A building by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is at once unmistakably individual and evocative of an entire era. Notable for their exceptional harmony with their environment, as well as for their use of steel and glass to revolutionize the interface of indoor and outdoor, Wright's designs helped announce the age of modernity, as much as they secured his place in the annals of architectural genius.

This meticulous compilation from TASCHEN's previous monograph assembles the most important works from Wright's extensive, paradigm-shifting oeuvre into one authoritative overview of America's most famous architect. Based on unlimited access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation's archives at Taliesin West in Arizona, the collection spans the length and breadth of Wright's projects, both realized and unrealized, from his early prairie houses, the Usonian concept homes, and the extraordinary Fallingwater to the Tokyo years, his designs for administrative buildings and places of worship, and later high-profile projects like the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as his fantastic visions for a better tomorrow with The Living City.

Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) made a unique modernist mark. Influenced by both the landscape and the political independence of his native Finland, he designed warm, curving, compassionate buildings, wholly set apart from the slick, mechanistic, geometric designs that characterized much contemporary European practice.

Whether a church, a villa, a sauna, or a public library, Aalto's organic structures tended to replace plaster and steel with brick and wood, often incorporating undulating, wave-like forms, which would also appear in his chair, glassware, and lamp designs. An adherent to detail, Aalto insisted upon the humanity of his work stating: Modern architecture does not mean using immature new materials; the main thing is to work with materials towards a more human line.

Many of Aalto's public buildings such as Säynätsalo Town Hall, the lecture theatre at Otaniemi Technical University, the Helsinki National Pensions Institute and the Helsinki House of Culture may be seen as psychological as well as physical landmarks in the rebuilding of Finland after the ravages of war.

Architect Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) was known for his iconic modern houses and exemplary Brutalist buildings in exposed concrete. Rudolph's popularity peaked during the 1950s and 1960s, when he served as the chair of Yale University's Department of Architecture, but his work fell from favor with the advent of postmodernism in the 1970s. This compact volume provides an introduction to and long-overdue reassessment of the architect's trailblazing career, from his modernist Florida houses to his public and institutional buildings, unrealized mega-structures, experimental interiors, and later mixed-use
developments in Asia. Abraham Thomas examines how Rudolph explored concepts such as functionalism, urbanism, and modular construction across decades and continents. Richly illustrated with photographs of the structures and Rudolph's own drawings as well as models, furniture, and period press clippings, this book sheds light on the architect's process and takes up themes as important in his time as in our own, such as civic design, housing development, and experimental materials and methods.

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Schedule:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(September 30, 2024-March 16, 2025)

Famed for his motto less is more, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a hotly-debated tastemaker of twentieth-century aesthetics and urban experience.

Mies van der Rohe's philosophy was one of underlying truth in pure forms and proportions. With the help of contemporary technological and material developments, he sought a stripped-down purity to architecture, showcased by the likes of the Seagram Building and Farnsworth House. Some spoke out against this stark approach as the precursor to bland, generic cityscapes. Others cite Mies van der Rohe as the ultimate master of an abidingly elegant essence.

This book presents more than 20 of Mies van der Rohe's projects from the period 1906-1967 to introduce his groundbreaking practise and influence in both America and Europe.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) was a German-born American architect and designer whose work in Europe and North America has had an enduring influence on modern and contemporary architecture worldwide. During his sixty-year career, he fundamentally rethought architectural types that shaped modern life, including the office building, apartment building, and private home. True to his alleged dictum less is more, Mies van der Rohe's style is characterized by utmost simplicity, elegance of materials, and radical formal and functional innovation, as exemplified by such iconic projects as the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and the Seagram Building in New York.

In this book, renowned architectural historian Dietrich Neumann presents a new, critical look at Mies and complicates the established narrative about him. Diverging from the reverential posture of many existing accounts, Neumann insists on the importance of the contemporary context--social, political, and architectural--for understanding the architect's life and work. The book draws on many overlooked archival and primary sources to demonstrate how and why Mies's designs were shaped and received, foregrounding contemporary critics' responses and the work of Mies's collaborators and peers. It presents several previously unknown buildings, projects, and furniture designs and challenges long-established interpretations of key works. Comprehensively illustrated and covering the entirety of Mies's career, this ambitious book is the most substantial account to date of the life and work of one of the most important architects of the twentieth century.

Headed by principals Krista Schrock and David John Dick, DISC Interiors is an interior and furniture design firm based in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. DISC Interiors strives to create homes of calibrated simplicity that balance the push and pull of modern life, address a sense of place and persons rather than any particular period or style, and balance the traditional with the modern and aesthetics with function. DISC Interiors favors earthy color palettes that transition like seasons, and organic textures that patina gently like metals that burnish with touch, leathers that soften, and floorboards that reveal more of a home's soul with every year. The homes they design are filled with vintage furniture and rugs juxtaposed against custom upholstery to feel contemporary yet classic and familiar.

The projects designed by DISC Interiors represent a one-of-a-kind combination of traditional details and contemporary chic, and Portraits of Home is inspiring for all those seeking both contemporary and traditional solutions to twenty-first-century living.

Although he was not widely known during his lifetime, Carlo Scarpa has in the past-half century become one of the most revered of modern architects. His passion for integrating the ancient with the modern, the natural with the built environment, and the sensual qualities of glass, wood and stone, makes him the perfect architect for this moment, when the preservation of historic buildings and sensitivity to environmental impact is of supreme importance.
As authoritative as it is attractive, this book features balanced introduction to Scarpa's work, weighing the opinions of both champions and critics of his work. More than 200 photographs and their accompanying illuminating texts capture the astounding beauty of Scarpa's designs, allowing readers to experience the interplay of light, texture and line in a way that is second only to viewing the works in person.
Arguably the most definitive volume available on this consummate craftsman and artist, this book explores Scarpa's lasting legacy of meticulous craftsmanship, respect for tradition, and a deep understanding of the relationship between architecture, nature, and human experience.

One of the most acclaimed architects working in Brazil since the mid-twentieth century, Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928-2021) began building in the 1950s, championing an approach often associated with Brutalism but expanding well beyond it. He is widely recognized for having transformed the urban imprint of São Paulo. His best-known buildings include the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, remarkable for its engagement with the site and its daring structure; the renovation of the Pinacoteca do Estado, with audacious metallic inserts; and outstanding private houses, starting with his own. In 2006, he became the second Brazilian architect, after Oscar Niemeyer, to win the Pritzker Prize.

This retrospective catalogue is the first major publication on Mendes da Rocha since the establishment of his archive at the Casa da Arquitectura in 2021. A team of international scholars provides a comprehensive view of the architect's trajectory and the collective dimension of his work, along with thematic essays. Mendes da Rocha's identity as a South American architect interested in the geographic relation between nature and culture is underlined. The book's contributors explore his concern with the social and anthropogenic impact of the continent's development, as well as its colonial past and postcolonial future. The volume centers around twelve of his most important buildings and reprints two important essays on Mendes da Rocha's work. This will be an essential book on this significant figure of global modernism and will point the way for future scholarship on Mendes da Rocha and the architecture of contemporary Brazil.

Distributed for Casa da Arquitectura-Portuguese Centre for Architecture

Exhibition Schedule:

Casa da Arquitectura, Porto
(May 26, 2023-February 25, 2024)

As seen in Interior Design Magazine, New York Magazine, and Elle Decoration

A comprehensive monograph exploring Alexander Girard's vivid and dynamic design career

Alexander Girard was a leading figure in mid-century American design, bringing sensational color and pattern to the modernist aesthetic. Organized by discipline, this stunning monograph covers Girard's prolific and groundbreaking output across textiles, furniture, interior design, graphic design, illustration, and architecture.

Favoring geometric patterns in as many palettes as possible, Girard is best known for his textiles series for design company Herman Miller and for his commercial interior projects, including La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York and the Braniff International Airways rebrand.

Featuring more than 800 images, some of which have never before been published, this fascinating book covers Girard's wide-ranging impact on design, from textiles and wallpapers to painstakingly detailed interiors and curatorial projects.

Extensively researched and thoughtfully assembled by designer Todd Oldham, in partnership with Girard Studio, the book features double gatefolds that immerse the reader in Girard's object design sketches, the vibrant environmental panels created for Herman Miller's Action Office project, his designs for Braniff International Airways, and his tireless explorations in textile design.

Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and desert laboratory is a National Historic Landmark and has been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This book, the first of its kind in decades, celebrates that recognition and offers a new look at this world treasure.

An extraordinary compound of buildings that complements the cactus-studded environs and mountain backdrop of the Scottsdale desert in Arizona, Taliesin West is Wright's ode to desert living and one of his greatest and most visited venues. Here, amidst palo verde trees and coyotes, the visitor finds an oasis of sparkling pools and low-slung modern buildings that are uniquely suited to the site--indeed a veritable paradise that seems to have emerged from the wilderness. The expression of profound vision and the product of determination, artistry, and imagination, here Wright brought forth an organic masterpiece from the elements of the earth.

Begun in 1937, the compound served as a place of exploration, a place of work, a place of camaraderie and culture, and a place of living for Wright, for his family, and for the apprentices of the Taliesin Fellowship, who had joined the architect to learn and to work with him side-by-side. A most unusual place and community, Wright's legacy lives on even today.

Taliesin West: At Home with Frank Lloyd Wright explores the life within structures that make up Wright's desert masterpiece, from Garden Room to Cabaret Theatre, and delves into the many stories that have made the place at once a crucible for creation and a home.

In the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970), inside and outside find their perfect modernist harmony. As the Californian sun glints off sleek building surfaces, vast glass panel walls allow panoramic views over mountains, gardens, palm trees, and pools.

Neutra moved to the United States from his native Vienna in 1923 and settled in Los Angeles. He displayed his affinity with architectural settings early on with the Lovell House, set on a landscaped hill with views of the Pacific Ocean and Santa Monica Mountains. Later projects such as the Kaufmann House and Nesbitt House would continue this blend of art, landscape, and living comfort, with Neutra's clients often receiving detailed questionnaires to define their precise needs.

This richly illustrated architect introduction presents the defining projects of Neutra's career. As crisp structures nestle amid natural wonders, we celebrate a particularly holistic brand of modernism which incorporated the ragged lines and changing colors of nature as much as the pared down geometries of the International Style.

The first in-depth publication of drawings that reveal the creative genius of H. H. Richardson, the greatest American architect of the nineteenth century

The trove of 4,000 drawings, preserved since Richardson's death, have been largely unpublished, until now. This new book encompasses masterpieces such as Trinity Church in Boston, MA-- voted the most beautiful building in America in 1885-- the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail in Pittsburgh, PA; the Ames Gate Lodge in Easton, MA; the Glessner House and the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago, IL; and many more.

The book makes a major contribution to Richardson scholarship through its presentation of unpublished sketches, renderings, and plans of more than 50 projects, including city and country houses, churches, libraries, railroad stations, and municipal buildings. Its companion text includes an essay surveying the life and career of Richardson by James F. O'Gorman, the leading scholar of his work, which provides context to the drawings, together with additional essays that discuss the organization of Richardson's studio in Brookline, MA, and his personal approach to a wide network of clients as well as an overview of the Richardson archive at Harvard.

With its curated selection of 450 drawings, meticulously reproduced to reveal the design process and hand of the architect, this book is a revelatory exploration of Richardson's work, work that set American architecture on a new course and exerted a global influence on the birth of modernism.

Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library was selected for the Classical America Series in Architecture by the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art

I. M. Pei (1917-2019) was one of the world's most influential architects. Born and raised in China, Pei trained and worked in the United States, establishing a practice that spanned seven decades and multiple continents. His legacy includes the realization of some of the most high-profile projects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the modernization of the Louvre in Paris to the design of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.

Going beyond the usual building-by-building format of most architectural monographs, I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture is organized thematically, exploring Pei's life and work through six topics that were central to his unique approach to architecture: transcultural identity, urban redevelopment, art and civic form, material and structural innovation, politics and patronage, and regenerating cultural and historical archetypes. Bringing together previously unpublished archival materials, specially commissioned essays, new photography, and personal contributions from those who knew and worked with Pei, this book presents both celebrated and lesser-known aspects of the architect's life and career while solidifying his position in architectural history and popular culture.

The practice is documented through conversations, studies, models, renderings, working drawings, and photographs at a level of detail that allows for a nuanced understanding of the disciplinary agenda from conception to completion. This content is accompanied by contributions from critics and other designers that further explore the significance of the work.

Organized by those materials (wood, bamboo, straw, hemp, cork, earth, brick, stone and re-use), and incorporating life cycle diagrams demonstrating how the raw material is processed into building components, the book shows how the unique properties of each material can transform the ways architects conceive the sections of houses.

The house was selected as the vehicle for these investigations due to its scale, its role as a site of architectural experimentation, and its ubiquity. Building on the techniques of the Manual of Section, the book is comprised of newly generated cross-sectional drawings of fifty-five recent, modestly sized houses from around the world, making legible the tectonics and materials used in their construction. Each house is also shown through exploded axonometric, construction photographs and color photographs of the exterior and interior. Introductory essays set up the importance of embodied carbon, the role of vernacular plant-based construction and the problems of contemporary house construction. Drawing connections between the architecture of the house, environmental systems and material economies, the book seeks to change how we build now and for the future.

The first comprehensive monograph on the cross-disciplinary practice including over 100 built and ephemeral works

Since its founding in 1981, New York-based studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) has designed some of the world's most revered civic spaces and cultural institutions. Their practice covers architecture, urban design, installation art, performance, digital media, and print.

From the renowned High Line in New York City to the upcoming V&A East Storehouse in London to some of their earliest projects like the Blur building designed for the 2002 Swiss Expo, DS+R explores alternative strategies in space-making that engage and surprise on a global scale.

Designed by DS+R as a pair of structurally conjoined volumes, this monograph invites readers to bridge different modes of production and reconsider the limits of architecture. The unique binding allows each volume to be read individually or in parallel by unfolding the book at the spine. Special crossover layouts link the two volumes with shared obsessions.

The monograph features layouts by design consultancy 2x4, with photography by Iwan Baan and Matthew Monteith amongst other photographers. It also includes new dialogues with visionaries from other creative fields, including artist Edmund de Waal, art critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator Paola Antonelli, actor Alan Cumming, choreographer William Forsythe, professor Sylvia Lavin, curator Ana Miljacki, and Jill Medvedow.

Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century. From private villas to mass social housing projects, his radical ideas, designs, and writings presented a whole-scale reinvention not only of individual structures, but of entire concepts of modern living.

Le Corbusier's work made distinct developments over the years, from early vernacular houses in Switzerland through dazzling white, purist villas to dynamic syntheses of art and architecture such as the chapel at Ronchamp and the civic buildings in Chandigarh, India. A hallmark throughout was his ability to combine functionalist aspirations with a strong sense of expressionism, as well as a broader and empathetic understanding of urban planning. He was a founding member of the Congrès international d'architecture moderne (CIAM), which championed architecture as a social art.

This book presents some of Le Corbusier's landmark projects to introduce an architect, thinker, and modern pioneer who, even in his unrealized projects, offered discussion and inspiration for generations to come.

Wallpaper* once described Thomas Heatherwick as having the world at his feet, and the designer's bestselling monograph puts his world at ours. Filling almost 650 pages, this fully revised and updated edition illuminates the breathtaking imagination behind more than one hundred and fifty of the studio's extraordinary works, from London to Shanghai, New York to Tokyo. Now with sixteen new projects, updated photography and an index for easy navigation, Thomas Heatherwick: Making will remain a crucial design resource.

Covering the studio's complete output since its foundation in 1994, this new edition features several extraordinary new projects, at all scales, from an unfolding National Trust Glasshouse in Sussex to an iconic red Friction Table shown at Design Miami in Shanghai. Revealing texts give an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at Heatherwick's creative processes, now ingrained in the DNA of the studio itself, answering the question How did he do that? and Why did he do that? As Heatherwick's body of work continues to expand, pushing creative, design and manufacturing boundaries, this tome will provide inspiration for curious minds across the globe.

Acclaimed as the father of skyscrapers, the quintessentially American icon Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was an architect of aspiration. He believed in giving cultivated American life its fitting architectural equivalent and applied his idealism to structures across the continent, from suburban homes to churches, offices, skyscrapers, and the celebrated Guggenheim Museum.

Wright's work is distinguished by its harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture, and which found its paradigm at Fallingwater, a house in rural Pennsylvania, cited by the American Institute of Architects as the best all-time work of American architecture. Wright also made a particular mark with his use of industrial materials, and by the simple L or T plan of his Prairie House which became a model for rural architecture across America. Wright was also often involved in many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass, paying particular attention to the balance between individual needs and community activity.

Exploring Wright's aspirations to augment American society through architecture, this book offers a concise introduction to his at once technological and Romantic response to the practical challenges of middle-class Americans.