Architecture Biography

Over more than five decades, legendary architect Moshe Safdie has built some of the world's most influential and memorable structures. Safdie always refers to the "silent client" an architect must ultimately serve: the people who live in, work in, or experience a building. If Walls Could Speak takes listeners behind the veil of an essential yet mysterious profession to explain through Safdie's own experiences how an architect thinks and works.

Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from...

Fiona MacCarthy challenges the image of Gropius as a doctrinaire architectural rationalist, bringing out the visionary philosophy and courage that carried him through a politically hostile age. Pilloried by Tom Wolfe as inventor of the monolithic high-rise, Gropius is better remembered as inventor of a form of art education that influenced schools worldwide. He viewed argument as intrinsic to creativity. Unusually for one in his position, Gropius encouraged women's artistic endeavors and sought equal romantic partners.

From the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast, comes a guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities. Narrated by Roman Mars, with a bonus Q&A and a Full Episode of 99% Invisible. Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk...

""Through her art, Herrera writes, Kahlo made of herself both performer and icon. Through this long overdue biography, Kahlo has also, finally, been made fully human."" — San Francisco Chronicle Hailed by readers and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter...

W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar...

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stone Barrington series tells the story of his own life from childhood to the present, and chronicles the journey that made him the writer he is today. Over the last forty years, Stuart Woods has written more than ninety novels of suspense and...

From Alec Nevala-Lee, the author of the Hugo and Locus Award finalist Astounding, comes a revelatory biography of the visionary designer who defined the rules of startup culture and shaped America’s idea of the future. During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest...

Charles M. Schulz, the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, is also one of the least understood figures in American culture. Now acclaimed biographer David Michaelis gives us an in-depth biography of the brilliant, unseen man behind Peanuts. It is the most American of...

New York Times Notable Book “A smart, crackling chronicle of fast game, the ’80s art market, [and] the attraction of destruction.”— Village Voice A bold and vivid biography that chronicles the dazzling rise and tragic death of Neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In less than a...

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography of America's greatest architect Renowned architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography Frank Lloyd Wright looks at the architect and the man, from his tumultuous personal life to his long career as a master builder. Along the...

Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this...

From acclaimed fashion designer Prabal Gurung comes a captivating, courageous literary memoir, a testament to the transformative power of creativity, and a celebration of the power of femininity and individuality Walk Like a Girl is the story of a queer boy who yearned for a world beyond the...

A fascinating biography of the philanthropist Albert Barnes, whose pioneering collection of modern art was meant to transform America’s soul From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of America’s first great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs...

How a Florentine orphanage rescued thousands of children and revolutionized childhood education amid the splendor of Renaissance art. The story begins with the abandonment of the newborn Agata Smeralda on February 5, 1445, in Florence’s Hospital of the Innocents, the first—but certainly not...

""This is a serious, meticulous history that will also appeal to Game of Thrones fans, who will discover intriguing parallels between history and fiction.” — Booklist ""An enlightening portrait of the medieval mindset.” — Publishers Weekly The authors of The Bright Ages return with a...

This New York Times bestseller intimately depicts urban life in a gripping book that slips behind cold statistics and sensationalism to reveal the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour. One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In her extraordinary...

A novel in The L.A. Quartet. Internationally acclaimed author James Ellroy presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns—it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an...

""A hugely entertaining achievement."" –Esquire “An engaging survey through a period of intellectual history that reveals as much about people who wear watches as the objects on their wrists."" – Wall Street Journal ""As impeccably crafted and precisely engineered as any of the watches on...

Maverick for the Built Environment is a biography of my father. A trained architect, he felt that architecture, indeed all engineering disciplines, should not ignore the human factor and that new ways of thinking were needed to improve the built environment. “This generation of students and young professionals,” he testified before Congress in 1973, “feels the need to deal with issues which reflect a socially responsible position by the profession…they want to have some confidence that their design decisions make a positive contribution to the quality of the environment.” Not ...