Books published by Birkhauser

In order to design a building with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction. In these essays, Peter Zumthor expresses his motivation in designing buildings, which speak to our emotions and understanding in so many ways, and possess a powerful and unmistakable presence and personality.

Features text and images that complement each other to create a narrative thread that offers informative insights into the architect's intellectual and visual imagination and expands our understanding of Olgiati's oeuvre.

It is understood that Mies van der Rohe is one of the most important architects of the Modern movement. The projects include Lange and Esters Houses (1927-30), Tugendhat House (1928-30), the Barcelona Pavilion (1928-29), Farnsworth House (1946-51), Lake Shore Drive (1948-51) and the New National Gallery (1962-68).

While 20th century architecture learned to control the climate of a building, the architecture of the 21st century needs to learn to cope with the climate of cities. Problems such as urban heat and air pollution need to be included in planning and design. Based on empirical realities in Cairo, Chongqing, Geneva and Santiago de Chile, the book underlines that the materiality and social practices attached to room heating, compound greening, street alignment or climate policies together form the tissue for contemporary urban climates. It interweaves socio-cultural with meteorological data and pioneers the new concept of "thermal governance" by linking architectural and technological as well as legal and economic dimensions of climate control in urban environments.

Architecture and freehand drawing are inextricably linked. Even in the Gothic period, the principle applied: what you can't build, you at least draw. The same applies to the sketches of Wolf dPrix, co-founder and CEO of Coop Himmelb(l)au. Over the 53 years of their creation, Prix's sketches formed the first stage of every design - despite rapid developments in digital architecture. Whereas his freehand drawings were proxies for completed projects in the 1960s and 1970s, today they serve as strategic guides to the firm's complex buildings. From 2,800 archival drawings, 1,300 examples were selected for publication to represent developmental dynamics in an archive-like format. As invaluable documents of architectural history, they illustrate some 320 selected projects.