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Title:
Evolo: skyscraper for the 21th century

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eVolo presents the best 60 projects of the 2006, 2007, and 2008 Skyscraper Competition. An investigation by architects, students, and designers on the future of the skyscraper. What is the skyscraper in the beginning of the XXI Century? What is the historical and social context of these mega-structures? What is their response to the urban fabric? Is the human scale lost?

Title:
Skyscraper rivals : the AIG building and the architecture of Wall Street

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$77.00
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"Skyscraper Rivals" is the first book to examine the architecture of Wall Street between the wars through an array contemporary and archival images and an informed discussion of the financial, geographical, and historical forces that shaped this district. The book focuses on the AIG Building--once known as the Cities Service Building--and three other major towers in the financial district, in their race to be the tallest, the most modern, and the most lavish. We meet the tycoons who paid for these structures, the architects who designed them, the workers who laboured in them, and the artists and photographers who portrayed them. The economics of skyscraper construction and the real-estate market of Wall Street are explained; also included are illuminating details and anecdotes surrounding each building's history.

Title:
Higher : a historic race to the sky and the making of a city

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$38.00
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In 1924 two architects, William Van Alen and Craig Severance (former friends and successful partners, but now bitter adversaries), set out to imprint their individual marks on the rapidly evolving skyline of New York City. Each man desired to build the city’s tallest building, or ‘skyscraper.’ Van Alen was a creative genius who envisioned a bold, contemporary building that would move beyond the tired architecture of the previous century. By a stroke of good fortune he found a larger-than-life patron in automobile magnate Walter Chrysler, and they set out to build the legendary Chrysler building. Severance, by comparison, was a brilliant businessman, and he tapped his circle of downtown, old-money investors to begin construction on the Manhattan Company Building at 40 Wall Street. From ground-breaking to bricklaying, Van Alen and Severance fought a duel of wills. Each man was forced to revamp his architectural design in an attempt to push higher, to overcome his rival in mid-construction, as the structures rose, floor by floor, in record time. Yet just as the battle was underway, a third party entered the arena and announced plans to build an even larger building. This project would be overseen by one of Chrysler’s principal rivals--a representative of the General Motors group--and the building ultimately became known as The Empire State Building.

Title:
Sky high : vertical architecture

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Summary:
History and evolution of skyscrapers around the world, with an introduction by Lord Normam Foster.

Title:
High Society: Contemporary highrise architecture and the international highrise Award 2006 / Aktuelle hochhausarchitektur und der nternationale hochhaus preis 2006

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Summary:
From the Tower of Babel to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, from European cathedrals to the Twin Towers and the currently scandalous Freedom Tower, highrises have always been a symbol of mankind's cultural aspirations and technological achievements. The biennial International Highrise Award specifies that an ideal contemporary tower should make exceptional use of aesthetics, design and technology, and show cost-effectiveness, sustainability and integration into town planning. This album of the 2006 contenders honors foremost the winners, Jean Nouvel and Fermin Vasquez, who designed the Torre Agbar building in Barcelona. The Agbar Tower's distinctive rounded crown had already earned it a nominee spot in Cabinet Magazine's Most Phallic Building in the World Contest. Here, the Highrise Award's more serious honor cites the building's "expressive shape," "pulsating dynamism" and "a multi-layer outer skin that generates its varied and exciting appearance." Runners-up include Santiago Calatrava's Turning Torso in Malmo, Sweden.

Title:
Les gratte-ciel

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$64.95
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Avec l'apparition des gratte-ciel, véritables symboles de modernité urbaine, le paysage architectural des grandes métropoles connaît, dès la fin du XIXe siècle, des transformations majeures. Ces buildings spectaculaires, qui s'élancent dans les ciels de Tokyo, de Shanghai, de Riyad, de Londres ou de Chicago, sont non seulement les symboles de la croissance économique et financière de ces villes, mais aussi des œuvres d'art. Constructions innovantes -au niveau des techniques et des matériaux de construction - ou géants d'acier, de verre et de granit qui adaptent aux exigences de la modernité des éléments issus de l'architecture traditionnelle, les gratte-ciel transforment les paysages dans lesquels ils s'inscrivent. Si au début le principal défi était celui de la prouesse technique et du toujours plus haut, aujourd'hui les concepteurs privilégient l'habitabilité de l'immeuble et se montrent de plus en plus soucieux du bien-être environnemental. Les fonctions remplies par ces buildings dans un espace urbain en perpétuelle évolution sont très diverses : centres financiers ou administratifs, bureaux ou sièges d'entreprises, centres commerciaux ou hôtels. Cet ouvrage recense les gratte-ciel les plus spectaculaires et extravagants et raconte l'histoire de leur construction. Des images et des plans dévoilent la structure et l'organisation invisibles des buildings qui ont transformé le paysage architectural des métropoles. Les textes d'Antonino Terranova racontent toute la variété et l'originalité des gratte-ciel.

Title:
eVolo skyscrapers 3: visionary architecture and urban design

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$118.00
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Summary:
The future of architecture and urban design unveiled by 150 innovative projects submitted to the eVolo Skyscraper Competition. The third book in the Skyscraper Competition series showcases visionary designs that utilize the latest technological advances, offer sustainable architectural solutions, explore new territories, propose social change, and examine radical urban strategies. Since 2006 the annual Skyscraper Competition receives thousands of entries from more than 80 different countries. The projects presented in this edition represent the top entries selected by an expert international jury.

Title:
One World Trade Center: biography of the building

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$42.00
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Summary:
The new World Trade Center represents one of the most complex collaborations in human history. Nearly every state in the nation, a dozen countries around the world, and more than 25,000 workers helped raise the tower, which consumed ninety million pounds of steel, one million square feet of glass, and enough concrete to pave a sidewalk from New York to Chicago. With more than seventy interviews with the people most intimately involved, and unprecedented access to the building site, suppliers, and archives, Dupré unfurls the definitive story of fourteen years of conflict and controversy-and its triumphant resolution.

Title:
The skyscraper and the city: the woolworth building and the making of modern New York

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$74.00
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Once the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building is noted for its striking but incongruous synthesis of Beaux-Arts architecture, fanciful Gothic ornamentation, and audacious steel-framed engineering. Here, in the first history of this great urban landmark, Gail Fenske argues that its design serves as a compelling lens through which to view the distinctive urban culture of Progressive-era New York. Fenske shows here that the building’s multiplicity of meanings reflected the cultural contradictions that defined New York City’s modernity. For Frank Woolworth—founder of the famous five-and-dime store chain—the building served as a towering trademark, for advocates of the City Beautiful movement it suggested a majestic hotel de ville, for technological enthusiasts it represented the boldest of experiments in vertical construction, and for tenants it provided an evocative setting for high-style consumption. Tourists, meanwhile, experienced a spectacular sightseeing destination and avant-garde artists discovered a twentieth-century future. In emphasizing this faceted significance, Fenske illuminates the process of conceiving, financing, and constructing skyscrapers as well as the mass phenomena of consumerism, marketing, news media, and urban spectatorship that surround them. As the representative example of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building remains a commanding presence in the skyline of lower Manhattan, and the generously illustrated Skyscraper and the City is a worthy testament to its importance in American culture.

Title:
Skyscrapers

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Summary:
This vibrantly designed, updated and expanded edition celebrates every facet of the skyscraper as an architectural icon. Few buildings rivet our attention like skyscrapers. As the race to build higher and higher continues, these symbols of success and economic power dominate and reshape urban skylines across the globe. Opening with Chicago s Reliance Building, built in 1894, and closing with plans for the London Bridge Tower, scheduled to be completed in 2011, eye-catching two to four page spreads in this up-to-date and comprehensive volume capture over fifty of the world s most important skyscrapers. Each building is breathtakingly photographed and an accompanying text offers intriguing historical details, notes on construction, and engineering feats. Tracing the evolution of these magnificent structures, Skyscrapers illustrates their significance not only in architectural history, but also as a reflection of humankind s most competitive and optimistic urges.