Robert Konieczny, founder and principal of KWK Promes, in Poland, specialises in projects renowned for ingenious concepts and unique design. His works examine closely the nature and interpretations of spatial journeys for the viewer or those who inhabit the space, be it for residential works, public buildings, or international cultural festivals and exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale. The firm’s work especially with kinetic architecture fuses seamless design principles with inventive concepts, namely movable structures that both catch light and create a uniquely experiential environment. A leader in industry innovation, Konieczny and KWK Promes was awarded the World Architecture Festival Award for the best building in 2016.
“Our designs are shaped by logic. Inside these pages we showcase a unique and detailed précis that narrates the story of the concepts behind our buildings.” — Robert Konieczny
“The ideas expressed by Robert Konieczny are quite radical and surprising—his forms are unexpected, and often closed or heavy at first sight. Though the Polish context, in terms of climate, history, and sociology may imply such solutions, KWK has laid out a series of concepts that could readily be applied to other places, surely generating other types of buildings. This is not a style so much as it is an intellectual construct.” — Philip Jodidio
The book departs from a reflection on contemporary issues of environmental and social sustainability. With buildings and cities being one of the primary accelerators of climate change, the tightening of urban environments is one of the mechanisms by which architects and urban planners can affect change. To date, models of urban densification and compact cities have been focused on sites of urban consumption — residential, commercial, civic and social spaces. Little thought has been given to the vast productive hinterlands around the world that support cities, through the growing of food, generation of power, production of goods and disposal of waste.
Working through three scales of analysis, across three cities in the Asia Pacific Region, and deploying varying design research techniques ranging from critical observation to speculative scenario modelling, the book presents a series of projects that seek to retro-fit an existing urban environment with a productive program.
The purpose of this project is to describe a series of models for the folding of production into our cities, with ambition of consolidating all components of human inhabitation within a smaller overall physical and environmental footprint.
Highly praised for its aesthetics and daring design, Japanese architecture has been rooted in socio-critical discourse since World War II. Especially in the 1970s, the house served as a means of criticism and strategic positioning on this “intellectual battlefield”. In the 1990s, Toyo Ito questioned this approach. What followed was a comprehensive debate on the changing relationship between housing, contemporary architecture and society, which was detrimental to criticism – and reflects the global shift towards so-called post-critical philosophy. In this book, 20 Japanese architects – including Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Kentaro Yamazaki – reflect on this change in interviews and essays, revealing a lively, albeit more subtle, form of criticism in contemporary practice.
Kettle’s Yard Art & Artists introduces readers to the key artists represented in the Kettle’s Yard collection. It focuses on works collected by Jim and Helen Ede between 1957 and 1973, which remain on permanent display in the Kettle’s Yard House.
Organised alphabetically by artist surname, each chapter features:
– An image of the artist’s work in situ at Kettle’s Yard
– Reproductions of significant artworks from the collection
– Biographical details covering early life, education, and major achievements
– Insights into the artist’s relationship with the Edes, Kettle’s Yard, and Cambridge
The text is enriched with excerpts from Jim Ede’s writings and archival material, including letters exchanged with the artists. Conceived as a companion to the Kettle’s Yard House Guidebook ISBN 9781904561613, this publication offers an accessible introduction to the art on display at in the Kettle’s Yard house and the stories behind the artists who created it.
From the womb—humankind’s first fully enclosed space—to houses, cities, and nations, architecture has always sought to reproduce that primordial experience of being enveloped. Yet in the context of what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity—marked by the transformation of family structures, the restructuring of intimate relationships, and the penetration of digital technology into private life—the traditional notion of home is no longer a fixed location, but a temporarily emergent structure.
Spanning grand movie palaces, beloved neighbourhood cinemas, and contemporary multiplexes, Thomas Schiff’s photographic survey celebrates the enduring role of movie theatres in American public life. Using his signature panoramic camera, Schiff captures these buildings as vital civic spaces whose architecture reflects the communities they serve. Rather than documenting decline, the book highlights theatres that remain active in new and evolving ways—whether as cinemas, repurposed live performance venues, or cherished landmarks preserved through local advocacy. An introductory essay by film historian Ross Melnick explores the cultural history of the American movie theatre, while a foreword by Barbara Miller of Museum of the Moving Image considers their lasting significance as places of collective experience. Together, text and images offer a compelling portrait of movie theatres as enduring centres of community, memory, and shared cultural life.
Eclectic, eccentric and tirelessly innovative, art crafted from cut paper has experienced an exciting renaissance in recent years. Published to accompany a travelling exhibit organised by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Slash: Paper Under the Knife examines the resurgence of traditional handicraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. Highlighting the work of forty-five international artists, among them Olafur Eliasson, Tom Friedman, William Kentridge, and Kara Walker, the book features not only cut but also burned, torn, laser-cut, shredded and sculpted paper art. In addition, the book includes cut-paper animation, as well as cut paper incorporated in photography and fashion. Works range from small-scale intricate cuttings to large-scale architectural inventions and sculptures. With an essay by well-known decorative arts expert David Revere McFadden, this singular book reveals that, with ingenuity and craftsmanship, one of our most familiar implements can be transformed into unforgettable works of art.
In line with the works on decorators of the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, this book plunges us into the world of ’80s and ’90s. These have witnessed unprecedented experiments in the world of design and architecture. Composed of a rich introduction which gives a synoptic vision and 38 monographs that describe its many faces, this book makes and exceptionally creative period intelligible, and reveals through an abundant iconography, often unpublished, its formidable aesthetic richness.
A new generation of designers stands out; among them Shiro Kuramata, Philippe Starck, Ron Arad, Bob Wilson, Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti. All regenerate creation by refusing the elitism of their predecessors and by favouring the use of new materials. Some turn to recovery, such as the Creative Salvage group, and offer inventive and provocative furniture thanks to welding and assembly. Others, gathered in Italy around Ettore Sottsass and Memphis, combine unexpected colours and patterns to the playful use of plastic laminate. Sliding until the end of the ’90s, the achievements presented in this book mark the desire for a dialogue between artistic references with a new relationship to the industrial aspect, at the dawn of the 21st century and its technological innovations.
Text in English and French.
A unique opportunity to see rare and beautiful drawings by some of the biggest names in European art.
Chatsworth House in Derbyshire holds one of the finest and most significant private collections of drawings in the world, but they are rarely seen and very little has been published on them.
This book showcases 47 drawings from this exceptional collection, including superb watercolours and drawings by famous German Renaissance artists Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein alongside the baroque splendour of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. It will reveal intimate insights into the artists’ practice and their ways of recording the world.
The captivating selection of drawings will be introduced and contextualised by Charles Noble, Curator of Fine Art at Chatsworth House. Each image will be explained and examined based on rigorous new research, offering new insights into the work of some of art’s biggest names.
Of Material, Memory, and Mountains offers insights into the sensitive reconstruction of Chesa Culaischem, a historic house in the Upper Engadin, in the Swiss canton of Grisons. Built in the 16th century, it remained unused and empty for more than 60 years. Magdalena Wallhoff, who owns the house today, revived it with the support of local craftspeople. Together with architects Lena Breitenborn and Charlotte Schoenberger, she now reflects on the undertaking in this book. Core concerns were to be mindful of the house and its legacy, to observe local building tradition and methods, and to learn from and appreciate each other’s work and contributions.
The texts shed light on the entire project from different angles. Newly taken photographs document the house and its surroundings as well as the progress of its reconstruction. Interviews with craftspeople, technical information, drawings, and plans round out this portrait of Chesa Culaischem.
The revived house represents a manifesto for an architecture of minimal intervention that honours local resources and craft, while also demonstrating the chances offered by a contemporary approach to the building culture of the Engadine region. The combination of philosophy and practice can be transferred to other projects, as it responds to broader questions of long-term sustainability in construction.
John Russell Pope is one of America’s most famous architects, responsible for many major works, including the Jefferson Memorial, the House of the Temple and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. This book, The Architecture of John Russell Pope, Selected Works: Houses is the first volume of a two-part monograph, to be followed by a volume on public buildings.
Made in association with the ICAA (the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art), this is a lavishly illustrated study of Pope’s extraordinary house designs, often inspired by classical European architecture, standing proudly among his achievements as the crown jewels in many of the USA’s most vaunted ZIP codes. Originally published during the 1920s, Pope’s exquisite floorplans and sketches accompany period photographs and the original commentary by art historian and traditionalist Royal Cortissoz to create a comprehensive and visually stunning account of a true titan of American design.
Houses include: the residence of Ogden Mills, Woodbury, Long Island; Moses and Edith Taylor’s Glen Manor House, Portsmouth, Rhode Island; Charlcote House, built for James Swan Frick in the suburbs of Baltimore; the now lost Oak Hill mansion, Jericho, Long Island; and Brodhead-Bell-Morton Mansion (aka Morton House) in the exclusive Logan Circle area of Washington DC.
Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge is the culmination of a life spent collecting and living with art. Celebrated as a masterclass in balance and restraint, this quietly radical house brings together modern art, found objects and natural forms in a series of carefully composed rooms alive with light. More than seventy years later, the house remains open for visitors to discover works by acclaimed twentieth-century artists including Ben Nicholson, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Alfred Wallis and Barbara Hepworth.
First published in 1984, A Way of Life was written and assembled by Jim Ede and includes his personal selection of remarkable black and white photographs. Conceived with the same care and attention he devoted to the Kettle’s Yard house, A Way of Life has been described as Ede’s other great work of art. Full of insights into the work of his artist friends, Ede’s reflective commentary is interwoven with excerpts from the spiritual and poetic texts that shaped his ethos, creating a unique and timeless anthology on art and life. More than a record of one house, A Way of Life is an invitation to pause, to look closely, and to discover the underlying harmony of light, space and living.
“To build a home is perhaps the most primal form of architecture. A place of complete particularity to human existence, houses both influence and incubate individuality. A house situates the fragile territory between container and creator, the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” (Gaston Bachelard)
“This selection of 20 houses by Patrick Tighe shows a diverse spectrum of work, all tied by a shared occupation of the west coast. His work highlights the dramatic variance that can exist within residential architecture, how each project has been approached organically and intuitively but held by the familiar siting among the smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time.” (Kerouac, Out/West)
With his book The Good Life, Iñaki Ábalos takes the reader on a tour of seven iconic 20th-century houses. Some of them were actually built, others merely imagined or film sets: Mies van der Rohe’s House with Three Patios, Martin Heidegger’s cabin in the Black Forest, the houses from Jacques Tati’s movie Mononcle, Picasso’s house in Cannes, the New York loft of Andy Warhol and the Factory, the self-build house from Buster Keaton’s movie One Week, the house in David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash.
Ábalos’s selection represents a variety of concepts for living. It is based on a clear archetypal assignment of a place to a particular modern way of living. He analyses each house from key philosophical points of view. He demonstrates relations between architectural concepts, philosophical schools, and various approaches to planning and designing, constructing, and inhabiting a space. Ábalos offers an intellectual introduction to these icons, rather than a manual for the design of residential architecture. He focuses on the 20th-century’s radical pluralism, rather than celebrating modernism as a triumph of positivism. This new and revised edition of this book, first published in 2001 by Gustavo Gili and out of print for many years now, makes the significant contribution to the perennial discourse on concepts of living available again.
House design in Britain and Ireland is guided by climate, landscape and local resources just as much as the centuries-old traditions that have influenced architectural shape and form. Today’s best-known and emerging architects interpret their briefs with imaginative flair: they are transforming houses for the next generation of families by blending their renewed vigour for a local aesthetic with new materials and trends. Many of the new houses featured in British + Irish Modern reflect the architect’s focus on redefining local expectations for form by beautifully juxtaposing the traditional with contemporary structures, thus forging a new vernacular. Architects across this region are wholeheartedly seeking opportunities to re-use existing structures in myriad ways, resulting in surprising and remarkably unique renditions of old houses and buildings made new. Shown in stunning, full-colour photographic detail are hundreds of pages of new and renovated houses, cottages and even converted barns nestled in misty rural valleys, including new and retrofitted modern inner-city terraces and townhouses that make the best use of available space. Houses are selected for levels of comfort, use of materials, and dramatic expression of traditional and contemporary architecture, as well as houses that capitalise on longer and warmer summers imposed by changing weather patterns in this corner of the globe. Houses are designed with indoor spaces and intimate courtyards for play and recreation that draw in light and shield from the extreme weather elements yet maintain an eye on sustainability and affordability. British + Irish Modern reveals a rich array of works that showcase how architecture in Britain and Ireland today has much to teach the world about creative, high-calibre design, innovative application of materials, and cautious but clever reliance on resources.
Lux Guyer (1894–1955) was the first female architect to establish her own studio in Switzerland in 1924. One of her key designs is the Obere Schiedhalde, a single-family home above Küsnacht near Zurich. Completed in 1929 and temporarily occupied by Guyer and her family themselves, it is a variation on her legendary SAFFA-Haus of 1928. Between 2012 and 2018, the building itself as well as the surrounding garden were extensively and carefully restored by Basel-based architecture firm Christ & Gantenbein together with Sven Richter, co-founder of Richter Tobler Architects in Basel. Working in close collaboration with the Canton of Zurich’s office for the preservation of historic monuments, they also called in experts for a historically conscious overhaul of the building’s interior design, colour scheme, furniture, and garden design.
Together with the current owners, the architects made it their mission to not only preserve this significant architectural monument of Swiss Modernism, but also make it accessible to the public through this book. Conceived by graphic designers Ludovic Balland and Annina Schepping, it offers an in-depth documentation of the renovated Obere Schiedhalde. Some 200 photographs of the house, garden, interior details, and furniture, as well as historic and newly drawn plans are supplemented with texts in German and English that tell the story of the building and the entire undertaking of its restoration.
Text in English and German.
Laura Dowling is an expert floral designer artist who combines French-inspired designs with the wildness of nature to create romantic floral arrangements. In her book, she shares her process for creating a beautiful Christmas at home, drawing inspiration from Paris, her experience as White House floral designer, and nature. She provides practical tips on how to incorporate holiday decor in phases using 10 favourite elements and showcasing 10 different design schemes, including a vintage Parisian theme and an Italian-style motif. Whether you want to add subtle touches or go all out for the holidays, Laura’s book offers inspiration tips and tricks, and step-by-step instructions for making your home festive and beautiful.
Like many small residential practices Illinois-based Cohen & Hacker Architects have made a career of doing house additions. In a practice spanning almost 40 years they have evolved strategies for making additions that represent both a theoretical and philosophical position about altering older buildings. They believe that recycling existing houses, retrofitting them to meet new energy standards, preserving their embodied energy as well as their cultural significance is the most sustainable way to practice architecture. The projects included in this book seamlessly and often invisibly extend the fabric of an existing house. Cohen & Hacker’s remodelled architectural interiors, while respectful of the character and scale of the existing house, transform these spaces with ideas taken from modern design, creating spatially open floor plans with traditional details based on the existing architecture.
To help illustrate what Cohen & Hacker describe as transformation, this book contains before and after floor plans and often exterior elevation drawings for every project. Almost every residential addition project and remodeling includes photos of new kitchens and bathrooms, a staple typical of small residential practices. From the largest to the smallest project the same care and attention to detail characterises their work.
The Arts and Crafts Movement, founded in the philosophies of John Ruskin and William Morris, produced some of the world’s most enduring architectural masterpieces. Author and architect David Cole presents the 100 great Arts and Crafts houses, each individually described and analysed with insightful detail and floor plans, and illustrated with stunning photography. Beginning with Morris’s own iconic Red House, the book traces the fifty-year span of the movement, with a short chapter dedicated to each of these extraordinary houses: from the works of the pioneer Arts and Crafts architects, to the great reformer architects of the next generation, to the craftsman architects who took their lives and their work to the countryside, to the movement’s Scottish architects, and finally to the houses of the Garden Cities and suburbs built through the movement’s last decade before the First World War. The book features the great houses of some forty of the movement’s most renowned architects, including Philip Webb, R. Norman Shaw, E.S. Prior, William Lethaby, C.F.A. Voysey, Edgar Wood, Ernest Gimson, the Barnsley brothers, C.R. Ashbee, M.H. Baillie Scott, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Robert Lorimer, Parker and Unwin, and many others.
As Morris famously said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
Based in New Canaan, Connecticut, David Prutting, Prutting + Co, has built some of the finest contemporary houses in the area. This stunning publication features many of these spectacular residences, as founder David Prutting takes readers behind the scenes to offer a unique builder’s perspective.
Working in an area that was once a hot bed of modernism—where influential modernist architects Marcel Breuer, Phillip Johnson, and Eliot Noyes designed pioneering houses—Prutting has built many award-winning homes that have been inspired and influenced by this architectural heritage. These contemporary residences—designed by Steven Holl Architects, Toshiko Mori Architects, Joeb Moore & Partners, Olson Kundig, KieranTimberlake, plus others—showcase why Prutting + Co. has a well-earned reputation for building custom homes.
It takes a courageous client, a visionary architect, and an exacting builder to bring these homes to life. But it’s the builder who bridges the gap between an architect’s drawings and a client’s reality. In A Builder’s Life Done Well, Prutting offers a down-to-earth look at how his firm navigates difficult sites and complex builds. Recounting his 50-year career, he imparts words of wisdom and advice for clients, architects, and contractors, sharing his experience of building homes and running a successful business.
Four years after the publication of the first A Home Away from Home, our fascination with exceptional private houses has only grown stronger.
The 30 distinctive guesthouses presented in this second edition share that spirit. They are places where architecture, landscape and hospitality come together naturally; places conceived not merely to accommodate travellers, but to make them feel that, for a few precious days or weeks, they genuinely belong there.
Some are deeply personal homes whose owners have opened their doors to guests. Others are remarkable architectural projects created around a particular landscape or way of life. There are houses shaped by the sea and others surrounded by forests, olive groves, vineyards or mountains; intimate retreats for two and generous residences made for families and groups of friends. What connects them is not a particular style or destination, but a certain attitude toward living. From a restored centuries-old house among the rolling hills of Tuscany to a secluded sanctuary surrounded by tropical vegetation in Sri Lanka; from the elemental beauty of a Cycladic island house overlooking the Aegean to a contemporary loft immersed in the energy of Athens, these homes show how wonderfully diverse the idea of a home away from home can be.
Architecture naturally plays an important role, yet these houses are not included simply because they photograph beautifully. The most memorable homes are those in which design becomes almost invisible once you begin to live in them. Natural light, tactile materials, open kitchens, shaded terraces, gardens and swimming pools become part of the rhythm of the day. Indoors and outdoors merge, the surrounding landscape enters the house, and carefully designed spaces encourage a wonderfully unstructured way of living.
This second volume of A Home Away from Home is not simply a collection of 30 beautiful guesthouses. It is an invitation to discover 30 different ways of living well. Each has its own identity, atmosphere and story.
The Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace (ALICE), affiliated with the School of Architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, is an educational facility dedicated to preparing students for the practice of architecture. To cultivate the ability to create or shape space, students must be confronted with an educational framework that prepares them for the field’s many practical challenges, from cultural, social, environmental, and physical concerns to working with the wide range of collaborators who bring their creativity and expertise together in the design process. The second volume in a four-part series on ALICE, The House 1 Catalogue focuses on a prototype, House 1, developed and constructed throughout the academic year. This mobile structure incorporates ALICE’s core values of communication and collaboration in building processes. It will travel as part of an exhibition to several major cities, where it will be continually modified and reconfigured. With five hundred illustrations, this book continues the experimental narrative Dieter Dietz, Matthias Michel, and Daniel Zamarbide began in The Invention of Space, which will be further developed in the forthcoming third and fourth volumes in the series. ALICE plays a key role in the success of one of Europe’s leading schools of architecture. This book, together with the three other volumes in the series, two of which are still-to-be-published, will provide an opportunity to explore the exceptional learning environment ALICE offers.
Josef Frank, born 1885 in Baden near Vienna, ranks among Europe’s most significant architects of the twentieth century. His designs for furniture and textiles also make him one of the eminent figures of modernist interior design. Born into a Jewish family, growing anti-Semitism forced him to emigrate in 1933. He first went to Sweden and in 1939 to the USA, returning to Sweden again in 1947, where he lived and worked until his death in 1967.
Josef Frank – Spaces is the first comprehensive book on Frank’s single-family houses. It explores the evolution of his designs over the years and investigates the influences that shaped his work: Adolf Loos’s spatial plan concept, Le Corbusier’s ideas, and Hermann Muthesius’s seminal book The English House. It also looks at Frank’s own architectural concepts of movement and stairs in residential buildings. The second part features six of Frank’s houses in greater detail, including images and plans, and in descriptive texts that also interpret their characteristics. The selection comprises the villas Claëson and Wehtje in Falsterbo, Sweden, the villas Wien XIII and Beer in Vienna, the House MS in Los Angeles, and the unrealised Fantasy House 9 (Accidental House). A complete catalogue of Frank’s single-family houses rounds out the book.
The lure of a home by the ocean resonates with us all, bringing to mind the beauty and changing moods of the water, the intoxicating salty scent and the sound of waves against the shore. But what makes a beach house, and how does the idea of a home by the coast differ across the world? This stunning edition showcases a global snapshot of beautifully designed coastal homes, with a diverse mix of types, from Hamptons style to more minimalist residences, reflecting the different landscapes and locations. Lavishly illustrated with full-colour images of award-winning architecture combined with spectacular views, this curated list brings together the most recent designs from highly regarded architects to produce the best examples of contemporary beach house residential design. This book is a captivating glimpse into the irresistible world of modern and stylish contemporary living in homes that take full advantage of their beachside settings.