A deep exploration of modern life that examines our cities, public places, and homes

Following How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski casts a seasoned critical eye over the modern scene withMysteries of the Mall. His subject is nothing less than the broad setting of our metropolitan world.
In thirty-five discerning essays, Rybczynski ranges over subjects as varied as shopping malls, Central Park, the Paris opera house, 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, and our fascination with vacation homes, and he visits 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 Christopher Wren, 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 cities in an age of tourism and what places attract us in the modern city.
Mysteries of the Mall is required reading for anyone curious about the modern world and how it came to be that way.

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.

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.

Seaside, Florida, is a town designed as an 'ideal' community, where houses have front porches and verandas, picket fences, sleeping porches, where streets are carved and paved with brick, and sidewalks are made of pebbles and seashells. This resort town on Florida's panhandle coast has had an extraordinary impact on the thinking of architects, developers, planners, traffic engineers, sociologists, environmentalists, and even political thinkers. As the first, the most widely published, and now at twenty-five by far the most esteemed and well-known example of the revival of traditional neighborhood design, Seaside has become the icon of the New Urbanism movement, and has been emulated extensively.

When Witold Rybczynski first heard about New Daleville, it was only a developer's idea, attached to ninety acres of cornfield an hour and a half west of Philadelphia. Over the course of five years, Rybczynski met and talked to everyone involved in the building of this residential subdivision -- from the developers to the township leaders, whose approval they needed, to the home builders and engineers and, ultimately, the first families who moved in.

Always eloquent and illuminating, the award-winning author of Home and A Clearing in the Distance looks at this 'neotraditional' project, with its houses built close together to encourage a sense of intimacy and community, and explains the trends in American domestic architecture -- from where we place our kitchens and fences to why our bathrooms get larger every year.

Last Harvest was voted one of the ten best books of 2008 by the editors of Planetizen, and as Publishers Weekly said, 'Rybczynski provides historical and cultural perspectives in a style reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell, debunking the myth of urban sprawl and explaining American homeowners' preference for single-family dwellings.'

The Miami estate of Vizcaya, like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power.

In Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, a celebrated architecture critic and writer and an award-winning landscape architect explore the little-known story of Vizcaya, an extraordinary national treasure. Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin use a rich collection of illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document the creation of this stunning house and landscape. Vizcaya was completed in 1916 as the winter retreat of Chicago industrialist James Deering. The cosmopolitan bachelor, who chose Miami for its warm climate, enlisted the guidance of artist Paul Chalfin, with whom he traveled throughout Italy to survey houses and gardens. With the assistance of architect F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., and garden designer Diego Suarez, the 180-acre site on Biscayne Bay was transformed into a grand estate, complete with lagoons, canals, citrus groves, a farm village, a yacht harbor, and a 40-room Baroque mansion.

The lure of this architectural and landscape masterpiece, named for a Spanish Basque province, is undeniable. John Singer Sargent planned a short visit in 1917 but stayed for several months, producing an inspired series of watercolors, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. The book is further enriched by archival material and by the color images of noted photographer Steven Brooke, paying homage to Vizcaya as a lens through which readers learn about architecture, landscape and garden design, interior decoration, and art.

Robert A. M. Stern is dedicated to the synthesis of tradition and innovation. In more than thirty-five years of practice, he has produced a wide range of building types with a variety of stylistic influences, all inspired by the great legacy of American architecture. His firm, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, was first recognized for its distinguished houses, and residential design remains the cornerstone of the practice. This beautifully illustrated monograph—a companion to the best-selling Robert A. M. Stern: Houses—presents twenty-six of the firm's most memorable houses.

Located in diverse settings across North America—from a valley in Colorado with sweeping views of the Aspen mountains to a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound to an island off the coast of British Columbia—these remarkable houses reveal the architect's emphasis on the importance of context and his dedication to exploring the nature of space. Each house invokes the vernacular architectural heritage particular to its region while gracefully reflecting its unique natural surroundings. Whether they are Shingle Style 'cottages' by the sea, colonial Georgian country estates, or elegant Regency designs, Stern's houses are unique both for their timelessness and their ability to evoke a conversation with the past—a dialogue he believes lies at the heart of architecture.

Pilar Viladas is the design editor of the New York Times Magazine.

'Palladio is the Bible,' Thomas Jefferson once said. 'You should get it and stick to it.' With his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, Andrea Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form during the late sixteenth century -- and his influence is still evident in the ample porches, columned porticoes, grand ceilings, and front-door pediments of America today.

In The Perfect House, bestselling author Witold Rybczynski, whose previous books have transformed our understanding of domestic architecture, reveals how a handful of Palladio's houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe. More than just a study of one of history's seminal architectural figures, The Perfect House reflects Rybczynski's enormous admiration for his subject and provides a new way of looking at the special landscapes we call 'home' in the modern world.

Witold Rybczynski, si interroga sull'improvvisa e in apparenza inattaccabile popolarità del sabato e della domenica nella storia dell'uomo, sulla trasversalità, nel tempo e nello spazio, di una pratica plasmata dalla credenza popolare e dall'uso quotidiano sulla matrice astronomica, religiosa, sociale, e forse persino biologica, di uno schema settenario necessario e misteriosamente radicato. Le curiose, puntuali, documentate e occasionalmente autobiografiche osservazioni che dedica alla formazione del ciclo settimanale chiamano in causa il tradizionale rapporto tra lavoro e tempo libero, e la sua lenta e graduale evoluzione.

The Best Tool of the Millennium

The seeds of Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying 'the best tool of the millennium.' An award-winning author who once built a house using only hand tools, Rybczynski has intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- which serves him beautifully on his quest.

One Good Turn is a story starring Archimedes, who invented the water screw and introduced the helix, and Leonardo, who sketched a machine for carving wood screws. It is a story of mechanical discovery and genius that takes readers from ancient Greece to car design in the age of American industry. Rybczynski writes an ode to the screw, without which there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no enlightenment science. One of our finest cultural and architectural historians, Rybczynski renders a graceful, original, and engaging portrait of the tool that changed the course of civilization.

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.

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, the bestselling author of Home and City Life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure and a man 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, Boston's Back Bay Fens, Illinois's Riverside community, Asheville's Biltmore Estate, and Louisville's park system. He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country's first regional plans.

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 wrote books about the South and about his exploration of the Texas frontier. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as general secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Olmsted was both ruthlessly pragmatic and a visionary. To create Central Park, he managed thousands of employees who moved millions of cubic yards of stone and earth and planted over 300,000 trees and shrubs. In laying it out, 'we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years,' he told his son, Rick. 'I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future.' To this day, Olmsted's ideas about people, nature, and society are expressed across the nation -- above all, in his parks, so essential to the civilized life of our cities.

Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make this book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

Tracing the development of American cities and city life from early colonial settlements to the familiar downtowns of today, a sweeping cultural history reveals how our urban spaces have been shaped by the land and the American lifestyle. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

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.