, how to live with it, what it means, tell us more about ourselves than almost any othe
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
Erik Larson · 464 pages
From back cover: Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spell-binding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men - the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America's place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik