Items related to Almanac of Architecture and Design 2000
Synopsis
The Almanac of Architecture and Design 2000, the first sourcebook of its kind, is the definitive reference for the design professions - architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, industrial design, and historic preservation. Designed to be comprehensive, easy to use, and entertaining, the Almanac brings together a host of facts and worldwide information resources. Among its many valuable facts, the Almanac includes a design calendar with dates for competition submission deadlines and conferences; major award programs and their history and past winners; a listing of the major design organizations; worldwide museums of architecture and design including their 2000 exhibition schedules; obituaries which note the passing of industry pioneers and leaders from the previous year; a noted individuals section with a listing of the fellows, honorary members, and past presidents of the major design associations; a compilation of design records, rankings and achiev! ements including the tallest buildings in the world, best skylines, top 15 schools of architecture and interior design, 29 best buildings of the 20th century, and more; a Design Econometrics chapter which includes valuable cost information and statistics; a special design and historic preservation section with awards, organizations, and rankings; major architecture and design bookstores throughout the U.S.; worldwide directory of design journals and magazines; a listing of U.S. colleges and universities offering design degrees; overview of registration laws; and much more.
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About the Author
James P. Cramer is the founder and chairman of the Greenway Group and Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the University of Hawaii. He researches, consults, and gives seminars for over 200 leading professional firms around the world. He is the author of 120 articles and several books, including the critically acclaimed Design + Enterprise, Seeking a New Reality in Architecture. He is co-author of How Firms Succeed, A Field Guide to Management Solutions, which will be released in early 2000. Cramer is the former Chief Executive of The American Institute of Architects in Washington D.C. and the former President of the American Architectural Foundation. He is currently the Co-chair of the Washington D.C. based think tank, the Design Futures Council. An educator, futurist, and business advisor, he is currently leading sessions on technology advancements and pending value migration changes in the design professions.
Reviews
Aiming to provide "an essential and definitive resource on architecture and design facts," editor Cramer (former CEO of the American Institute of Architects, currently at the University of Hawaii) delivers a mixed bag that falls short of his goal. With extensive lists of award winners, association members, and leading firms, this almanac's first edition reads mostly like a who's who in architecture. A fact-filled section on "design econometrics" will aid the marketing efforts of professionals, and lists of institutions, periodicals, associations, and schools will benefit the student and practitioner. A fair amount of browsable trivia is included in the "records and rankings" section. The index includes only names, failing completely as a point of subject access. As no comparable resource exists, architecture schools and professionals may want to add this affordable reference to their libraries, with the hope that it will improve with future installments.DDavid Soltesz, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the Foreword by Paul Goldberger We like to believe that architecture is form and space and proportion and materials, and it is. But it is also information. And information about architecture tends to be scattered and difficult to pin down, particularly when it deals with what is happening right now. It is a paradox of the age of information that facts can often be easier to come by when they have acquired a patina of history. Thus, almost every library is full of architectural history books, not to mention encyclopedias that delve deeply into the past, which is why no one trying to learn the circumference of the Pantheon or the height of the towers of Notre Dame or the year Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater can claim any excuse for coming up dry. But move out of the past and into the present and you have a problem. It is, strangely enough, easier to track down who designed the world's tallest building in 1913, the Woolworth Building, than the world's tallest building in 1999, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. There are more sources to tell you the height of the tallest structures in medieval Europe, the Gothic cathedrals, than the height of the tallest structures in contemporary America, corporate skyscrapers. And it is simpler to learn about Thomas Jefferson's architecture that was built in the 1820s than to learn who won the Thomas Jefferson Award for Architecture in the 1990s. That is the purpose of this Almanac - to fill in these gaps, to bring the developments of this moment to our fingertips. It is a propitious time for such a book, because there is more happening in architecture and design than there has ever been, not only more buildings of note, but more interest in everything surrounding the built environment. The architectural profession is more in the public eye than it has been at any time in the last generation, if not in its entire history, and there is more and more demand for information about how that profession has defined itself as well as about the things it has produced. That is why this book contains a list of who has won every architectural award of note, from the Praemium Imperiale in Japan to the Carlsberg Prize in Denmark; information about the missions of every professional group in the field, from the American Society of Landscape Architects to the Royal Institute of Australian Architects; a list of the exhibition schedules of eighteen of the most prominent museums of architecture and design in the world; and directories of the leading architecture and design firms, major schools of architecture and design, and major journal and magazines of architecture and design.
The Almanac includes several more exotic lists as well. Now that I have this book in hand, I am not sure where else I would have ever gone to learn that Mount Vernon is visited by more people than Monticello, or that Biltmore in North Carolina attracts more visitors than either Hearst Castle at San Simeon or Graceland in Memphis. (Mount Vernon is at the top of the Almanac's list of the 25 most visited house museums, a list in which Monticello ranks sixth, Fallingwater twenty-first, and the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York last.) These figures don't tell us everything - they are no indication of architectural importance - but they tell us much about what certain places mean to our culture at this moment. And the Almanac has a fascinating ranking of "the world's best skylines," separate entirely from its listing of the world's tallest skyscrapers. Each city's skyline is ranked according to the total number of meters by which its buildings exceed 151meters per building, which is how you can learn that New York at number one has 6,207 points to number two Chicago's 2,891, and that Philadelphia has more skyline points than San Francisco, Seattle or Frankfurt, that Paris is number thirty, and that Dunwoody, Georgia, outside of Atlanta, is number sixty-eight, which puts it higher on the skyline ranking than Des Moines, Nashville, or Cincinnati.
This is not a book about design trends per se - it is not an analysis of stylistic directions but rather a compilation of facts that can, if used right, buttress our understanding of those larger trends. The Almanac is a compendium of supporting information, we might say, and while the reader will have to look elsewhere to find a critical discussion of the rise and fall of post-modernism, the reader who uses this book well will come away with a richer sense of the texture of the profession and of the architecture it produces.
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