Architecture History

Hardcover. Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Starkly beautiful photos of abandoned and converted movie theaters with new essays by Peter Bogdanovich, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and Chester H. Liebs. The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. The well-dressed throng of moviegoers has vanished; the facades are boarded. In Silent Screens, photographer Michael Putnam captures these once prominent cinemas in decline and transformation. His photographs of abandoned movie houses and forlorn marquees are an elegy to this disappearing cultural icon.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 328 pages with bibliography and index. A revised and abridged version of Watkins earlier work on Soane (1753-1837), concentrating on the twelve lectures the eminent architect gave to the Royal Academy between 1810 and 1820, dealing with the huge scope of the lessons to be gained from world architecture.

Hardcover. Harrisburg PA, National Historical Society, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glossy green pictorial boards. No DJ as issued. Volume 16 of the Architectural Treasures of Early America. From material originally published as the Georgian Period edited by Professor William Rotch Ware. 224 page book with historic photographs and home plans. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Smith, Elder and Co., Second Edition, 1858, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Three hardcover volumes with blue leather covers featuring marbled endpapers, raised bands along brown spines with red title plates, gilt decoration. Second Edition. Black & white, and some color illustrations in all 3 volumes by John Ruskin. Volume 1 - "The Foundations". 400 pages. Top edge gilt. Light, faint pencil marginalia to a few pages. Minor abrasion to covers. Clean, tight copy. Volume 2 - "The Sea Stories". 394 pages. Top edge gilt. Faint foxing to some pages. a few moderate abrasions to rear cover. Clean, tight copy. Volume 3 - "The Fall". 362 pages. Top edge gilt. Light pencil marginalia scattered throughout. Faint foxing to some pages. Minor abrasions to covers. Clean, tight copy. A nice set.

Hardcover. Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1st Edition, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 220 pages. Hardcover. Black & white illustrations throughout.Light foxing to edges, pen markings on a couple pages. Dust jacket with shelf wear, small tears to edges. Previous owner's signature to front flyleaf. Otherwise clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Portand ME, Maine Citizens For Historic Preservation, 1st, 1993.00, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 104 pages, oblong format, b&w photos. Scarce monograph on the historical architecture of the reclusive summer colony on the Maine coast. Prominent families such as the Cabots, Saltonstalls, the Lamonts and the Morrows transformed the small fishing village into an exclusive summer retreat and the homes erected for these "rusticators" are examined in detail. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Santa Monica, CA, Hennessey & Ingalls, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 162 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear to dust jacket. Marston was instrumental in establishing Pasadena as a winter resort and then as a thriving community. He and his firm designed 1000 projects, many of which still survive, including cottages and additions to resort hotels, notable commercial and civic buildings such as the Pacific Asia Museum, and the earliest bungalow court. His residential designs span the range of styles from the Arts and Crafts through English Tudor and Monterey Colonial to, most importantly, Mediterranean Revival. This is an important addition to the literature of California's Golden Age of architecture.

Hardcover. NY, Public Affairs, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 329 pages. When Katharine Greider was told to leave her house or risk it falling down on top of her and her family, it spurred an investigation that began with contractors' diagnoses and lawsuits, then veered into archaeology and urban history, before settling into the saltwater grasses of the marsh that fatefully once sat beneath the site of Number 239 East 7th Street.During the journey, Greider examines how people balance the need for permanence with the urge to migrate, and how the home is the resting place for ancestral ghosts. The land on which Number 239 was built has a history as long as America's own. It provisioned the earliest European settlers who needed fodder for their cattle; it became a spoil of war handed from the king's servant to the revolutionary victor; it was at the heart of nineteenth-century Kleinedeutschland and of the revolutionary Jewish Lower East Side. America's immigrant waves have all passed through 7th Street. In one small house is written the history of a young country and the much longer story of humankind and the places they came to call home.

Hardcover. New York, Universe Publishing, 2nd printing, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non paginated. Hardcover. Six pages of pop-ups in excellent condition, each page has several smaller pop-ups laid in. Bright cover boards & bright illustrations throughout by illustrator, Anton Radevsky. A magnificent journey through the history of architecture. Featuring amazing three-dimensional replications of famous buildings from ancient to modern times, The Architecture Pop-Up Book showcases artwork, photographs, pop-ups, and detailed text of the ancient Egyptian pyramids; the great constructions of Greece and Rome, such as the Parthenon and the Colosseum; majestic Asian wonders, including the Taj Mahal; Gothic and Neoclassical masterpieces, such as Notre Dame and the Florence Duomo; and the work of such important modern architects as Gaudi, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Frank Gehry. From a brilliantly elaborate Gothic cathedral nave to a telescoping Chrysler Building skyscraper, the talent and imagination of architects and builders from all eras and from all over the world are displayed and compared here.Clean, unmarked & tight copy.

Hardcover. NY/London, Sotheby's Parke Bernet, Revised Ed., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 376 pages. 26 illustrations in color, and 420 in black and white. Originally published in 1979. John Harris was one of England's leading Architectural Historians at the time this book was written. He was curator of the Drawing Collection for RIBA. (Royal Institute of British Architects). Each section introduces a period such as: the Age of Estate Cartographers and the Garden Converstations, The Country House and Sporting Art: John Wootton, Peter Tillemans and Others, Caneletto and the Architectural Topographers, Gainsborough and the Picturesque, The Art of Turner and Constable. Harris comments on the artists , their style and pictures.

Hardcover. NY, The Monacelli Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 640 pages, pofusely illustrated. In the late nineteenth century, Chicago -- the birthplace of modern architecture in the United States -- was a magnet for aspiring architects. The city was forced to rebuild after the destruction wrought by the Great Fire of 1871 and also to expand to accommodate a surge in the population. The seemingly endless demand for taller and more sophisticated buildings offered young draftsmen an unprecedented opportunity to influence the design of the American skyscraper. The Chicago Architecture Club: Prelude to the Modern documents the history of these draftsmen, the organization they founded, and its role in shaping architectural education and modern architectural practice.

Hardcover. NY, The Monacelli Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 640 pages, pofusely illustrated. In the late nineteenth century, Chicago -- the birthplace of modern architecture in the United States -- was a magnet for aspiring architects. The city was forced to rebuild after the destruction wrought by the Great Fire of 1871 and also to expand to accommodate a surge in the population. The seemingly endless demand for taller and more sophisticated buildings offered young draftsmen an unprecedented opportunity to influence the design of the American skyscraper. The Chicago Architecture Club: Prelude to the Modern documents the history of these draftsmen, the organization they founded, and its role in shaping architectural education and modern architectural practice.

Softcover. Dallas TX, Southern Methodist University, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 221 pages, 202 b&w plates, 20 in color. Historical and cultural history of religious, popular and folk architecture of colonial New Spain. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Paul Holberton Publishing, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 197 pages. Color and b&w plates throughout. This groundbreaking architectural history examines what people actually wanted in their institutional and private patronage over the last two centuries as opposed to what architects and theorists thought they should want - as seen through the prism of Oxford's principal building contractor and craft practitioner, Symm & Company. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 295 pages illustrated in b&w and color. Beginning in the 1730s, Heather Minor tells us, Rome "began to resemble one huge construction site," with a series of ambitious and expensive new building campaigns that transformed the face and substance of the city. From renovations of the Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano and the restoration of the Arch of Constantine to the creation of the Capitoline Museum and the establishment of the papacy's Calcografia, the push for reform not only renewed papal and Church identity but also revived Italian culture as a whole. Based on extensive archival research and full of fascinating stories about the often stormy theological and intellectual debates central to the attempts at reform, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome brings to life the personalities of architects, theologians, and intellectuals and links the extensive architectural programs with powerful shifts in the intellectual climate of the time. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 224 pages. The Dakota is arguably the best-known residential address in the world, home to dozens of New York City's most famous artists, performers, and successful executives. The rare sale of an apartment there, usually at jaw-dropping prices, is newsworthy, as is the financial and architectural health of the building itself, a landmark in every sense of the word.The first true luxury apartment house built in New York City, more than 130 years ago, the Dakota is still the gold standard against which all other apartment buildings are weighed. Historian Andrew Alpern tells the fascinating story of how the Dakota came to be, how Singer sewing magnate Edward Clark dared to build an apartment building luxurious enough to coax the city's wealthy from their mansions downtown for ultra-modern living on what was then the swamplands of the Upper West Side. Redrawn plans of the entire building, published here for the first time, show how Clark created apartments glamorous enough that they made living under a shared roof as acceptable in Manhattan as it already was in Europe's grand capitals, forever revolutionizing apartment life in New York City.

Softcover. Notre Dame IN, Theatre Historical Society, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, stapled wrappers, 40 pages. Profusely illustrated in b&w. A visual history of the design and building of the Earle Theatre in Philadelphia. Some of the world's biggest stars performed there in it's heyday. Old price sticker on rear cover, otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 303 pages. Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 350 pages, b&w illustrations. This illustrated account of the impact of the English Gothic revival on American church architecture in the mid-nineteenth century finds that this fundamentally conservative movement provided the foundation for a new, influential aesthetic. Clean copy.

Softcover. New York, Brooklyn Museum, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 180 pages, b&w and color photography. Very light edge wear, else a very clean, tight copy. Wonderful book on the great Brooklyn Bridge. Includes much historical material, chapters on the design of the bridge with several beautiful fold-outs, and many full color repros. of the many paintings and artwork that have been inspired by the beauty of one of the wonders of the modern world. Even includes a small filmog. of films that have used the Bridge as a background or a major location/set. Published on the 100th anniversary of the opening of the bridge and an exhibition celebrating it, held at The Brooklyn Museum.

Hardcover. Princeton Architectural Press , 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 144 pages. With photos taken in the mid 1980s the author takes us on a pictorial trip along the former Iron Curtain from the Baltic sea coast at Travemunde (West-East Germany) to the Adriatic sea coast at Trieste (Italy-Yugolsalvia [today Slovenia]); with a separate chapter on the Berlin Wall. They are superb photos full of (sad) atmosphere, poignancy and historical importance.

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st pbk., 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 304 pages. Profusely illustrated in b&w. Piranesi has a powerful appeal for our time. His brilliance as a graphic artist, his transformation of the European vision of Classical antiquity, and his themes of fantasy have been the focus of considerable study in recent years. But though these aspects are important for an appreciation of Piranesi's visual significance, they have tended to obscure other factors essential for a complete understanding of his unique achievement. In this copiously illustrated study, John Wilton-Ely - one of the world's foremost authorities on Piranesi - offers a full reappraisal of the complex personality of an astonishingly versatile artist. His book covers every aspect of Piranesi's life and work, emphasizing especially his importance as a pioneer of Roman archaeology, the high quality of his technical illustrations, and his role in the great Graeco-Roman debate of the 1760s. The author brings to life the Enlightenment world of the artist's ideas - fundamentally bound up with the birth of Neo-Classicism - and the search for an appropriately modern form of expression; and he shows the practical and influential form taken by these ideas in Piranesi's architectural projects, his designs for furniture and decorative schemes and his imaginative restoration of antiquities. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. Daring, bold, dramatic, towering, impossibly glamorous: this is how we imagine New York in its golden age, and this is how Samuel H. Gottscho, the preeminent architectural photographer of his generation, captured it. Through his lens, New York of the 1930s became the quintessential modern metropolis, a round-the-clock city in which night was as charismatic as day. Rigorously editing out the Depression-weary city's more seamy aspects--its tenement slums, breadlines, and soup kitchens--Gottscho presented a dreamlike Gotham of skyscrapers and penthouse luxury that literally and figuratively glowed with glamour's sheen. His gimlet eye focused on the bold interplay of sun and shadow, dramatizing the chiseled forms of Manhattan's signature skyline and bridges. The Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Rockefeller Center, the Plaza, the George Washington Bridge--Gottscho brought them all to sparkling life. In this beautifully produced, landmark book, historian Donald Albrecht presents 175 of Gottscho's extraordinary images of the city, from the Battery to Harlem. An introductory essay tells the story of this legendary photographer, describing his working methods and philosophy, while placing his work in the broader context of photographic history.

Hardcover. London, The Architectual Press, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly edgeworn dust jacket. First edition of Reyner Banham's foundational disquisition on Brutalist architecture presenting, per the liner notes, a scholarly history of the documentable facts on Brutalism, an eye-witness account of the period and personalities that produced it, and a comparative critique of numerous buildings regarded rightly or wrongly as examples of Brutalist architecture. Explores texts and buildings by an international roster of architects including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, James Stirling, Sir Owen Williams, Louis Kahn, Johannes van den Broke, Vladimir Bodiansky, William G. Howell, Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Denys Lasdun, Sir Basil Spence, Peter Moro, Andre Wogenscky, Atelier 5, Walter Forderer, Sverre Fehn, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Sir Leslie Martin, Vittorio Vigano, Aldo van Eyck, Paul Rudolph, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kunio Mayekawa, and not least, the architects regarded by Banham as the founders of the New Brutalism, Peter and Alison Smithson. 196 pages, illustrated throughout in black-and-white. Clean copy.