Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

New Urban Environments features spectacular examples of key urban building types designed by some 50 leading architects and engineers working in Britain and Europe, such as Foster and Partners, Richard Rogers Partnership, and Zaha Hadid. The book includes approximately 85 cultural buildings, commercial districts, transport interchanges, educational and environmental centers. Each section illustrates key projects with drawings, photographs, models and/or computer renderings and provides an overview of the site's development history. A number of comparative projects by non-British architects are described in brief, putting British architecture in a European context.

Descriptive texts explain the selection criteria for each project and include reasons for the new development, design constraints, and a summary of critical comments on the schemes, particular attention being paid to the environmental design aspects of the projects.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This catalog accompanies an exhibition of the recent urban works of a number of leading British architects (Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Michael Wilford, etc.) and a limited number of their European contemporaries (such as Rafael Moneo, Christian de Prtzamparc, Daniel Libeskind) currently working on projects in Britain. The exhibition was sponsored by the Royal Academy of Arts, was curated by Peter Murray, and opened in Tokyo and Hiroshima. Following essays on contemporary British architecture by Robert Maxwell and on the urban environment by Richard Burdett, the catalog is organized around six typologies--Public Buildings, Transport, Leisure, Culture, Commerce, and Ecology--which are immediately preceded by a section entitled "The Post Modern City," and are followed by biographies of the 41 architects and firms included in the exhibition. The emphasis of the presentation is markedly visual as each project is given just two pages on which three or four images in color and a brief explanatory text are arranged. About one-quarter of the entries are as yet unrealized and are presented as models, in line drawings, and as computer generated images. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. J. Quinan; SUNY at Buffalo