A Place for Art : The Architecture of the National Gallery of Canada = Un lieu pour l'art : L'architecture du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada

Rybczynski situates this building by Moshe Safdie in the history of the art museum. Three essays recount the history of the early display of art, the evolution of the art museum (discussing the solutions of traditional and modernist architects), and a history of the National Gallery's various facilities. The author concludes with a systematic analysis of Safdie's building. 36 bibl. ref

The Look of Architecture.

New Yorkxiv, 130 p, 18 cm

One Good Turn : A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw

New York173 p : Illus ; 19 cm

Godfathers Of Sprawl

Three pioneers of real estate development have changed the way modern Americans live. Francis C. Turner was appointed executive secretary of the President's Advisory Committee for the National Highway Program in 1954 and, by his retirement from the Federal Highway Administration in 1972, more than 40,000 miles of interstate highway had been built. Turner's interstates went to, through, and around the cities, creating physical barriers to urban development and turning thousands of square miles of countryside into suburbs and edge cities. Stanley H. Durwood’s suburban multi-screen movie theaters have also changed the metropolitan landscape, offering entertainment once possible only in the largest cities. Jay Pritzker's airport and downtown hotels have been a part of urban renewal in many major cities. The careers of these three innovators demonstrate how the shape of the American city is both the result of grand political visions, and the expression of millions of individuals' choices.

The Art of the New Urbanist Deal

New urbanism proposes new models for the urban design of master-planned communi-ties and town centers. The financial performance of three projects is examined in detail: Seaside, a second-home resort in Florida; Lakelands, a master-planned community in Gaithersburg, Maryland; and Haile Village Center, a mixed-use residential, commercial, and retail center outside Gainesville, Florida. Seaside, which consists of 630 residential units, about 45,000 square feet of retail, and about 18,000 square feet of commercial space, has slowly developed into a financial success. The first lots sold in 1982 for $15,000; by 1992, the average price of new lots sold was$130,000 and by 2001 it was $690,000. The project has become a model for several larger second-home village-type resorts in northwest Florida. Lakelands, with 220 developable acres, has about 1,572 residential units (houses as well as multi-family), the majority produced by national homebuilders. The selling rate has been good: in the first three years, the project sold about 400 units a year. The land at Haile Village was originally bought for$2,500 per acre and is today sell-ing for more than $300,000 per acre; the value of the project at build-out is estimated to be about$500,000 per acre. Due to lack of visibility, there has been some difficulty in attracting a large variety of retail tenants.

City Life : Urban Expectations In A New World

256 hlm., bibl., index, 21 c

Measuring Sprawl

The simplest measure of how much a metropolitan area sprawls is its population density - that is, the number of inhabitants per square mile. However, this can be misleading since metropolitan areas include land that has not been developed and may, in fact, not be developable, such as steep slopes, nature preserves, or land banks. This paper discusses dif-ferent measures of density, including urbanized density, centralization of employment, and densification of metropolitan areas over time. It suggests that many popular preconcep-tions about sprawl are inaccurate - that is, Western and Southern metropolitan areas do not necessarily sprawl more than areas in the Northeast. Indeed, Los Angeles and Phoenix actually have higher population densities than older metro areas such as Chicago and Boston, and older metropolitan areas in the Northeast are not necessarily denser than newer areas. Philadelphia and Detroit rank as extreme examples of low-density develop-ment according to several measures.