Explore the vast range of titles available.

Fitis a book about architecture and society that seeks to fundamentally change how architects and the public think about the task of design. Distinguished architect and urbanist Robert Geddes argues that buildings, landscapes, and cities should be designed to fit: fit the purpose, fit the place, fit future possibilities. Fit replaces old paradigms, such as form follows function, and less is more, by recognizing that the relationship between architecture and society is a true dialogue--dynamic, complex, and, if carried out with knowledge and skill, richly rewarding. With a tip of the hat to John Dewey,Fitexplores architecture as we experience it. Geddes starts with questions: Why do we design where we live and work? Why do we not just live in nature, or in chaos? Why does society care about architecture? Why does it really matter?Fitanswers these questions through a fresh examination of the basic purposes and elements of architecture--beginning in nature, combining function and expression, and leaving a legacy of form. Lively, charming, and gently persuasive, the book shows brilliant examples of fit: from Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia and Louis Kahn's Exeter Library to contemporary triumphs such as the Apple Store on New York's Fifth Avenue, Chicago's Millennium Park, and Seattle's Pike Place. Fitis a book for everyone, because we all live in constructions--buildings, landscapes, and, increasingly, cities. It provokes architects and planners, humanists and scientists, civic leaders and citizens to reconsider what is at stake in architecture--and why it delights us.

How Americans adapted European royal illuminations for patriotic celebrations, spectacular expositions, and intensely bright commercial lighting to create the world's most dazzling and glamorous cities. Illuminated fêtes and civic celebrations began in Renaissance Italy and spread through the courts of Europe. Their fireworks, torches, lamps, and special effects glorified the monarch, marked the birth of a prince, or celebrated military victory. Nineteenth-century Americans rejected such monarchial pomp and adapted spectacular lighting to their democratic, commercial culture. In American Illuminations, David Nye explains how they experimented with gas and electric light to create illuminated cityscapes far brighter and more dynamic than those of Europe, and how these illuminations became symbols of modernity and the conquest of nature. Americans used gaslight and electricity in parades, expositions, advertising, elections, and political spectacles. In the 1880s, cities erected powerful arc lights on towers to create artificial moonlight. By the 1890s they adopted more intensive, commercial lighting that defined distinct zones of light and glamorized the city's White Ways, skyscrapers, bridges, department stores, theaters, and dance halls. Poor and blighted areas disappeared into the shadows. American illuminations also became integral parts of national political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and victory celebrations after the Spanish-American War and World War I.

In his memoir, \"The Towers of New York\" (Simon & Schuster, 1937, written with Boyden Sparkes), the builder Louis J. Horowitz recalled visiting Woolworth at the house, and watching him play the pipe organ. According to Dr. Fenske's research, Woolworth had fits of weeping during the construction of his tower on Broadway, completed in 1913.

''In stone it would be magnificent,'' he said, but in terra cotta, ''it would look like a 5-and-10-cent store proposition.'' A 1912 ad by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in The Real Estate Record and Guide boasted, ''Cream color in another material would be dark and dirty after a few years' exposure.'' Mr. [Paul Starrett]'s misgivings were well founded. In his 1938 book he recalled, apparently from years earlier, ''the spectacle of the upper part of the Woolworth Building, wired up with metal mesh to catch the falling terra cotta.''

Ms. [Monica Randall], of Oyster Bay, has a business renting Gold Coast mansions for films and commercials. Winfield, which is in Glen Cove, was for a time one of the more popular, appearing in hundreds of television and print advertisements and several films. No filming has been permitted for 25 years. Winfield is one of only about 100 surviving Gold Coast mansions, and even in their company, is a standout. The music room, which includes an Aeolian pipe organ and a 14-karat gold-leaf ceiling, takes up the west wing. A $2 million pink marble staircase graces the foyer, whose ceiling is trimmed in blue and 14-karat gold leaf. Monica Randall, left, has written a book about Winfield, F.W. Woolworth's estate in Glen Cove, shown above in 1917. At far left is a view of the ballroom, one of the mansion's 57 rooms. (Photo by John W. Wheeler)

The architect Cass Gilbert's combination of forceful vertical thrust and aerie filigree, in shimmering terra cotta, is indeed masterful. The glittering marble and mosaic lobby evokes medieval cathedrals. Yet the faces staring down from the ribbed vaults are not of saints but the decision-makers behind this feat built on America's nickels and dimes. Along with the engineer and rental agent are portraits of Gilbert and Frank Woolworth -- a great architect and a great client. In intensive exchanges with Woolworth, Gilbert found a new way of relating street scale and skyscape and a series of refinements to his ornamental vocabulary. The dynamic between the two minted architectural gold from that spare change. For even an architect mining a design vision desires the creative tension produced by a strong client. Just such a client enabled [Mies] van der Rohe to bring the experiments with the form and materials of the steel frame that had preoccupied him for decades to a level of perfection never surpassed. In 1954, Samuel Bronfman, chairman of Seagram's, was planning an office tower on Park Avenue when his daughter Phyllis Lambert persuaded him to jettison an unmemorable design by one of the era's productive commercial firms in favor of a bid to realize a landmark worth of his efforts. Ms. Lambert recalled that Bronfman had to be brought around to accepting the building's lofty glazed base: Mies insisted that Bronfman lean down to the pedestrian's level to see on the model just how beautiful the effect would be of entering a glazed void under a lofty tower, especially when it was encountered on a plaza that broke the great line of Park Avenue's masonry cliff face. But it was Bronfman, by saying he wanted a warmer color and effect than Mies's Chicago apartment buildings, who inspired Mies to use the tawny bronze mullions that are the trademark of the Seagram Building's classical serenity and reserve.