alan balfour

Alan Balfour's Books
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Educated at Edinburgh and Princeton and a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Alan Balfour is Professor and former Dean of the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech, a position he came to after serving as the architecture dean at Rensselaer. He was formerly chairman of the Architectural Association in London, and architecture dean at Rice University in Houston. He has taught and lectured widely and will assume the position of advisory professor to the CAUP Faculty of Tongji University, Shanghai, in the Spring of 2014. Balfour was the year 2000 recipient of the Topaz Medal, the highest recognition given in North America to an educator in architecture. He was just named by Designintelligence among their choice of 30 exemplary design educators for 2013.

Alan Balfour writes on the cultural imagination from the evidence in the forms of architecture and the city. Some of his work is focused on settings of significant conflict examining the physical evidence to reveal the underlying causes. The most recent book SOLOMON'S TEMPLE, Myth, Conflict and Faith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) studies the constructive and destructive power of faith played out in the myths and realities of one place, Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Creating a Scottish Parliament (with David McCrone, Finlay Brown, Edinburgh 2005) offers an intimate exploration of the conceptualization of the political structure for a devolved Scotland and the architecture that would symbolize and be the instrument for its advancement.

In 2002 he completed three books on three world cities; in each the city is viewed as the most tangible residue of the complexity of society's desires. Shanghai was published in 2002 and New York in 2001, (both from Wiley/Academy, London). The first in the series Berlin, published by Academy Editions in 1995, documents the transformation of Berlin before and after the collapse of the 'Wall.'  This and an earlier book Berlin: The Politics of Order: 1737-1989 (Rizzoli 1990), received AIA International Book Awards.

Other books include Portsmouth (Studio Vista 1970), Rockefeller Center: Architecture as Theater (McGraw-Hill 1978), with contributions to The Edge of the Millennium (Cooper Hewitt 1993), Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman (Rizzoli International /CCA 1994) and Recovering Landscape (Princeton Architectural Press 1999).