Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design - Hardcover

Watson, Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 007068507X ISBN 13: 9780070685079

Publisher: McGraw Hill, 2003

Synopsis

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MAGNIFICENTLY ILLUSTRATED AND INTERNATIONAL IN SCOPE, HERE IS THE DEFINITIVE REFERENCE ON URBAN DESIGN

This important addition to the McGraw-Hill Time Saver Standards series is an entirely new, comprehensive, meticulously researched compendium of every aspect of the physical design of cities and other urban places including communities and civic and public places.

Featuring articles by authoritative urban design scholars and practitioners, Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design provides a visual and detailed archival record of:

* Context of global cities
* Classic texts of urban design
* Urban design history and design theory
* Preservation, renewal, and extension of existing cities
* Methods of urban design from regional to pedestrian scale
* Sustainable communities
* Details and case studies of urban design practice

Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design covers the full-spectrum of allied disciplines such as transportation planning, bioregionalism, storm water management, parking, universal design, urban acoustics, and graphics. It provides a single-source for the key reference articles on urban design and physical planning of cities, including social, environmental and economic data.

This inaugural volume on the topic of urban design in the Time-Saver Standard series is written for easy reference by urban planners and designers, architects, landscape professionals, environmental engineers, civil and transportation engineers, as well as municipal government and planning officials. This “soon to be a classic” provides a one-volume reference that is indispensable for urban design policy and practice. It is equally valuable for the urban studies educators and students of architecture, urban design and planning.

About this title

Review:

Excerpts from review by Bay Brown.

It is a how-to, with diagrams on street and courtyard siting, but it is also a history of urban-design theory, including seminal texts ranging from passages of Camillo Sitte's 1889 book The Art of Building Cities to Kevin Lynch's 1960 essay "The City Image and Its Elements."

Chapters are dedicated to sustainable design, universal design, transit-centered urban villages, wayfinding, and "traffic calming." Almost every essay is written by a different expert, which affords a diversity of experience and voice, and the tome liberally uses photographs, drawings, diagrams, and charts with informative statistics and demographics. It may offer more than you want to know, but after a selective read, it should be parked on your shelf as an invaluable reference.

Excerpts from review by Philip Langdon

Judging by its title, you might think "Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design" would be a source mainly for street widths, sidewalk dimensions, parking ratios, and other matters than can largely be reduced to mathematical calculations. But this six-pound tome with its 960 oversized pages has far broader ambitions. McGraw-Hill calls this volume, "the definitive reference on urban design," and the description doesn't seem to be hyperbole.

Donald Watson, former dean of the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with help from Alan Plattus of Yale School of Architecture and Robert Shibley of SUNY-Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, has assembled a volume containing the most significant urban design writings of the past 106 years. And that's just one of the eight sections in this enormous compilation. In addition to twelve classic texts...readers will find dozens of authoritative recent writings on world urbanization, regionalism, neighborhood planning, bikeways, greenways, universal design, outdoor lighting, way finding, acoustic considerations, and seemingly every other aspect of city-shaping.

You can flip from key documents of New Urbanism, including the Charter and the Lexicon, to LeCorbusier's (wrongheaded but fascinating) vision of towers and highways, Clarence Stein's The Radburn Idea, Clare Cooper Marcus's sociological analyses of urban plazas and shared outdoor spaces, and case studies of places such as Seattle's Pike Place Market. History, theory, principles and practice, they're all here...this is the best single volume I've seen, in terms of its ability to explain the entire spectrum of urban designthrough the words of its most prominent analysts and practitioners. Expand your bookshelf.

Excerpts from review by Bay Brown.. .

It is a how-to, with diagrams on street and courtyard siting, but it is also a history of urban-design theory, including seminal texts ranging from passages of Camillo Sitte's 1889 book The Art of Building Cities to Kevin Lynch's 1960 essay "The City Image and Its Elements." . .

Chapters are dedicated to sustainable design, universal design, transit-centered urban villages, wayfinding, and "traffic calming." Almost every essay is written by a different expert, which affords a diversity of experience and voice, and the tome liberally uses photographs, drawings, diagrams, and charts with informative statistics and demographics. It may offer more than you want to know, but after a selective read, it should be parked on your shelf as an invaluable reference. .

Synopsis:

"Time Saver Standards for Urban Design", in the tradition of the "Time-Saver Standards" series, is the world's foremost professional reference on the physical design of cities and urban places including communities and civic and public places. Scope of the work is international and topics include preservation, renewal, patterns of settlement and sustainability. Key Features include: international coverage including recent European and Asian sustainability initiatives; topics from allied disciplines such as transportation engineering, bioregionalism and environmental engineering; heavily illustrated. The prestigious contributors include Alan Plattus, Dean of the College of Architecture, Yale University.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw Hill
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 007068507X
• ISBN 13: 9780070685079
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 960