Harvard University Press

Chinese architecture is astonishingly uniform. Buddhists, Daoists, and Muslims, inside China and beyond, built Chinese-style structures the same way for two thousand years, despite mastering new technologies along the way. Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt offers an authoritative overview of design principles that have stood the test of time-and geography.

A history of Cairo, from its beginnings in the Arab conquest of Egypt in 640 to a modern capital. This book examines the invasions, changes and conflicts which shaped Cairo's destiny as well as the rulers, religious leaders, artisans and merchants who characterized the city.

Stephen Kern writes about the sweeping changes in technology and culture between 1880 and World War I that created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space.

A work on the shaping of our architectural environment.

Americans encounter their homes in ways comforting and haunting: as an imagined refuge or a place of mastery and domination, a destination or a place to escape. Drawing on literature, personal experience, and the histories of slavery, incarceration, and homesteading, Thomas Dumm offers a meditation on the richness and poverty of the idea of home.

A healthy building does more than conserve resources: it improves the health and productivity of the people inside. Joseph Allen and John Macomber look at everything from the air we breathe to the water we drink to how light, sound, and materials impact our performance and wellbeing and drive business profit.

In 2010 BP's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe spiraled into the worst human-made economic and ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history. In the most comprehensive account to date, senior systems engineers Earl Boebert and James Blossom show how corporate and engineering decisions, each one individually innocuous, interacted to create the disaster.