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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > Design styles > Modernist design & Bauhaus
Text in English & German. When architects design a house for
themselves, the often tense relationship between clients and
builders is usually absent. That is why in many such buildings the
architect-designers artistic stance and political position,
preferences and antipathies, temperament and character are more
pronounced than usual. Moreover the architectural theories, debates
and trends of an epoch also leave their traces in them in a
particular way. We encounter both attachment to tradition and
commitment to the avant-garde, willingness to experiment and
pragmatism, distinctive artistry and views shaped by the fact that
a building is also a product of engineering. And last but not
least, expressed in their houses are the personal life
circumstances of the people concerned, or the messages the houses
are meant to convey above and beyond their actual purpose: as a
'manifesto', as the 'self-portrait' of the architect, but also as
an advertising tool or as a sign of connection to specific milieux
or positions. Building for oneself has a special connotation under
the conditionsof migration and exile. Among the most prominent
examples are the private homes of Rudolph Schindler in West
Hollywood (1921/22), Richard Neutra in Los Angeles (1932), Walter
Gropius in Lincoln, Massachusetts (1937/1938), Ernst May near
Nairobi (1937/1938), Bruno Taut in Istanbul (1937/1938), Ernoe
Goldfinger in London (19371939), Marcel Breuer in New Canaan,
Connecticut (1938/1939 and 1947/1948), Josep Lluis Sert in
Lattingtown, New York (19471950) and Max Cetto in Mexiko-Stadt
(1948/1949). What expression could voluntary migration or forced
change of location find in these buildings? To what extent do the
architects other buildings differ from such 'homes of ones own' in
a foreign country, to use an expression borrowed and modified from
Virginia Woolf? The book is a collection of contributions by
internationally renowned authors and examines not only the
buildings themselves but also other aspects of the topic that have
hitherto received little attention.
The 'new urban municipality of Berlin', also called Greater Berlin,
was created 100 years ago, on 1 October 1920, following a
ground-breaking administrative reform. This was a century-defining
milestone that transformed Berlin into a world city. The old city
of Berlin was merged with 7 other cities, 59 rural communities, and
27 estate districts. As a result, the city's area increased from 66
to 878 square metres, its population from 1.9 to 3.9 million
people, virtually overnight. But Greater Berlin did not remain a
fixed entity. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, new planning and
development projects continued to transform the greater urban area,
which has grown, seemingly without end, far beyond the boundaries
of Berlin. The two volumes of Unfinished Metropolis are dedicated
to the past and future of Greater Berlin. The first volume offers
an insight into an array of different topics, such as Berlin's role
as the capital of Germany, its relationship with Brandenburg, and
the historical, economic, and social conditions that have driven
the growth of the urban area over the centuries. The second volume
delves deeper into the designs for the future. It comprehensively
documents the International Urban Planning Competition for
Berlin-Brandenburg 2070, held by the states' association of
architects and engineers. It also explores how other European
capital regions - London, Moscow, Paris, and Vienna - are seeking
to ensure sustainable urban development in years to come. Volume 1:
100 Years of Urban Planning for Greater Berlin 416 pages; 550
pictures Volume 2: International Urban Planning Competition for
Berlin-Brandenburg 2070 336 pages; 300 pictures
B.C. Binning taught that architecture has an intrinsic link to art
and life. This book follows in his footsteps, focusing on what is
arguably his greatest creation: the first significant piece of
modern residential architecture in Western Canada, the BC Binning
House. Still standing in West Vancouver as a National Historic
Site, the house has influenced generations of architects and
continues to do so today. The structure is often thought to have
sparked Canada's West Coast Modernism movement, as it represents
both the arrival of Modernist design principles and their
inflection with local interests and conditions.
Short-listed for the Fage & Oliver Prize for outstanding
scholarly work published on Africa. Finalist, African Studies
Association Book Prize. Finalist, ASA Bethwell A. Ogot Prize for
best book in east African studies. If modernism initially came to
Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia's inimitable
historical condition--its independence save for five years under
Italian occupation--mean for its own modernist tradition? In
Modernist Art in Ethiopia--the first book-length study of the
topic--Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country's
supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history
from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader
colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in
Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political
histories of it in a pan-African context. Giorgis explores the
varied precedents of the country's political and intellectual
history to understand the ways in which the import and range of
visual narratives were mediated across different moments, and to
reveal the conditions that account for the extraordinary dynamism
of the visual arts in Ethiopia. In locating its arguments at the
intersection of visual culture and literary and performance
studies, Modernist Art in Ethiopia details how innovations in
visual art intersected with shifts in philosophical and ideological
narratives of modernity. The result is profoundly innovative
work--a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of
Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.
Broken down in the Sahara Desert, a pilot meets an extraordinary
Little Prince, travelling across time and space to bring peace to
his warring planet. Inua Ellams' magical retelling of the much
loved story by Antoine de Saint-Exupery turns the Little Prince
into a descendant of an African race in a parallel galaxy. His
journey as a galactic emigrant takes us through solar systems of
odd planets with strange beings, addresses climate change and
morality, and shows how even a little thing can make a big
difference.
For nearly fifty years the humanities have been confined by a
series of critiques: of the subject, of representation, of the
visual, of modernism, of autonomy, of intention, of art itself. In
their place various "materialities" have appeared: signs,
identities, bodies, history, and works. Against Affective Formalism
challenges these orthodoxies. "What I am after, above all, is
expression," Henri Matisse declared. Matisse believed that through
the careful arrangement of line and color he could transmit his
feelings directly to the minds and bodies of his viewers. Yet
Matisse continually struggled with the reality that his feelings
were misunderstood-or simply ignored-by viewers of his art. Matisse
oscillates between a desire for expressive command over the viewer
and a sense of the impossibility of making himself known. Against
Affective Formalism confronts modernism's dissatisfactions with
representation. As Todd Cronan explains, a central tenet of
modernist thought turns on the effort to overcome representation in
the name of something more explicit in its capacity to generate
bodily or affective experience. Henri Bergson was one of the most
influential advocates of the antirepresentational impulse; his
novel theories of memory and freedom gripped a generation of
writers, philosophers, psychologists, and artists. Matisse and
Bergson worked within and against the context of form and
expression that remains in force today. Writing in opposition to
prevailing theories and assumptions about the relation of intention
and form-most of which accept the "death of the author" as a basic
fact of interpretation-Cronan argues that the beholder's response
to art, outside a framework of intentionality, is irrelevant to a
work's meaning. Intentions are not a matter of method at all: no
letter, biography, document, archive, or key will recover an
intention. What matters is that intentions make works of art
different from objects in the world.
In Surrealism at Play Susan Laxton writes a new history of
surrealism in which she traces the centrality of play to the
movement and its ongoing legacy. For surrealist artists, play took
a consistent role in their aesthetic as they worked in, with, and
against a post-World War I world increasingly dominated by
technology and functionalism. Whether through exquisite-corpse
drawings, Man Ray's rayographs, or Joan Miro's visual puns,
surrealists became adept at developing techniques and processes
designed to guarantee aleatory outcomes. In embracing chance as the
means to produce unforeseeable ends, they shifted emphasis from
final product to process, challenging the disciplinary structures
of industrial modernism. As Laxton demonstrates, play became a
primary method through which surrealism refashioned artistic
practice, everyday experience, and the nature of subjectivity.
A groundbreaking history of the confluence of regulatory thinking
and building design in the United States What is the origin of
"room temperature"? When did food become considered fresh or not
fresh? Why do we think management makes things more efficient? The
answers to these questions share a history with architecture and
regulation at the turn of the twentieth century. This pioneering
technological and architectural history of environmental control
systems during the Gilded Age begins with the premise that
regulation-of temperature, the economy, even the freshness of
food-can be found in the guts of buildings. From cold storage and
scientific laboratories to factories, these infrastructures first
organized life in a way we now call "modern." Drawing on a range of
previously unexplored archival resources, Michael Osman examines
the increasing role of environmental technologies in building
design from the late nineteenth century. He shows how architects
appropriated and subsumed the work of engineers as thermostats, air
handlers, and refrigeration proliferated. He argues that this
change was closely connected to broader cultural and economic
trends in management and the regulation of risk. The transformation
shaped the evolution of architectural modernism and the development
of the building as a machine. Rather than assume the preexisting
natural order of things, participants in regulation-including
architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, managers,
economists, government employees, and domestic reformers-became
entangled in managing the errors, crises, and risks stemming from
the nation's unprecedented growth. Modernism's Visible Hand not
only broadens our conception of how industrial capitalism shaped
the built environment but is also vital to understanding the role
of design in dealing with ecological crises today.
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