Books – Detail

In Art Cure, world-leading expert and award-winning scientist Professor Daisy Fancourt reveals the life-changing power of the arts, including how: Songs support the architectural development of children's brains. Creative hobbies help our brains to stay resilient against dementia. Visual art and music act just like drugs to reduce depression, stress, and pain. Dance build new neural pathways for people with brain injuries. Going to live music events, museums, exhibitions, and the theatre decreases our risk of future loneliness and frailty.

Maureen Meister distills key elements of Arts and Crafts architecture, and her broad national perspective reveals new insights, including the close relationships among the movement's leaders.

A beginner-friendly guide to drawing. Filled with fun prompts and easy step-by-step techniques for sketching and shading, it will help you find calm and creativity as you capture everyday moments in its pages. Whether you're new to drawing or rediscovering your artistic side, this is the perfect place to start!

This lively, richly illustrated publication features works in a wide range of media by a diverse group of artists, including Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, and many others.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, Philadelphia Art Museum, November 8, 2025

Documenting the 50 year friendship and collaborative efforts of noted architects and friends Frank Gehry and Robert Tannen. The book features essays, personal notes, and collaborative and individual work in a range of media, including architectural models, sculpture, painting, printmaking, urban planning, and product design.

The life, works and legacy of a Philadelphia architect.

A fascinating biography of the philanthropist Albert Barnes, whose pioneering collection of modern art was meant to transform America’s soul.

Athenaeum Literary Award Finalist

This two-volume publication examines in depth the work of Samuel Yellin (1884-1940), a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who became the single most important ironworker in America. Excellent new photographs bring to life many extraordinary objects. Thanks to unlimited access to the Samuel Yellin Metalworkers archives, a wealth of archival material--photographs, drawings, and business records--is published here for the first time.

2 volumes (xv, 528 pages; xv, 615 pages)

Wallace traces how, over the span of some forty years, this unspoken rivalry was reciprocal and mutually beneficial, with each learning from the other's brilliance, quietly seeking to best the other's work and secure his own legacy.

Catalogs a nationwide participatory public art and history exhibition seeking to elevate the next generation of monuments that reckon with and reimagine public memory.

The culmination of Robert A.M. Stern's monumental history of architecture in New York City and a comprehensive record of building over the last twenty-five years. A landmark in architectural publishing, New York 2020 explores the planning and politics of building in New York City during the first decades of the 21st century.

In his inventive manuscript, Anthony Fontenot reveals the affinities between Friedrich Hayek's libertarian conception of state power and the aesthetic deregulation sought by "non-design" architects and urbanists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Jane Jacobs.

During the Great Depression, Americans employed historic preservation as a tool to address the political, economic, and social upheavals of the era. Inspired by the Roosevelt administration's unprecedented support of federal arts projects, US politicians, architects, laborers, artisans, and local boosters skillfully used New Deal funds to restore, mythologize, and politicize the "historic shrines" in their communities. Restoring America illustrates how and why Americans turned to historic preservation as a strategy for managing both political realities and ambitions.

The Short Story of Queer Art offers a fuller picture of the history of art--from the barriers broken and breakthroughs that queer artists have made, to the important contributions to key artistic movements, and the forgotten and obscured artists who are now being rediscovered and reassessed.

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the great architects of the twentieth century. His Edwardian country houses, surrounded by rhapsodic gardens, beguiled clients with their romance and wit. After 1918, the war memorials that he created symbolised a grieving nation's sense of loss.

Explore how the design of our homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods impacts our health, happiness, and relationships. With practical approaches, scientific insights, and real-world examples, this book will inspire you to create spaces that help you feel and live better.

Readers embark on a visual journey through the world's bustling subway systems, where each station tells a story of its city's soul.

First published in 1999, Annie Leibovitz's landmark collection of portraits of women is back in print, together with a new book of photographs. The broad array of subjects reflects what women look like now: dancers, actors, astronauts, artists, politicians, farmers, writers, CEOs, philanthropists, soldiers, musicians, athletes, socialites, scientists.