{"title":"Florian Urban","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"form-follows-fuel-book-florian-urban-9781032636542","title":"Form Follows Fuel","description":"This book is the first to quantify energy inputs for a range of buildings worldwide and across the historical record. It consists of 14 accessibly-written case studies and is an important contribution to architectural historical research, written for academics and building professionals as well as for a general audience.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51598665974033,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51598666367249,"sku":"NGR9781032636542","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53067421909265,"sku":"GOR014724495","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1032636548.jpg?v=1751463367"},{"product_id":"form-follows-fuel-book-florian-urban-9781032639888","title":"Form Follows Fuel","description":"Modernists believed that “form follows function.” Form Follows Fuel shows that in fact energy has been the biggest influence on the world’s architecture throughout the history of our species. The availability of energy under different fuel regimes – including human labour, firewood, coal, oil, gas, and renewables – shapes architecture at all scales, from what gets built to how its doors hinge.  This book is the first to quantify energy inputs for a range of buildings worldwide and across the historical record. In the process, it challenges today's architects, offers practical solutions to today's ecological crises, and highlights the aspects of today’s buildings that make architecture responsible for 37% of human climate-changing emissions. It reveals the enormously lower impacts of historical alternatives to today’s default building practices.  This book shows that the shift to modern fossil fuel use, from the seventeenth century, came to be the most consequential move in the history of architecture as well as in human history in general. This brought about remarkable wealth for the built environment and at the same time unprecedented dangers for our planet, as evidenced by the exacerbating climate emergency.  This book consists of 14 accessibly written case studies, illustrated with beautiful and revealing new measured drawings of each project by John Joseph Burns. Each chapter focuses on a single structure in a particular historical context, sometimes contrasted to similar buildings, from subsistence farming to advanced global capitalism. The chapters analyse the consumption of embodied and operational energy in these buildings, and also discuss questions of recycling and adaptive reuse. They complement precise descriptions with hard numbers on materials and construction, using robustly sourced approximations where exact figures are not available. The case studies rely on both published research and the authors’ own calculations and allow systematic comparison across different global regions and historical periods.  Cases include architectural icons such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Baths of Caracalla, the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the Seagram Building, and Terminal 1 of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, as well as common types such as a pre-modern stone house, a late-nineteenth-century tenement, and a modernist panel block. Examples are taken from different regions of the world, including ancient China, pre-Columbian Mexico, and modern Europe. This book is an important contribution to architectural historical research, written for students, academics and building professionals as well as for a general audience.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51598725218577,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51598725611793,"sku":"NGR9781032639888","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1032639881.jpg?v=1751462539"},{"product_id":"origins-of-the-pacific-war-and-the-importance-of-magic-book-florian-urban-9780415489980","title":"Origins of the Pacific War and the Importance of 'Magic'","description":"Argues that in the final phase of the eight months of US-Japan talks leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor, serious mistranslations in Magic (the US decoding system) were a significant factor in the cumulative effect of mutual misunderstandings which grew between the two sides.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52535318544657,"sku":"NLS9780415489980","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780415489980.jpg?v=1778838672"},{"product_id":"tower-and-slab-book-florian-urban-9780415676298","title":"Tower and Slab","description":"Tower and Slab looks at the contradictory history of the modernist mass housing block - home to millions of city dwellers around the world. Few urban forms have roused as much controversy. While in the United States decades-long criticism caused the demolition of most mass housing projects for the poor, in the booming metropolises of Shanghai and Mumbai remarkably similar developments are being built for the wealthy middle class. While on the surface the modernist apartment block appears universal, it is in fact diverse in its significance and connotations as its many different cultural contexts.   Florian Urban studies the history of mass housing in seven narratives: Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Brasilia, Mumbai, Moscow, and Shanghai. Investigating the complex interactions between city planning and social history, Tower and Slab shows how the modernist vision to house the masses in serial blocks succeeded in certain contexts and failed in others. Success and failure, in this respect, refers not only to the original goals – to solve the housing crisis and provide modern standards for the entire society – but equally to changing significance of the housing blocks within the respective societies and their perception by architects, politicians, and inhabitants.   These differences show that design is not to blame for mass housing’s mixed record of success. The comparison of the apparently similar projects suggests that triumph or disaster does not depend on a single variable but rather on a complex formula that includes not only form, but also social composition, location within the city, effective maintenance, and a variety of cultural, social, and political factors.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52537403834641,"sku":"NLS9780415676298","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52571196522769,"sku":"NGR9780415676298","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780415676298.jpg?v=1760678273"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-florian-urban.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}