Book Description
The first biography of an amazing modern master whose architectural vision and political skill have shaped our environment. Michael Cannell reveals here the history and personality behind the enigmatic Pei, our most famous living architect.
90 black-and-white photographs.
Customer Reviews:
Helpful insights into so many memorable projects and the man whose vision they were.......2006-01-22
You know the work of I.M Pei even if you don't know that he was the architect behind them. You have seen the glass Pyramid at the Lourvre (although there was much more to his design than that visible and memorable landmark), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington D. C. , the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Hancock Place in Boston, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong and many others.
Like a great many important architects, he caused strenuous debate, derisive rejection by some, loud praise from others. Many link him as a disciple of Walter Gropious and others reject the very idea that such an original thinker would be derivative of another.
This very fine book will help you understand more about his work, how the projects were selected, the requirements and desires behind the designs, and what the vision was that resulted in all those buildings with the sharp geometric lines. The man himself is also quite interesting. The firm he founded continues (though he retired from it in 1990), however, in an interview in 2004 he said that he stopped taking new projects in 2001. He was born in 1917, so he has had a very active and long career.
If you think you hate his work, I encourage you to step back and read this book. It will help you better understand his designs. They do make a great deal of sense and I think they are beautiful. Certainly, while they still challenge some, they do seem less outrageous compared to the designs one sees going up around the world today.
A Wonderful Tale.......2000-04-04
A brilliant and well-thought out look at one of this centuries most prolific architects. All of the stories behind his greatest achievements are here, including the scandal the erupted around the building of the Louvre pyramid. Pei is shown to be an practical innovator with his own particular philosophy; his elegant lines and deceptively simple ideas set him apart from the complicated ideology of the Bauhaus movement and architects like Le Corbusier. A very good read.
Average customer rating:
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Sketching People and Places in All Mediums (Watson-Guptill Painting Library Series)
Jose Maria Parramon
Manufacturer: Watson-Guptill Pubns
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Instructional & How-To
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
Drawing
| Instructional & How-To
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Drawing
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0823048527 |
Product Description
Another alluring Kodak publication that makes everyone want to be a better photographer! On shiny, slick glossy paper with bright attractive photos and interesting yet easy instructions. Covers Photography of cats & dogs, Creative Close-ups of Flowers, Underwater Photography, Pictorial Lighting Outdoors, A Galaxy of Glassware, and Photography from the Air! You can do it!
Average customer rating:
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The Here's How Book of Photography
Eastman Kodak Company
Manufacturer: Kodak Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Photography
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| How-to
| Photography
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0879850019 |
Customer Reviews:
Good Service.......2007-01-10
I ordered this book for school and I was worried that it wouldn't make it in time to start class, so I ordered early. When I emailed the supplier about it's delivery I received no response, but the book arrived in the next day or two, good service!
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of the American Planning Association, published by American Planning Association on September 22, 1999. The length of the article is 876 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Cooperating with Nature: Confronting Natural Hazards with Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Communities.(Review) (book reviews)
Author: Charles Eadie
Publication:
Journal of the American Planning Association (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1999
Publisher: American Planning Association
Volume: 65
Issue: 4
Page: 452
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century.
Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by University of Saskatchewan on December 1, 2001. The length of the article is 881 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End. (Reviews: modern Britain). (book review)
Author: Anne Clendinning
Publication:
Canadian Journal of History (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2001
Publisher: University of Saskatchewan
Volume: 36
Issue: 3
Page: 584(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Amazon.com
"We've created a mean economy--a sumptuous heaven for some, an ungodly struggle for most, and a living hell for many," writes Jeff Gates in Democracy at Risk. The United States, he says, suffers from "affluenza." It is a democracy in name only: "Who would vote for a system in which just three Americans--Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen plus Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett--have a net worth larger than the combined GDP of the forty-one poorest nations and their 550 million people?" What's more, American capitalism has been a global disaster: "The United States should begin this new century of capitalism with a mea culpa. Our stature in the world community would be much enhanced if we simply concede what everyone already knows--that our pell-mell worldwide pursuit of profit has been accompanied by considerable human, political, and ecological damage."
And yet it would be wrong to call Democracy at Risk a standard left-wing appraisal. Gates considers himself a capitalist, and he calls for sharing the fruits of capitalism with all workers through stock ownership. Conservatives will regard Gates as a quasi Marxist with his calls for imposing "a capital commons user fee" on international trade, a foreign policy whose main concern is "the worldwide alleviation of poverty" rather than national security, and his near-obsession with concentrations of wealth. Democrarcy at Risk is, at its heart, a progressive book, but one not beholden to the Democratic Party. Gates's criticism of Social Security, for instance, would spring from the mouth of few politicians of any stripe. He lambastes it as "an income transfer funded with a job tax." At times, the book seems unfocused, with its 19-point plan in the first chapter. But nobody can doubt Gates's commitment to reducing the inequality of wealth or his passion for fighting plutocracy. The book includes endorsements from Noam Chomsky, William Greider, and Ralph Nader; for readers who admire these minds, Democracy at Risk will be a volume. --John J. Miller
Book Description
From the leading voice in the "shared capitalism" movement comes a manifesto for spreading wealth and creating a truly democratic society
The year 2000 is the first election year of the twenty- first century. For attorney-activist Jeff Gates, it represents the ideal occasion to own up to the failings of our political system and to pursue a more inclusive national agenda that corrects what he shows are severe threats to democracy, free enterprise and the environment. Citing alarming statistics, Gates convincingly argues that the current boom is largely a mirage, buoyed by policies that continue to reward the wealthy and punish the poor. With equal measures of passion and incisive reasoning drawn from a career in national politics and corporate finance, he proposes an ambitious yet practical program of financial, political, and economic reform. Democracy at Risk is a call-to-arms for any aspiring leader or concerned citizen who wants to create and participate in a better future.
Customer Reviews:
Jeff Gates is a socialist posing as a capitalist.......2005-06-08
Any book recommmended by Noam Chomsky, Bill Greider, and Ralph Nader is a socialist tome to be sure. Jeff Gates, the author here, needs to acquaint himself with Adam Smith, author of "the wealth of nations". and Hernando DeSoto who wrote "the Mystery of Capitalism." He also needs to come to grips with the truth that Marx's Capitalist Manifesto missed the mark when it failed to cite that human initiative is the most important component in the means of production and the means of exchange.
It isn't capitalism that's out of control but those in the bureaucracy who seek to interposition themselves between the money freely spent by consumers, making one voluntary choice over another, and the corporations that have provided them with the requisite goods or services. Unlike governments, corporations go out of business if they don't squarely meet consumer demand on an ongoing basis.
The reason why those in America have a better lifestyle, more choices, and a greater surplus for the common man is that private proerty in America is protected by a rule of law. In Gates' world he or those like him would make the decisions as to who gets what, when where and how. This is known as crony capitalism and is practiced around the world. Indeed, all of those poverty stricken countries would do well to have companies like Microsoft or Walmart providing jobs for their citizens not to mention the cheaper, quality goods they provide. Instead the political elites enrich themselves while overtaxing and over regulating those who would create new jobs.
Gates' citations of statistics in support of his theories is selective to say the least. Nowhere does he mention that the number of hours the average worker has to work in order to buy a consumer good, say a car, has dropped dratically over the last 50 years. Nor does he break out the amount of income apportioned to capital gains by those he sees as rich. He picks starting dates which come immediately after down markets in securities where capital gains income was at a minimum, and then uses a future date coinciding with the culmination of a long uptrend in securities prices. This is not the way to fairly represent the state of things in the economy. As anecdotal proof, if things are so bad in America where are so many immigrants poring across our borders trying to get in? How many people are taking a raft or swimming to Cuba for that free health care?
This is just another left-wing screed from a guy who truncated his analysis at the point where he felt sufficiently aglow with his own motives. Jeff Gates, the self rightious apostate of the left, needs to continue doing his homework. Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" would be a good starting point.
A vision for a populist form of capitalism.......2002-06-14
In "Democracy at Risk", author Jeff Gates opines that democracy in the United States has actually become a plutocracy. Average citizens have little to no influence with legislators when compared with the access extremely wealthy capitalists have gained from years of dominating the financing of the major political parties. Declining voter turnout suggests that citizens are resigned to a condition of powerlessness, one of many symptoms of an unhealthy democracy.
Against this backdrop, Gates believes that the time is ripe for a new form of populist politics. He boldly sketches out a proposed populist political agenda that he believes could connect with today's disillusioned voters. Gates includes an interesting section where he describes the type of personality an ideal populist Presidential candidate might need to possess in order to attract voters and deal effectively with opposition parties.
As a veteran Beltway insider and architect of the legislation that created ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans) in the 1970s, Gates knows a lot about finance, ownership and public policy. He shows how current laws privilege finance at the expense of labor and the environment but argues that such laws can be changed if the people demand it. Therefore, Gates believes that an important task for a populist party will be to educate the public about the link between concentrated financial power and ownership with economic and environmental sustainability.
Gates writes with knowledge and passion, but at times the rush of ideas is so intense that the book tends to wander off course. For example, there are dozens of brilliant and imaginative ideas sprinkled throughout the text. But this is sometimes confusing for the reader, given that Gates organized the book into four distinct sections; shouldn't these important solutions have been grouped in one place to facilitate ease of reference?
But Gates does in fact reserve section four of the book for his cornerstone idea: "Share Our Wealth", a highly controversial program of wealth redistribution (from the rich to everyone else). Understanding that this proposal will raise more than a few eyebrows, Gates includes a Question and Answer section to address objections to his plan. But while the idea may have some merit, I think that the proposal would generate such intense opposition that it might overshadow and crush the otherwise adminrable populist agenda that the author has successfully envisioned. Indeed, "Share Our Wealth" is an idea of such magnitude that it more rightly deserves a separate book to flesh out the idea more fully and provide the support it needs to make the idea defensible.
Overall, this book in my view accurately diagnoses much of what is wrong with our democracy and proposes some useful populist-flavored solutions, but unfortunately does not convincingly make the case for the "Share Our Wealth" concept. Nevertheless, "Democracy at Risk" is recommended reading for those who may be pondering how a fully-functioning democracy might be restored in this country.
Democracy as if People Matter.......2001-07-07
Jeff Gates is clearly a powerful thinker and a thoughtful human being. He writes with conviction and credibility. He knows what he's talking about. He was the consummate 'insider', having spent more than a decade on Capital Hill as counsel to the Senate Finance Committee. DEMOCRACY AT RISK provides stark evidence that 'we the people' are no longer citizens who are served by the 'common good'. Instead, we are 'consumers' being herded and manipulated to serve an all powerful 'marketplace' and the small number of people who have become obscenely wealthy as a result. For example, 70% of all earnings growth in the U.S. since the 1970's has gone to less than 1% of the people. Gates says that highly concentrated wealth patterns aren't forces of nature: they're political choices. We can choose something quite different and far more inclusive - provided we're offered that choice. Gates calls for a society built on a more natural, caring form of capitalism, with broad ownership patterns. Gates argues that this 'populist' agenda is neither liberal or conservative; Democratic or Republican. It's about restoring a democracy that is badly broken. It's about removing corruption from a political system awash in influence money. He does not suggest making things right will be easy; only that it is necessary. If you want to understand the powerful, largely hidden forces shaping our society; if you want a vision for something better; if you want to be part of the solution, read this book.
OF MERIT, BUT..........2000-07-19
THIS IS A BOOK THAT MUST BE RECOMMENDED. IT MAY BE ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT FOR A BOOK OF THIS TYPE TO APPEAR IN OUR CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE AS AN ANTIDOTE TO A POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS COMPLACENCY AND THE TENDENCY TO ENGAGE IN BLIND, GOOD-TIMES BOOSTERISM. AS SUCH, THE IMPERATIVE TO RECOMMEND LIES IN THE VALUE OF THE DETAILED INFORMATION IT PROVIDES IN ARGUING THAT SOMETHING IS AMISS IN THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY. THIS IS ITS STRENGTH AND MERIT. IT IS THE SAME MERIT THAT DEMANDS THAT CORRECTING ANY PATHOLOGY FIRST REQUIRES RECOGNIZING THAT THERE IS A PATHOLOGY. BUT MY RECOMMENDATION COMES WITH A LARGE CAVEAT; NAMELY THAT THE PATHOLOGY LIES NOT MERELY IN THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY BUT ALSO IN THE REALM OF ECONOMIC THEORY. ONCE THIS WORK HELPS US TO RECOGNIZE THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM, WHAT DO WE DO TO RATIONALIZE AND JUSTIFY THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A CORRECTIVE, AND WHICH CORRECTIVE? THAT YOU WILL NOT FIND HERE. FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO TAKE THE LOGICAL NEXT STEP OF MOVING ONTO TO THESE ISSUES, I WOULD MOST EMPHATICALLY RECOMMEND A TITLE FROM JUST ONE YEAR AGO THAT POWERFULLY ADDRESSES THESE CRITICAL AND FAR TOO OVERLOOKED SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEMS ELEVATED TO OUR ATTENTION IN DEMOCRACY AT RISK AND THAT COMPELLINGLY ARGUES THAT THE PROBLEM IS NOT MERELY IN THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY, BUT ALSO IN THE REALM OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ECONOMIC THEORY GUIDING OUR ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT POLICIES. I REFER TO THE TERRIBLY IMPORTANT WORK, BINARY ECONOMICS:THE NEW PARADIGM, BY PROFESSOR ROBERT ASHFORD AND RODNEY SHAKESPEARE. ANYONE INTERESTED IN AND CONCERNED WITH THE LEGITIMATE ISSUES RAISED IN DEMOCRACY AT RISK, WILL NOT WANT TO IGNORE THE PROFOUNDLY IMPORTANT THEORETICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL POLICY PROPOSALS FOR A SOLUTION TO THOSE PROBLEMS PROVIDED IN BINARY ECONOMICS:THE NEW PARADIGM.
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- Jon Jerde in Japan: Designing the Spaces Between
- Mansions in the Clouds: The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth
- Masters, Slaves, & Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790
- Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras And His Influence on Thought And Art in Antiquity And the Middle Ages
- Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Mike Nelson: Magazine (Opus Projects)
Books Index
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Conversations With I. M. Pei: Light Is the Key (Architecture)
I. M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture (Revised Edition)
The Architecture of I.M. Pei
I.M. Pei - First Person Singular/The Museum on the Mountain
