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 Right in the heart of one of the nation's most densely populated urban areas sits an idyllic realm of graceful meadows, dense woods, placid lakes, and fresh air.
Brooklyn's 585-acre Prospect Park offers a rural refuge to thousands of visitors every day. Created nearly 150 years ago by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of New York's Central Park, the duo considered Prospect Park their true masterpiece. Prospect Park, the first monograph on this exquisite public space, makes it easy to see why. Presenting a wealth of archival and newly commissioned photography and insightful text, David P. Colley and Elizabeth Keegin Colley trace the park's colorful history from its creation in the mid-nineteenth-century to its decline in the 1970s and restoration in the 1980s, up to the park's new Lakeside Center facility, opening in 2013.  Verlyn Klinkenborg's regular column, The Rural Life, is one of the most read and beloved in The New York Times.
Since 1997, he has written eloquently on every aspect, large and small, of life on his upstate New York farm, including his animals, the weather and landscape, and the trials and rewards of physical labor, as well as broader issues about agriculture and land use behind farming today. Featuring drawings by Nigel Peake, best-selling author of In the Wilds, More Scenes from the Rural Life gathers together 150 of Klinkenborg's best pieces since his last collection, The Rural Life, was published a decade ago.  There are many ways to make your writing feel more personal, but none carries the charge of using a custom-drawn font.
Draw Your Own Alphabets is a fun, hands-on workbook that teaches how to create funky hand-lettered fonts sure to jump off the page, poster, or screen. Presenting thirty complete alphabets, custom-drawn in a variety of styles by various young designers and illustrators, this do-it-yourself guide demonstrates how to adapt the letters and make them your own. Whether you dip in and out of your favorite lettering styles, or work through the book practicing various alphabets, you'll be creating your own fonts in no time.  An inspiring sourcebook for architects and prospective homeowners, as well as a useful tool for students, and builders alike.
Passive is the new green. Passive Houses, well–insulated, virtually airtight buildings, can decrease home heating consumption by an astounding ninety percent, making them not only an attractive choice for current and prospective homeowners, but also the right choice for a sustainable future. The Greenest Home showcases eighteen of the world's most attractive Passive Houses by forward-thinking architects such as Bernheimer Architecture, Olson Kundig Architects, and Onion Flats, among many others.  Trainor's gardens create sensory memories that foster a deep connection to the land.
Australian-born landscape designer Bernard Trainor has made it his life's work to capture the wild soul of his adopted home of Northern California. Neither a naturalist nor an architect, Trainor uses the tools of both to create stunning large-scale gardens that unfold over many acres. Across airy hilltops, craggy seasides, and other one-of-a-kind tracts, Trainor applies simple, understated frames to rugged natural panoramas, the better to bring them into focus. Landprints showcases ten of his most ambitious and inspiring gardens through gorgeous photography and detailed project descriptions.  "The defining factor in our firm's work is that we practice architecture in Maine, amidst extraordinary and ordinary beauty."
Although it has become something of a cliche for architects to say they pay close attention to a building's site and surroundings, for Elliott + Elliott Architecture, residing, working, and building along Maine's rugged coast has translated not only into refreshing architectural forms whose roots in tradition are clear, but also into collaborative processes with local builders and artisans, in the spirit of the shipbuilders and craftsmen of the state's history. Houses of Maine offers an in-depth look at six houses, from the celebrated House on Casco Bay (a modern update to a nineteenth-century Cape Cod) to Pond House (a Mount Desert Island summer cottage inspired by local fishing shacks). |
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