Iznik

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foreword by Prince Amyn Aga Khan

One of the most important and authoritative books to celebrate mosque architecture and Islamic design, featuring many newly commissioned photographs. Mosques reflect some of the greatest architectural achievements - their spiritual purpose gives them a profound and often mystical beauty. This visually striking volume illustrates the development of basic mosque strucutral and decorative elements with over sixty examples. Venerated mosques such as the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the Imam Mosque of Isfahan, and Instanbul's Süleymaniye Mosque, as well as Doha's innovative Abu al-Qabib Mosque, are featured in magnificent detail. Mosques: Splendors of Islam showcases mosques from Europe, the Indian subcontinent, North America, North Africa and the sub-Sahara, the Middle East, and Russia and the Caucasus. It spans from their earliest origins in Mecca and Medina to contemporary masterpieces, highlighting major stylistic transformations as illustrated in the mosques of some of Islam's great dynasties - the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals. The inclusion of dynamic new structures provides an insight into the vitality of current mosque design. Original and archival photographs offer exterior and interior views as well as images of adjacent gardens and fountains that grace these sanctuaries. Essays by prominent architecture and design authorities also address such topics as the iconographic and decorative elements of the mosque. Descriptions of their calligraphy and tilework, as well as furnishings and illumination, enhance this volume. -- from dust jacket.

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Yoshihide Momotani

Provides an introduction to the basics of origami and gives more detailed instructions for making fourteen dinosaurs out of folded paper.

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Jo Kirby

Materials and working practices influence a painter just as much as contemporary intellectual and cultural developments. Techniques of Painting aims to help readers develop a painterly eye by learning to recognise different materials and methods of application and to appreciate how these features contribute to how a painting looks.

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Norman Crowe

Over the course of this century, nature has increasingly been relegated to the province of environmentalists while cities and towns have been turned over to developers and planners. Norman Crowe seeks to overcome this division into the respective realms of specialists by recognizing the independence of both the natural and the man-made through an understanding of the often hidden roots of the world we contrive for ourselves. Crowe argues that we have lost a vital balance by neglecting our traditional motives for building in the first place. He argues for a symbiotic theory of man's making and nature's activity that views the built environment as a form of nature, one that nourishes the generative power as well as other enduring qualities of nature. . In this sweeping view of architecture and urbanism across cultural boundaries, Crowe evaluates the connections between the natural and man-made in our towns and cities, farms and gardens, architecture and works of civil engineering. He draws on the lessons to be learned from the buildings and cities of the past in restoring critical traditional values that have been lost to modernism, which tends to see the built world almost exclusively through the abstractions of post-Enlightenment science.