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Sandy Isenstadt

"In The Modern American House, Sandy Isenstadt examines how architects, interior designers, and landscape designers worked to visually enhance spatial perception in middle-class houses. The desire for spaciousness reached its highest pitch where it was most lacking, in the small, single-family houses that came to be the cornerstone of middle-class life in the nineteenth century. In direct conflict with actual dimensions, spaciousness was linked to a tension unique to the middle-class: between spatial aspirations and financial limitations. Although rarely addressed in a sustained fashion by theorists and practitioners: Isenstadt argues that spaciousness was central to the development of modern American domestic architecture, with explicit strategies for perceiving space being pivotal to modern house design. Through professional endorsement, concern for visual space found its way into discussion on the course of a century of real estate taste and law. This book documents how visual space came to be internalized as a cultural value."--Jacket.

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Michael Dennis

Traces the history of the hotel, a French style of town house, and examines its influence on the development of modern architecture.

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Buck Abbey

In U.S. Landscape Ordinances, Buck Abbey furnishes landscape architects, planners, land-use attorneys, and students with a much-needed resource. This state-by-state presentation demystifies the complex planning laws and ordinances that determine landscape design parameters for more than 300 American cities. The author highlights sections of each ordinance that pertain to landscape architecture, boils the legalese down to plain English, explains the law's main purpose and regulatory function, and spells out the practical implications from a design perspective. With the help of more than fifty diagrams and drawings that clarify complex spatial concepts, U.S. Landscape Ordinances reviews the entire spectrum of green laws currently on the books, including ordinances that cover parking lots and vehicular use areas, landscape buffers and screens, street tree plantings, open space design, irrigation, land clearing and building sites, wetlands protection and shoreline development, erosion and drainage mitigation, site design standards, tree preservation, and tree protection. U.S. Landscape Ordinances is a unique and invaluable tool for professionals in landscape design and municipal planning. It also offers a deep reservoir of information for students, municipal legislators, community activists, and anyone interested in understanding or developing a community's landscape ordinances.

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Nancy Frazier

"The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History presents a new perspective on art history. In keeping with today's students, who are interested in more than just the details of connoisseurship and provenance, it takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon literature, history, psychology, geography, economics, and other areas to set important artistic advances in a cultural context. With more than 1500 entries, ranging in length from 150 to 600 words, this is a concise yet highly readable work.". "It also differs from similar references, which tend to be Eurocentric, by giving relatively more space to American art, artists, and architects; to the work of women artists; to sometimes controversial post-modern ideas; and to the words of the artists themselves, quoted in most of the major entries."--BOOK JACKET.