Sustainable Architecture: The Green Buildings of Nikken Sekkei

Product Description

The concept of sustainable architecture has a high profile at present, as we are become increasingly aware of our responsibilities towards the preservation of our planet. Nikken Sekkei is an architectural firm known for its consideration of the environmental consequences of its buildings, and this will be the first book to give a comprehensive coverage of this aspect of their work to date.

From the Inside Flap

The relationship between architecture and the environment has historically been and continues to be a complex interaction of site, technology, climate and other natural forces, building materials, and the human presence. In the new century this affinity is gradually assuming a powerful profile as architecture moves away from former design paradigms to a more defined alliance with nature.
The burgeoning Green movement in architecture has its origins in the activism of the sixties, the alternative societies of the seventies and an ever-increasing body of knowledge concerning global warming, the depletion of the earth’s resources, widespread pollution and other environmental hazards. Such environmental issues are now a mounting concern in most industrialized nations, and almost by necessity, have led to a major evolution in world architecture that embraces a whole new design ‘vocabulary’ — the language of sustainability. 

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Academy Press (August 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471864579
• ISBN-13: 978-0471864578
• Product Dimensions: 12.3 x 10.2 x 0.9 inches

Architecture Book Description

As the oldest and largest design firm in Japan, Nikken Sekkei employs over two thousand people and boasts of over fourteen thousand completed projects in forty countries. 

This volume examines their finest displays of architectural refinement, elegance, and bravura from 1990 to the present. Botond Bognar, Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, provide an authoritative and thorough history of the firm's achievements since the beginning of the century, focusing on such important recent works as the Islamic Development Bank Headquarters, Jeddah; the IBM Japan Head Office, Tokyo; and the Education and Cultural Center "Cairo Opera House."Although famous for their innovative approach to materials and new technologies as applied to the designs of magnificent large-scale buildings and monumental complexes like the high-tech Osaka World Trade Center Building "Cosmo Tower" in Osaka and Queen's Square in Yokohama (nearly the scale of a small city), Nikken Sekkei's brilliantly executed miniature conceptions, like the artfully conceived Sakuradamon Police Box in Tokyo, display a similar level of artistic control and finish as well. 

Whether reclaiming land from the sea, as in the Kansai  International Airport Passenger Terminal Building and the Asia and Pacific Import Mart (AIM); merging buildings with the surrounding environment, the Museum of Ehime History and Culture in Uwa; or constructing them underground, the subterranean Osaka Municipal Central Gymnasium, whose site is located under the expansive greenery of Yawataya Park, the superbly crafted architectural solutions of Nikken Sekkei are both feats of creative engineering and thoughtfully conceived monuments, based on a long-standing aesthetic judgment both firmly rooted in the past and present and moving beyond them.

Nikken Sekkei: Building Future Japan, 1900-2000

Product Details

Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Rizzoli (September 2, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 084782246X
ISBN-13: 978-0847822461
Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 10.2 x 1.3 inches

Architecture Book Description

The concept of sustainable architecture has a high profile at present, as we are become increasingly aware of our responsibilities towards the preservation of our planet. 

Nikken Sekkei is an architectural firm known for its consideration of the environmental consequences of its buildings, and this will be the first book to give a comprehensive coverage of this aspect of their work to date.

Sustainable Architecture: The Green Buildings of Nikken Sekkei

From the Inside Flap

The relationship between architecture and the environment has historically been and continues to be a complex interaction of site, technology, climate and other natural forces, building materials, and the human presence. In the new century this affinity is gradually assuming a powerful profile as architecture moves away from former design paradigms to a more defined alliance with nature.
The burgeoning Green movement in architecture has its origins in the activism of the sixties, the alternative societies of the seventies and an ever-increasing body of knowledge concerning global warming, the depletion of the earth’s resources, widespread pollution and other environmental hazards. Such environmental issues are now a mounting concern in most industrialized nations, and almost by necessity, have led to a major evolution in world architecture that embraces a whole new design ‘vocabulary’ — the language of sustainability. 

---

Product Details

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Academy Press (August 29, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0471864579
ISBN-13: 978-0471864578
Product Dimensions: 12.3 x 10.2 x 0.9 inches