In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation.
As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883-1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a total work of art across different practices and media.
This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.
A comprehensive history of the women architects who left their enduring mark on American Modernism
In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. Women Architects at Work tells the stories of the resilient and resourceful women who surmounted barriers of sexism, racism, and classism to take on crucial roles in the establishment and growth of Modernism across the United States. Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy describe how the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts evolved for the professional education of women between 1916 and 1942. While alumnae such as Eleanor Agnes Raymond, Victorine du Pont Homsey, and Sarah Pillsbury Harkness achieved some notoriety, others like Elizabeth-Ann Campbell Knapp and Louisa Vaughan Conrad have been largely absent from histories of Modernism. Hunting and Murphy describe how these innovative practitioners capitalized on social, educational, and professional ties to achieve success and used architecture to address social concerns, including how modernist ideas could engage with community and the environment. Some joined women-led architectural firms while others partnered with men or contributed to Modernism as retailers of household furnishings, writers and educators, photographers and designers, or fine artists. With stunning illustrations, Women Architects at Work offers new histories of recognized figures while recovering the stories of previously unsung women, all of whom contributed to the modernization of American architecture and design.In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, and sculpture to ceramics.
This best-selling reference work is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world's largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 575 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a total work of art.
This is a defining account of Bauhaus' energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in Modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. The handy edition features artists Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and many more.
The Empire State Building is the landmark book on one of the world's most notable landmarks. Since its publication in 1995, John Tauranac's book, focused on the inception and construction of the building, has stood as the most comprehensive account of the structure. Moreover, it is far more than a work in architectural history; Tauranac tells a larger story of the politics of urban development in and through the interwar years. In a new epilogue to the Cornell edition, Tauranac highlights the continuing resonance and influence of the Empire State Building in the rapidly changing post-9/11 cityscape.
With more than 280 entries, this architectural A-Z, now part of our Bibliotheca Universalis series, offers an indispensable overview of the key players in the creation of modern space. From the period spanning the 19th to the 21st century, pioneering architects are featured with a portrait, concise biography, as well as a description of her or his important work.
Like a bespoke global architecture tour, you'll travel from Manhattan skyscrapers to a Japanese concert hall, from Gaudí's Palau Güell in Barcelona to Lina Bo Bardi's sports and leisure center in a former factory site in São Paulo. You'll take in Gio Ponti's colored geometries, Zaha Hadid's free-flowing futurism, the luminous interiors of SANAA, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh's unique blend of Scottish tradition and elegant japonisme.
The book's A to Z entries also cover groups, movements, and styles to position these leading individual architects within broader building trends across time and geography, including International Style, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and much more. Featuring modern architectural photography, this is a comprehensive source book for any architecture professional, student, or devotee.
In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, and sculpture to ceramics.
This best-selling reference work is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world's largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 575 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a total work of art.
This is a defining account of Bauhaus' energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in Modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. The handy edition features artists Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and many more.
Traces the evolution of midcentury houses and demonstrates how they are experienced and lived in today
This expanded and updated edition of the 2014 classic focuses on the concentration of midcentury houses in New Canaan, Connecticut, built by noted architects including Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, Philip Johnson, John Black Lee, and Edward Durell Stone. This new edition addresses the issue of preservation and adaptive reuse as a sustainable architectural strategy.
A representative group of 17 houses reveals an evolving legacy, now adapting to contemporary life. Each is examined in detail, with plans, timelines, and both archival and new photography, capturing the clean, minimalist look of the initial construction and re-imagining by significant architects of our time. Today preservation and renovation of older buildings has new visibility as a sustainable approach. As the National Trust for Historic Preservation has said, The greenest building is the one that is already built.
The comprehensive story of an icon of modern architecture: the Edith Farnsworth House, designed by Mies van der Rohe
One of the most famous residences in modern history, a glass and steel marvel that seems to float above its site, the Edith Farnsworth House had been legendary in the public imagination long before it could be widely accessed. This book charts the house's original design by Mies van der Rohe and periods of neglect, flooding, and new ownership by Lord Peter Palumbo.
Now publicly accessible and celebrating twenty years of being owned and administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, this icon of modern architecture commissioned by client and patron Edith Farnsworth now gets its due. The Edith Farnsworth House is one of the most prized residences in modern architectural history, whose sometimes fraught history culminates in its publicly accessible life today.
The book, which newly foregrounds the key role of client Edith Farnsworth, is written and edited by Michelangelo Sabatino, who contributes deep expertise on modernist architecture, and includes an essay by architectural historian Dietrich Neumann, excerpts of Edith Farnsworth's unpublished memoir, as well as interviews with Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan, and the house's second owner, Lord Peter Palumbo. Published in association with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, this book is published is a trove of cultural and visual history, and includes photographs by Hedrich Blessing, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Annie Leibovitz, in addition to documentation of cultural collaborations with artists, designers, and performance troupes such as Virgil Abloh, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Gerard & Kelly.
The definitive book on one of the foremost modernist cities and architecture destinations in the USA: Columbus, Indiana
The midwestern city of Columbus, Indiana, is more than a mecca of modern architecture; it is an example of how design can help foster a remarkable community. The dozens of buildings and projects by legendary architects - from mid-century titans such as Eero Saarinen and I. M. Pei to contemporary practitioners Deborah Berke and IwamotoScott - remain integral to its urban fabric. This book explores Columbus's optimistic program of bold new architecture and landscapes, initiated by the legendary industrialist J. Irwin Miller and local leaders, and the generations-long quest to develop the ideal American city through design excellence.
This is the first in-depth history of Columbus, Indiana, demonstrating the unique convergence of civic, industrial, and social forces that produced the pre-eminent laboratory of architectural modernism in the USA. It presents a rich showcase of outstanding, generation-spanning architects and is published in association with Landmark Columbus Foundation, the civic organization behind the progressive preservation and promotion of the city's architectural heritage, as well as the producer of the acclaimed program Exhibit Columbus, a two-year cycle of events that uses the context of Columbus to host conversations around innovative ideas and then commissions site-responsive installations in a free, public exhibition.
From the towering Sagrada Família to the shimmering, textured façade of Casa Batlló and the enchanting landscape of Park Güell, it's easy to see why Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) gained the epithet God's architect. With fluid forms and mathematical precision, his work extols the wonder of natural creation: columns soar like tree trunks, window frames curve like flowering branches, and ceramic tiling shimmers like scaly, reptilian skin.
With this outstanding attention to natural detail, his inspirations from both neo-Gothic and Orientalist aesthetics, and a lifelong commitment to Catalan identity, Gaudí created a unique brand of the Modernista movement which transformed, and defines, Barcelona's cityscape.
With seven of Gaudí's projects listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, this book introduces the architect's extraordinary vision and unique legacy, exploring the influences and the details which allow his buildings to impress, inspire, and amaze, one century after their construction.
The architecture of the 20th century is distinguished by an astonishing diversity. Just as the clash of aesthetic and commercial ambitions nevertheless produced many a happy symbiosis, so the purist and the expressive, the monumental and the picturesque came face to face. From lofty starchitects to lesser-known names around the world, this chronological overview takes you to the heart of the ideas, trends, and transitions that defined the 1900s.
From Frank Lloyd Wright to Antoni Gaudí, Frank O. Gehry to Shigeru Ban and all the best stuff in-between, it's all here. Organized chronologically, the 31 chapters put it all into perspective, illustrated by hundreds of large-format photos as well as a plenitude of drawings and floor plans. The biographical appendix covers all of the century's greatest architects while celebrating today's new talents, and the lavish illustrations include some of the best architectural photography in the modern era.
For anyone interested in the zeitgeist and building design of the 20th century, this is your be-all-end-all reference work. The collection covers not only the architects but also the groups, the movements, and the styles that defined an era of construction. A must for all lovers of architecture!
America's most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was born in 1867 in the rolling hills of Richland Center, Wisconsin, to a family of Unitarians. Even with world-class commissions like New York City's Guggenheim Museum, his organic architecture remains rooted in Wisconsin's landscape, from affordable-housing prototypes in Milwaukee to his summer home and architecture school in rural Spring Green. This comprehensive guide to Wright's designs (and those of his protégés) that are open to the public--as well as insider historical information about sites now demolished, and those available for drive-bys only--is for the architecture or history fan looking for tours, overnight stays or creative inspiration.
Edith Wharton's The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-written with the architect Ogden Codman Jr., brought transatlantic fame to a writer best known as a chronicler of Gilded Age New York. In their decorating guidebook, Wharton and Codman, who collaborated on the design of the author's Massachusetts home, The Mount, advocated for simple but classically informed choices that resonate profoundly today. The book crystallizes what Wharton found to be troubling in Americans' enthusiasm for ostentation at the turn of the twentieth century--the late Victorian equivalent of the modern McMansion.
This annotated edition includes a comprehensive introduction that provides relevant biographical information on Wharton, as well as her literary work and how her perspectives on homeownership and décor informed her writing. The reproduction of the book's original illustrations alongside new annotations allows readers to visualize how Wharton's aesthetic preferences informed her writing, life, and charitable works. Valuable to Wharton scholars as well as students of design, The Decoration of Houses presents a definitive look at the tastes of a literary icon.History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (German: Geschichte und Klassenbewu tsein: Studien ber marxistische Dialektik) is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher Gy rgy Luk cs, in which Luk cs re-emphasizes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on Karl Marx, analyses the concept of class consciousness, and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism. History and Class Consciousness, which helped to create Western Marxism, is the book for which Luk cs is best known, and some of his pronouncements have become famous. Nevertheless, History and Class Consciousness was condemned in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and Luk cs later repudiated its ideas, and came to believe that in it he had confused Hegel's concept of alienation with that of Marx. It has been suggested that the concept of reification as employed in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) shows the strong influence of History and Class Consciousness, though such a relationship remains disputed. (wikipedia.org)
Once there was a nation that went to war, but after they conquered a continent their own country was destroyed by atom bombs... then the victors imposed democracy on the vanquished. For a group of apprentice architects, artists, and designers, led by a visionary, the dire situation of their country was not an obstacle but an inspiration to plan and think... although they were very different characters, the architects worked closely together to realize their dreams, staunchly supported by a super-creative bureaucracy and an activist state... after 15 years of incubation, they surprised the world with a new architecture--Metabolism--that proposed a radical makeover of the entire land... Then newspapers, magazines, and TV turned the architects into heroes: thinkers and doers, thoroughly modern men... Through sheer hard work, discipline, and the integration of all forms of creativity, their country, Japan, became a shining example... when the oil crisis initiated the end of the West, the architects of Japan spread out over the world to define the contours of a post-Western aesthetic.... --Rem Koolhaas / Hans Ulrich Obrist
Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism--the first non-Western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan's postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images--master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions--telling the 20th-century history of Japan through its architecture.
From the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s, a devastated Japan after the war, and the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo '70 in Osaka, and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s: The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.
Oral history by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist Extensive interviews with Arata Isozaki, Toshiko Kato, Kiyonori Kikutake, Noboru Kawazoe, Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kenji Ekuan, Atsushi Shimokobe, and Takako and Noritaka Tange Hundreds of never-before-seen images, architectural models, and magazine excerpts Layout by award-winning Dutch designer Irma Boom
Further reading
Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Transforming the American Mind is an interdisciplinary volume of literary and cultural scholarship that examines the link between two pivotal intellectual and artistic figures. It probes the degree to which the transcendentalist author influenced the architect's campaign against dominant strains of American thought. Inspired by Emerson's writings on the need to align exterior expression with interior self, Wright believed that architecture was not first and foremost a matter of accommodating spatial needs, but a tool to restore intellectual and artistic freedom, too often lost in the process of modernization.
Ayad Rahmani shows that Emerson's writings provide an avenue for interpreting Wright's complex approach to country and architecture. The two thinkers cohered around a common concern for a nation derailed by nefarious forces that jeopardized the country's original promise. In Emerson's condemnations of slavery and inequality, Wright found inspiration for seeking redress against the humiliations suffered by the modern worker, be it at the hands of an industrial manager or an office boss. His designs sought to challenge dehumanizing labor practices and open minds to the beauty and science of agriculture and the natural world. Emerson's example helped Wright develop architecture that aimed less at accommodating a culture of clients and more at raising national historical awareness while also arguing for humane and equitable policies. Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson presents a new approach to two vital thinkers whose impact on American society remains relevant to this day.How San Franciscans exploited natural resources such as redwood lumber to produce the first major metropolis of the American West.
California's 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the instant city of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state's vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional city. This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region's rich natural environment.
Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources--including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs--to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites--a City of Wood--Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.