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Title:
Kengo Kuma: breathing architecture. The teahouse of the Museum of Applied Arts Frankfurt

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$29.95
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Summary:
Activated by a compressor system, the teahouse unfolds like a blossom fashioned from the semitransparent high-tech material GORE-Tenara. The book documents the project in extensive picture material of the construction phase, the exterior and interior of the finished building, and floor plans. It includes a text by Kengo Kuma on 'What is a teahouse?' as well as essays by Ulrich Schneider on 'Breathing architecture - building for nomads?', Volker Fischer 'Designing with air - pneumatic structures in architecture, design, art and fashion', Takumi Saikawa 'Japanese and German sense of space', Katinka Temme and Maria-Isabel Martin-Pelaez 'Collaboration in architecture', Gerd Schmid 'Modern teahouse: form, structural analysis, detail', and Stephan Graf von Schulenburg 'Teatime'. All essays are accompanied by rich illustrations related to the text.

Title:
Sir Norman Foster and Partners : Commerzbank, Frankfurt am Main

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Price:
$68.00
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Summary:
Photographs by Ralph Richter.

Title:
Greenwards: the new delight in urban nature

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Price:
$51.90
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Summary:
Urban gardening has become recently popular. We only have to think of the riverbanks restored to their natural state, the urban gardening and urban farming projects springing up all over the world, the green skyscrapers (prospective and actually built) such as, for instance, the utopian farmscrapers of Vincent Callebout, the conversion of former high rail lines into green recreation spaces, the meditation gardens of Piet Oudolf, and the vertical gardens of Patrick Blanc. These days, we feel close to greenery, just as we feel close to our pets. We tend and nurture the seeds and stalks, the leaves and flowers, the shrubs and grasses, the bushes and trees, with a matchless solicitude. These culturally coded natural phenomena also have therapeutic qualities, because they offer us self-determination and the possibility to share in social development. This is nothing less than the reintegration of the first, primal nature into the context of the conditions that have become ubiquitous today into the context of what has, today, become 'second nature'. For some people, such as the campaigners of 'Guerilla Gardening', these plants, wild and domestic, provide a way of criticizing the system; others, such as vertical planners of wall gardens like Ken Yeang, utopia-infatuated and bitten by the green bug, presumably see themselves as an avant-garde working in harmony with the system. Volker Fischer was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main for over ten years. From 1994 to 2012 he has built up a new design department at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt. At the same time, he taught on the history of architecture and design at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Offenbach.