Witold Rybczynski

Walk through five centuries of homes both great and small—from the smoke-filled manor halls of the Middle Ages to today's Ralph Lauren-designed environments—on a house tour like no other, one that delightfully explicates the very idea of "home." You'll see how social and cultural changes influenced styles of decoration and furnishing, learn the connection between wall-hung religious tapestries and wall-to-wall carpeting, discover how some of our most welcome luxuries were born of architectural necessity, and much more. Most of all, Home opens a rare window into our private lives—and how we really want to live.

A Short History of an Idea

Home

In this new work, prizewinning author, professor, and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski returns to the territory he knows best: writing about the way people live, just as he did in the acclaimed bestsellers Home and A Clearing in the Distance. In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique. Makeshift Metropolis describes how current ideas about urban planning evolved from the movements that defined the twentieth century, such as City Beautiful, the Garden City, and the seminal ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs. If the twentieth century was the age of planning, we now find ourselves in the age of the market, Rybczynski argues, where entrepreneurial developers are shaping the twenty-first-century city with mixed-use developments, downtown living, heterogeneity, density, and liveliness. He introduces readers to projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Yards in Washington, D.C., and, further afield, to the new city of Modi’in, Israel—sites that, in this age of resource scarcity, economic turmoil, and changing human demands, challenge our notion of the city. Erudite and immensely engaging, Makeshift Metropolis is an affirmation of Rybczynski’s role as one of our most original thinkers on the way we live today.

Ideas About Cities

Makeshift Metropolis

Traces the history of the screwdriver from a sketch in da Vinci's pad to a later patent and mass production.

A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw

One Good Turn

Provides tools to understanding the beauty, art, and function in architecture through descriptive visits to opera houses, museums, war memorials, and a private retreat.

A Humanist's Toolkit

How Architecture Works

Discusses the origin of the week, the observance of the Sabbath, and the development of the weekend, describing weekend behavior and modern preoccupation with leisure time

Waiting for the Weekend

Chronicles the work and insight that marked the author's experience as the boathouse he set out to build expanded to become a full-scale home, and contains observations about construction, space, and beginnings.

The Most Beautiful House in the World

An inspired, engaging look at what architecture is and how we live and work in it--by the acclaimed author of Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World. Rybczynski discusses buildings like the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, demonstrates how architecture actually works, and more.

A Journey Through Architecture

Looking Around

A deep exploration of modern life that examines our cities, public places, and homes In Mysteries of the Mall, Witold Rybczynski, the author of How Architecture Works, casts a seasoned critical eye on the modern scene. His subject is nothing less than the broad setting of our metropolitan world. In thirty-four discerning essays, Rybczynski ranges over topics as varied as shopping malls, Central Park, the Opéra Bastille, and America's shrinking cities. Along the way, he examines our post-9/11 obsession with security, the revival of the big-city library, the rise of college towns, our fascination with vacation homes, and Disney's planned community of Celebration. By looking at contemporary architects as diverse as Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, and Bing Thom, revisiting old masters such as Palladio, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and considering such unsung innovators as Stanley H. Durwood, the inventor of the cineplex, Rybczynski ponders the role of global metropolises in an age of tourism and reflects on what kinds of places attract us in the modern city. Mysteries of the Mall is required reading for anyone curious about the contemporary world and how it came to be the way it is.

And Other Essays

Mysteries of the Mall

A architectural perspective on urban development explains how cities have evolved into the individual locales of the present, focusing on places as diverse as New York City, Charleston, Chicago, and New Orleans. 40,000 first printing. BOMC & QPB Alt. Tour.

Urban Expectations in a New World

City Life

The Perfect House

Dom. Krótka historia idei

Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway

Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada

National Gallery of Canada

La construction de nouveau Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, étudiée dans le contexte de deux siècles d'architecture européenne et américaine de musées. Croquis, photos et dessins, illustrent l'histoire du Musée et les innovations architecturales de Moshe Safdie.

The Architecture of the National Gallery of Canada

A Place for Art

One of the nation's foremost experts on architecture discusses the role of style in the "language" of the discipline, and shows how Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, Allan Greenberg, and others are influenced by it.

The Look of Architecture

The award-winning author of A Clearing in the Distance focuses on the designs, constructions, and writings of the Italian Renaissance architect, noting the influence of his works on such structures as the White House. 60,000 first printing.

A Journey with the Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Home and City Life, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure 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, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross. Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century

A Clearing In The Distance

"In the hands of one of our best writers on architectures and design, a history of chairs becomes a revealing history of design and leisure, and ultimately of how we see ourselves"--

From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History

Now I Sit Me Down

“[A] compact epic.… Brisk, lucid and enjoyable.” —Richard Snow, Wall Street Journal The renowned design writer on the extraordinary history of car design. In this lively and entertaining work, Witold Rybczynski—hailed as “one of the best writers on design working today” by Publishers Weekly—tells the story of the most distinctive cars in history and the artists, engineers, dreamers, and gearheads who created them. Delving into more than 170 years of ingenuity in design, technology, and engineering, he takes us from Carl Benz’s three-wheel motorcar in 1855 to the present-day shift to electric cars. Along the way, he looks at the emergence of mass production with Henry Ford’s Model T; the Golden Age of American car design and the rise of car culture; postwar European subcompacts typified by the Mini Cooper; and the long tradition of the streamlined and elegant sports car. Rybczynski explores how cars have been reflections of national character (the charming Italian Fiat Cinquecento), icons of a subculture (the VW bus for American hippies), and even emblems of an era (the practical Chrysler minivan). He explains key developments in automotive technology, including the electric starter, rack-and-pinion steering, and disc brakes, bringing to light how the modern automobile is the result of more than a century of trial and error. And he weaves in charming accounts of the many cars he’s owned and driven, starting with his first—the iconic Volkswagen Beetle. The Driving Machine is a breezy and fascinating history of design, illustrated with the author’s delightful drawings.

Witold Rybczynski

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