Writing About Place: The Complete Guide for Architects and Planners

At last, a comprehensive writing guide for architects and planners.Writing About Place offers the ultimate blueprint for the professionals who design and build our world.With case studies from the best writers on placemaking-from Vitruvius to Rybczynski-The Elements provides all the basic skills and 'tricks of the trade' to write memos, reports, proposals, and critiques.Charles Euchner produced this work for a class at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. And now offers a foundation for all the work of students and practitioners of placemaking.This work offers a "two-fer." In addition to providing simple, intuitive techniques to every writing challenge -- building great sentences and paragraphs, determining the structure of a piece, telling compelling stories, editing, and crafting a convincing analysis -- WAPalso provides a broad introduction to the compelling literature on architecture and planning.The book shows how to produce five essential pieces of writing in architecture, planning, preservation, and other place-oriented writing.* Portraits of people: To do any place-based project, you need to know your client or users. * Description of a place: To plan or design a place, we need to understand how it might work. * Breakdown of an action: Place, ultimately, is for people to use, so we need to understand the detailed ways that people act.* Explanation of a complex process: The best places accommodate complex and unpredictable processes.* Analysis of an issue: Allplacemaking occurs as part of a larger process, so we need to understand what causes what in cities, neighborhoods, communities, buildings, parks, plazas, waterfronts, and other kinds of places.About the AuthorCharles Euchner teaches writing seminars all over the U.S. Author of the acclaimed Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press), Euchner has written widely about urban policy and planning. Euchner was the founding executive director of Harvard's Rappaport Institute. He was educated at Vanderbilt University and the Johns Hopkins University.Raves for earlier editionsThe Elements of Writing, Euchner's landmark work on writing skills and techniques, has drawn raves from teachers, students, and writers from all realms. The Elements of Writing is an essential reference for writers and storytellers. I use it myself and recommend it to my students. The classic literary examples are extremely helpful. I feel smarter just having this book by my bedside, and I discover new insights every time I pick it up.- Lee-Sean Huang, cofounder and creative director, FoosaI found this book a few months ago and refer to it often and have recommended it to several people. It has some techniques that were very easy to implement and that have changed the way I write and edit. As soon as I adopted The Elements of Writing I found I worked much more quickly and felt in greater command of the text. I wish I had known about this years ago. -Marion Edmunds, Australian authorThe Elements of Writing is the rare writer's handbook that is both useful and a pleasure to read. The book's structure is original and smart; aspiring writers can read the book cover-to-cover or can look up specific issues. Besides articulating his own "tricks of the trade," Euchner offers a huge, wonderful array of examples. In clear, lucid terms, The Elements of Writing explains and shows what makes for strong prose.- Aaron Ritzenberg, Department of English, Columbia University