Inventing Modernity.

The godfather of Italian design.

Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti (1891-1979) is difficult to pin down. With an extraordinarily prolific output and eclectic style, his oeuvre remains one of the most diverse and groundbreaking in design history. Trained initially in architecture, Ponti soon moved into industrial and interior design, experimenting with ceramics, silverware, and glass. Ponti's key works are spread throughout this extensive overview, including structures of all kinds, from small residential dwellings to high-rise buildings, schools, and office blocks.

The home was one of Ponti's recurring interests and central areas of innovation. His talent for total design--a careful consideration of both interior and exterior space--is charted in the glossy reproductions, floor plans, and drawings featured in this edition. Ponti's colorful, carefree, and elegant spaces blended an expressive neoclassicism with emerging modernist sensibility.

The founder and nearly lifelong editor of domus magazine never ceased to develop and reinvent his style. From the Denver Art Museum to his collection of churches, from bespoke homeware to the symbol of modern Milan, the Pirelli Tower, this monograph provides an introduction to Ponti's exuberant creativity and illustrious career.

"A Poiret dress, a Catholic shrine in France, Thomas Walliss Hoover Factory building, an Edna Manley sculpture, the poetry of Bei Dao, the internal combustion engine- what makes such artifacts modernist? Disciplining Modernism explores the different ways disciplines conceive modernism and modernity, undisciplining modernist studies in the process"--Provided by publisher.

Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times synthesizes and interpretates the experience of light as revealed in a wide range of art and literature from medieval to modern times. The true subject of the book is making sense of the individual's relationship with light, rather than the investigation of light's essential nature. It tells the story of light "seducing" individuals from the Middle Ages to our modern times. Consequently, it is not concerned with the "progress" of scientific inquiries into the physical properties and behavior of light (optical science), but rather with subjective reactions as reflected in art, architecture, and literature. Instead of its evolution, this book celebrates the complexity of our relation to light's character. No individual experience of light being "truer" than any other.

The architecture of social reform explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architecture's obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated, Rousset's revealing analysis demonstrates how questions over aesthetics, style, urbanization, and technology that gripped the modernist imagination were deeply ingrained in a larger concern to reform society through housing. The increasing demand for new housing in Germany's rapidly growing cities fostered critical exchanges between a heterogeneous group of actors, including architects, urban theorists, planners, and social scientists, who called for society to be freed from class antagonism through the provision of good, modest, traditionally-minded domestic design. Offering a compelling account of architecture's ability to act socially, the book provocatively argues that architectural theory underwent its most critical epistemological transformation in relation to the dynamics of modern class politics long before the arrival of the avant-garde. -- .

Madrid on the move illustrates print culture and the urban experience in nineteenth-century Spain. It provides a fresh account of modernity by looking beyond its canonical texts, artworks, and locations and explores what being modern meant to people in their daily lives. Rather than shifting the loci of modernity from Paris or London to Madrid, this book decentres the concept and explains the modern experience as part of a more fluid, global phenomenon. Meanings of the modern were not only dictated by linguistic authorities and urban technocrats; they were discussed, lived, and constructed on a daily basis. Cultural actors and audiences displayed an acute awareness of what being modern entailed and explored the links between the local and the global, two concepts and contexts that were being conceived and perceived as inseparable. -- .

The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model "Aryan" society in Norway during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model "Aryan" society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler's Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire-one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings. Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler's Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway's Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme-a German cultural capital and naval base-remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance. A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler's Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been-a world colonized under the swastika.

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 1940, America's favorite illustrator Norman Rockwell, his wife Mary and their three sons moved to the picturesque rural village of West Arlington, Vermont. The artist discovered a treasure trove of models. Norman Rockwell's Models: In and out of the Studio is the first to detail these models' lives, friendships with the artist, and experiences in his studio. Dressed in quaint work clothing, the models were dairy farmers, carpenters, country doctors, soldiers, and mechanics. Norman Rockwell's Models features non-fiction narratives telling the story of these folks during an era when they helped the war effort, farmed with horses, and received home visits from doctors. The book also describes the challenges the models faced in their own lives and how these affected their expressions in the paintings. For example, in several 1945 masterpieces, the jubilance Americans felt after the close of the second word war is revealed in their faces. Upon meeting people, young or old, the artist would say, "Call Me Norman." Rockwell learned the models' roles in the community and their personalities, which fostered genuine paintings. He strove, for example, to find real-life soldiers to model as WWII heroes and spirited boys and girls for lively paintings. In the studio, Norman was charming and polite, but painstaking. He demonstrated poses and did whatever was necessary to evoke his trademark expressions, including telling stories of his own life, sometimes laughing or crying. Spending entire summers at his family's farmhouse near West Arlington, Vermont, the author, S.T. Haggerty, grew up knowing many models, including those who posed for such iconic works as Freedom of Speech, Breaking Home Ties, and Girl at the Mirror. Along with models and their families, the author hayed the scenic fields in the Batten Kill River Valley and swam under the red covered bridge on the Village Green. This experiences give him a unique perspective for telling this story.

Social groups formed around shared religious beliefs encountered significant change and challenges between the 1860s and the 1970s. This book is the first collection of essays of its kind to take a broad, thematically-driven case study approach to this genre of architecture and its associated visual culture and communal experience. Examples range from Nuns' holy spaces celebrating the life of St Theresa of Lisieux to utopian American desert communities and their reliance on the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin. Modern religious architecture converses with a broad spectrum of social, anthropological, cultural and theological discourses and the authors engage with them rigorously and innovatively. As such, new readings of sacred spaces offer new angles and perspectives on some of the dominant narratives of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries: empire, urban expansion, pluralism and modernity. In a post-traditional landscape, religious architecture suggests expansive ways of exploring themes including nostalgia and revivalism; engineering and technological innovation; prayer and spiritual experimentation; and the beauty of holiness for a brave new world. Shaped by the tensions and anxieties of the modern era and powerfully expressed in the space and material culture of faith, the architecture presented here creates a set of new turning points in the history of the built environment.

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948-1951). Although the name stood for the organizers' home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra's experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history.

Changes in the routines of domestic life were among the most striking social phenomena of the period between the two World Wars, when the home came into focus as a problem to be solved: re-imagined, streamlined, electrified, and generally cleaned up. Modernist writers understood themselves to be living in an epochal moment when the design and meaning of home life were reconceived. Moving among literature, architecture, design, science, and technology, Machines for Living shows how the modernization of the home led to profound changes in domestic life and relied on a set of emergent concepts, including standardization, scientific method, functionalism, efficiency science, and others, that form the basis of literary modernism and stand at the confluence of modernism and modernity. Even as modernist writers criticized the expanding reach of modernization into the home, they drew on its conceptual vocabulary to develop both the thematic and formal commitments of literary modernism. Rosner's work develops a new methodology for interdisciplinary modernist studies and shows how the reinvention of domestic life is central to modernist literature.

This book examines the pictorial representation of women in Great Britain both before and during the First World War. It focuses in particular on imagery related to suffrage movements, recruitment campaigns connected to the war, advertising, and Modernist art movements including Vorticism. This investigation not only considers the image as a whole, but also assesses tropes and constructs as objects contained within, both literal and metaphorical. In this way visual genealogical threads including the female figure as an ideal and William Hogarth's 'line of beauty' are explored, and their legacies assessed and followed through into the twenty-first century. Georgina Williams contributes to debates surrounding the deliberate and inadvertent dismissal of women's roles throughout history, through literature and imagery. This book also considers how absence of a pictorial manifestation of the female form in visual culture can be as important as her presence.

Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf offers a timely and engaging discussion on architectural production in the modernization era in the Arabian Peninsula. Focusing on the 20th century as a starting point, the book explores the display of transnational architectural practices resulting in different notions of locality, cosmopolitanism, and modernity. Contextually, with an eye on the present, the book reflects on the initiatives that recently re-engaged with the once ville moderne which, meanwhile, lost its pivotal function and meaning. A city within a bigger city, the urban fabric produced during the modernization era has the potential to narrate the social growth, East-West dynamics, and citizens' memories of the recent past. Reading obsolescence as an opportunity, the book looks into this topic from a cross-country perspective. It maps, reads and analyses the notion of modern heritage in relation to the contemporary city and looks beyond physical transformations to embrace cultural practices and strategies of urban re-appropriation. It interrogates the value of modern architecture in the non-West, examining how academic research is expanding the debate on Gulf urbanism, and describes how practices of reuse could foster rethinking neglected areas, also addressing land consumption in the GCC. Presenting a diverse and geographically inclusive authorship, which combines established and up-and-coming researchers in the field, this is an important reference for academics and upper-level students interested in heritage studies, post-colonial urbanism, and architecture in the non-West. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book explores how popular photography influenced the representation of travel in Britain in the period from the Kodak-led emergence of compact cameras in 1888, to 1939. The book examines the implications of people's increasing familiarity with the language and possibilities of photography on the representation of travel as educational concerns gave way to commercial imperatives. Sara Dominici takes as a touchstone the first fifty years of activity of the Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA), a London-based philanthropic-turned-commercial travel firm. As the book reveals, the relationship between popular photography and travel marketing was shaped by the different desires and expectations that consumers and institutions bestowed on photography: this was the struggle for the interpretation of the travel image.

The name De Stijl, title of a magazine founded in the Netherlands in 1917, is now used to identify the abstract art and functional architecture of its major contributors: Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Van der Leck, Oud, Wils and Rietveld. De Stijl achieved international acclaim by the end of the 1920s and its paintings, buildings and furniture made fundamental contributions to the modern movement. This book is the first to emphasize the local context of De Stijl and explore its relationship to the distinctive character of Dutch modernism. It examines how the debates concerning abstraction in painting and spatiality in architecture were intimately connected to contemporary developments in the fields of urban planning, advertising, interior design and exhibition design. The book describes the interaction between the world of mass culture and the fine arts.

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948-1951). Although the name stood for the organizers' home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra's experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history.

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.

European modernism underwent a massive change from 1930 to 1960, as war altered the cultural landscape. This account of artists and writers in France and England explores how modernism survived under authoritarianism, whether Fascism, National Socialism, or Stalinism, and how these artists endured by balancing complicity and resistance.

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.

In 1956, TIME magazine called him one of the defining "form-givers of the 20th century." Today, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) remains a locus classicus of modernism for architects and designers alike. As a Bauhaus pioneer, even his earliest work was marked by a material restraint; the balance of texture, color, and shape; and a symbiosis of local and global, big and small, rough and smooth. In this essential introductory monograph, we survey Breuer's complete career through some of his most influential projects and ideas, from his landmark tubular furniture to the MoMA Research House to his innovation of "binuclear" housing, splitting living and sleeping areas into separate wings. Along the way, we follow Hungarian-born Breuer's journey to international acclaim, with featured projects from Germany, France, England, Switzerland, and across the United States contributing to his global status as a modernist maestro. 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)

This book complements the more textually-based Bauhaus scholarship with a practice-oriented and creative interpretive method, which makes it possible to consider Bauhaus-related works in an unconventional light. Edit Toth argues that focusing on the functionalist approach of the Bauhaus has hindered scholars from properly understanding its design work. With a global scope and under-studied topics, the book advances current scholarly discussions concerning the relationship between image technologies and the body by calling attention to the materiality of image production and strategies of re-channeling image culture into material processes and physical body space, the space of dimensionality and everyday activity.