Sketchbook

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Benjamin A. Lieberman

Modeling complex systems is a difficult challenge and all too often one in which modelers are left to their own devices. Using a multidisciplinary approach, The Art of Software Modeling covers theory, practice, and presentation in detail. It focuses on the importance of model creation and demonstrates how to create meaningful models. Presenting three self-contained sections, the text examines the background of modeling and frameworks for organizing information. It identifies techniques for researching and capturing client and system information and addresses the challenges of presenting models to specific audiences. Using concepts from art theory and aesthetics, this broad-based approach encompasses software practices, cognitive science, and information presentation. The book also looks at perception and cognition of diagrams, view composition, color theory, and presentation techniques. Providing practical methods for investigating and organizing complex information, The Art of Software Modeling demonstrates the effective use of modeling techniques to improve the development process and establish a functional, useful, and maintainable software system.

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Margaret Steele & Cindy Estes

Presents twelve contemporary works of art each of which displays a body, then focuses on a specific part of that body on the opposite page.

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Bill Hubbard, Jr

To speak comprehensively about building today requires that we think about building in three different ways - as an instance of architectural order, as an embodiment of values about living, and as an instrument for bringing about results. With this insight, Bill Hubbard offers architects a useful new way of thinking about the work they do. He looks at all of the groups with an interest in a work of architecture - owners, inhabitants, customers, community groups, critics and historians, architecture schools - and presents a conceptual framework in which those disparate interests are not just given a place but are honored for providing different perspectives on the building. Recalling a time when a building could be encompassed by a single way of thinking, Hubbard reviews how political, economic, and philosophical movements have fostered new roles for buildings and provided new ways of thinking about them. How can these ways of thinking talk to each other, much less have a conversation that can produce a building? To find a language for such conversation is the task Hubbard takes on, through an exploration of the concept of a sense of place. In the book's closing chapters Hubbard describes the varieties of place that we can feel, and proposes a way to characterize such feelings and render them usable by designers. In so doing, he raises a fundamental question about the practice of architecture; he proposes that theory for practice founded on the idea of creating a sense of place is not a radical departure for architects because the acts of creating place are the acts architects do, for themselves, in their daily lives.

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J. Erik Kinkade

A step-by-step guide for creating a medium size artificial rock waterfall. Includes guidelines for the installation and construction of artificial rock boulders, waterfalls, fountains, and ponds with concept drawings and full-color photographs.