Walter Gropius (1883-1969) set out to build for the future. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, the Berlin-born architect had an inestimable influence on our aesthetic environment, championing a bold new hybrid of light, geometry, and industrial design, as dazzling today as it was a century ago. In this essential architect introduction, we survey Gropius' evolution and influence with 20 of his most significant projects, from the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany, to the Chicago Tribune Tower and Harvard University Graduate Center, completed after Gropius's exodus to the United States in 1937. We explore his role both as an architectural practitioner, and as a writer and educator, not only as a Bauhaus pioneer, but also, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as a leading proponent of the International Style. Along the way, we see how many of Gropius's tenets remain benchmarks for architects, designers, and urbanists today. Whether in his emphasis on a functional beauty or his interest in housing and city planning, Gropius astounds in the agility of his thinking as much as in the luminous precision of his work. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts, and plans)

The outbreak of the First World War coincided with the beginnings of high modernism in literature and the visual arts to make 1914 a pivotal moment in cultural as in national history. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Breszka, Sickert, Epstein and many other avant-garde artists were at work in London during 1914, responding to urgent political as well as aesthetic problems. London was the setting for key exhibitions of high modernist paintings and sculptures, and home to a number of important movements: the Bloomsbury Group, the Whitechapel Boys and the Vorticists among them. The essays in this 2010 book collectively portray a dynamic, remarkable year in the city's art world, whose creative tensions and conflicts were rocked by the declaration of war. A bold, innovative account of the time and place that formed the genesis of modernism, this book suggests new routes through the fields of modernist art and literature.

A curated list of more than 250 must-see destinations organized geographically from Maine to Florida

Featuring architecture by some of the biggest Mid-Century names, including Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, and Philip Johnson, each of the more than 250 buildings is located on a regional map. The book includes all the additional information needed to find and visit each building.

Its cool and functional design makes this book a coveted Modernist-style object in itself.

Including icons from The Met Breuer to the fabulous beach houses of Fire Island, private homes in Connecticut, Manhattan skyscrapers, and the Tropical Modern residences of Sarasota, Florida, it is a must-have guide to one of the most fertile and lesser-known regions for the development of Mid-Century Modern architecture.

From the publisher of Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA.

A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern design Alloys looks at a unique period of synergy and exchange in the postwar United States, when sculpture profoundly shaped architecture, and vice versa. Leading architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi to produce site-determined, large-scale sculptures tailored for their buildings' highly visible and well-traversed threshold spaces. The parameters of these spaces-atriums, lobbies, plazas, and entryways-led to various designs like sculptural walls, ceilings, and screens that not only embraced new industrial materials and processes, but also demonstrated art's ability to merge with lived architectural spaces. Marin Sullivan argues that these sculptural commissions represent an alternate history of midcentury American art. Rather than singular masterworks by lone geniuses, some of the era's most notable spaces-Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Max Abramovitz's Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, and Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius's Pan Am Building-would be diminished without the collaborative efforts of architects and artists. At the same time, the artistic creations within these spaces could not exist anywhere else. Sullivan shows that the principle of synergy provides an ideal framework to assess this pronounced relationship between sculpture and architecture. She also explores the afterlives of these postwar commissions in the decades since their construction. A fresh consideration of sculpture's relationship to architectural design and functionality following World War II, Alloys highlights the affinities between the two fields and the ways their connections remain with us today.

Alan Caswell Collier was one of Canada's most admired and successful landscape painters, but during the Depression he worked alongside other single, unemployed men in government-run relief camps. Labouring for twenty cents a day, he detailed camp life and politics in letters to his fiancee and depicted fellow "relief stiffs" and the BC landscape in character sketches and paintings. Incisive and candid, his letters reveal a born contrarian with a strong sense of social superiority over his fellow "twenty centers." But his letters also offer a fresh perspective on the hopes and dreams of an eminent Ontario artist and of the generation who came of age at a time of economic upheaval and class conflict.

In the 1920s, German-Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) began his long-lasting engagement with polyphonic art-multi-voiced way of painting analogous to music. A relentless experimenter, Klee began these studies while teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, developed them further during his tenure at the art academy in Dusseldorf, and brought them to conclusion after his return to Switzerland in 1933. In this book, distinguished art historian Oskar Batschmann explores Klee's seminal painting Ad Parnassum (1932). Painted shortly after the artist's departure from the Bauhaus, it symbolises a new era, also one of Klee's own self-discovery. Batschmann documents how the artist strove for a connection of music and painting in his colour hues and in the rhythmic movement of coloured dots. Richly illustrated, this book places Klee's polyphonic understanding of art in an art-historical context by using this key work and offers insight into the synesthetic thinking that emerged in the art world during that time. Text in English and German.

Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York. From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varese, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city's postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). She also gives sustained and serious treatment to the work of Yoko Ono, something long overdue in music scholarship. Musical Migration and Imperial New York is indispensable reading, offering a new understanding of global avant-gardes and American experimental music as well as the contrasting feelings of belonging and exclusion on which they were built.

Jewish designers and architects played a key role in shaping the interwar architecture of Central Europe, and in the respective countries where they settled following the Nazi's rise to power. This book explores how Jewish architects and patrons influenced and reformed the design of towns and cities through commercial buildings, urban landscaping and other material culture. It also examines how modern identities evolved in the context of migration, commercial and professional networks, and in relation to the conflict between nationalist ideologies and international aspirations in Central Europe and beyond. Pointing to the production within cultural platforms shared by Jews and Christians, the book's research sheds new light on the importance of integrating Jews into Central European design and aesthetic history. Leading historians, curators, archivists and architects present their critical analyses further to 'design' the past and push forward a transformation in the historical consciousness of Central Europe. By reconsidering the seminal role of Central European emigre and exiled architects and designers in shaping today's global design cultures, this book further strengthens humanistic, progressive and pluralistic cultural trends in Europe today.

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 fur 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. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

Ideal homes investigates the tastes and aspirations of the new suburban communities that emerged in Britain following the First World War. In a period when homeownership was becoming the norm, these communities sought out varieties of architecture and design that were both nostalgic and modern, reflecting longings for 'Old England' on the one hand and technological convenience on the other. The book draws on exhibitions, memoirs, advertisements and films, as well as surviving examples of suburban architecture and interiors, to identify a distinctively suburban modernism, embodied by the Tudorbethan semi. Arguing that the 'ideal' home of the period was both a retreat from the outside world and a site of change and experimentation, it concludes by considering how such houses are lived in today. This new edition also features an introductory chapter on researching the history of your own home. -- .

Working from a discourse analysis perspective, MA1/4ller examines how a national art history was constituted through its linguistic construction and transmission. The study demonstrates how German art history was a ~manufactureda (TM) through language, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. The study operates at the interface between text linguistics, the history of concepts and the history of words and makes an important contribution to the history of national consciousness.

An illuminating biography of one of the most famous--and most famously unfinished--buildings in the world, the Sagrada Familia of Barcelona. The scaffolding-cloaked spires of Antoni Gaudi's masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, dominate the Barcelona skyline and draw in millions of visitors every year. More than a century after the first stone was laid in 1882, the Sagrada Familia remains unfinished, a testament to Gaudi's quixotic ambition, his religious devotion, and the sensuous eccentricity of his design. It has defied the critics, the penny-pinching accountants, the conservative town-planners, and the devotees of sterile modernism. It has enchanted and frustrated the citizens of Barcelona. And it has passed through the landmark changes of twentieth-century Spain, surviving two World Wars, the ravages of the Spanish Civil War, and the Hunger Years of Franco's rule. Gijs van Hensbergen's The Sagrada Familia explores the evolution of this remarkable building, working through the decades right up to the present day before looking beyond to the final stretch of its construction. Rich in detail and vast in scope, this is a revelatory chronicle of an iconic structure, its place in history, and the wild genius that created it.

This is the most thorough and detailed monograph on the artwork of Raymond Jonson. He is one of many artists of the first half of the twentieth-century who demonstrate the richness and diversity of an under-appreciated period in the history of American art. Visualizing the spiritual was one of the fundamental goals of early abstract painting in the years before and during World War I. Artists turned to alternative spirituality, the occult, and mysticism, believing that the pure use of line, shape, color, light and texture could convey spiritual insight. Jonson was steadfastly dedicated to this goal for most of his career and he always believed that modernist and abstract styles were the most effective and compelling means of achieving it.

A beautifully illustrated retrospective of Art Nouveau architect and designer Hector Guimard, positioning him at the forefront of the modernist movement The aesthetic of architect Hector Guimard (1867-1942) has long characterized French Art Nouveau in the popular imagination. This groundbreaking book showcases all aspects of his artistry and recognizes the fundamental modernity of his work. Known for, among other things, the decorative entrances to the Paris Metro and the associated lettering, he often looked to nature for inspiration, and combined materials such as stone and cast iron in unique ways to create designs composed of curves and waves that evoked movement. Guimard broke away from his classical Beaux-Arts training to advocate a modern, abstract style; he also pioneered the use of standardized models for his design objects and experimented with prefabricated designs in his social housing commissions, advancing the technology of the time. With copious, beautifully reproduced illustrations of his architectural drawings as well as his furniture, jewelry, and textile designs, this volume explores Guimard's full oeuvre and elucidates the significance of his work to the history of modern art. Essays by an international group of scholars present Guimard as a visionary architect, a shrewd entrepreneur, an industrialist, and a social activist. Published in association with the Richard H. Driehaus Museum Exhibition Schedule: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (November 17, 2022-May 21, 2023) The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago (June 22, 2023-January 7, 2024)

One of the most extraordinary artists associated with the Bauhaus school, Herbert Bayer united graphic design, art and architecture in an uncompromising artistic vision that came to represent the bold aesthetic approach of the movement. A teacher with the school until 1928, Bayer went on to become a highly successful graphic designer in Germany, and later one of the most prominent figures in the 20th-century art scene of the United States. This broad biographical account, which presents previously unseen archival photographs and episodes from the life of Bayer and other influential Bauhaus artists such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, follows Bayer through the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and finally to his exile in the United States. Specifically, Patrick Roessler reveals for the first time Bayer's unique experience of 1930s Germany, where, with his commercial and artistic life shattered by terror and censorship, he distracted himself with leading a hedonistic life. Shining a light on Bayer's time in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and his route out of the Nazi state, Roessler provides rich new insights into how Bauhaus artists navigated a protracted period of social upheaval and dictatorship, where commercial success was fraught with a deep hostility towards the regime and the temptations of emigration. Revealing the tensions of an avant-garde artist struggling to practice during a period of repression, Herbert Bayer, Graphic Designer speaks to both the memory of those who left Nazi Germany, but also the perseverance of artists and intellectuals throughout history who have worked under authoritarian regimes. Drawing on never before interpreted documents, letters and archival material, Roessler tells Bayer's compelling story - documenting the life of a unique artist and offering a valuable contribution to research in emigre experiences.

British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime excavates British late modernism's relationship to war in terms of chronophobia: a joint fear of the past and future. As a wartime between, but distinct from, those of the First World War and the Cold War, Second World wartime involves an anxiety that is both repetition and imaginary: both a dread of past violence unleashed anew, and that of a future violence still ungraspable. Identifying a constellation of temporalities and affects under three tropes-time capsules, time zones, and ruins-this volume contends that Second World wartime is a pivotal moment when wartime surpassed the boundaries of a specific state of emergency, becoming first routine and then open-ended. It offers a synoptic, wide-ranging look at writers on the home front, including Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Rose Macaulay, through a variety of genres, such as life-writing, the novel, and the short story. It also considers an array of cultural and archival material from photographers such as Cecil Beaton, filmmakers such as Charles Crichton, and artists such as John Minton. It shows how figures harnessed or exploited their media's temporal properties to formally register the distinctiveness of this wartime through a complex feedback between anticipation and retrospection, oftentimes fashioning the war as a memory, even while it was taking place. While offering a strong foundation for new readers of the mid-century, the book's overall theoretical focus on chronophobia will be an important intervention for those already working in the field.

Reconsidering the status and meaning of Bauhaus objects in relation to the multiple re-tellings of the schoola (TM)s history, this volume positions art objects of the Bauhaus within the theoretical, artistic, historical, and cultural concerns in which they were produced and received.

Contributions from leading scholars writing in the field today - including Frederic J. Schwartz, Magdalena Droste, and Alina Payne - offer an entirely new treatment of the Bauhaus. Issues such as art and design pedagogy, the practice of photography, copyright law, and critical theory are discussed. Through a strong thematic structure, new archival research and innovative methodologies, the questions and subsequent conclusions presented here re-examine the history of the Bauhaus and its continuing legacy. Essential reading for anyone studying the Bauhaus, modern art and design.