This is an enormously readable history of modernist design, enhanced by the author's black and white drawings that both illustrate and elucidate the text. It is a book meant for lay readers and examines its subject with the kind of wit and insight found in John Berger's ""Ways of Seeing"" and Edward E. Tufte's ""Envisioning Information"". ""The Bauhaus Ideal"" is both a picture book and a guidebook to the fascinating and enduring legacy of modernist design, and to the continuing influence of Bauhaus on interior design - not just on architecture, but also on furniture, glassware, tableware, and kitchen utensils: the whole range of domestic arts. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, and others were part of a movement to make sense of design in the modern world. Their experiments - both successes and failures - eloquently demonstrate what design can accomplish. 'Design' itself was an invention of the Bauhaus era to combine usefulness, beauty, and economy into a reasonable whole. This unique volume introduces modern design principles and examines them from an historically critical perspective. It concludes with some ideas for melding modern solemnity with postmodern irony. And in each phase the illustrations speak as eloquently as the text. This invaluable book is itself a work of art and is being issued in paperback at a time when there is revival of interest in modernism - furniture by Le Corbusier, Noguchi, and Eames have never been more popular. It serves as a beautifully illustrated design manifesto.

In this vivid memoir, Denis Guenoun excavates his family's past and progressively fills out a portrait of an imposing, enigmatic father. Rene Guenoun was a teacher and a pioneer, and his secret support for Algerian independence was just one of the many things he did not discuss with his teenaged son. To be Algerian, pro-independence, a French citizen, a Jew, and a Communist were not, to Rene's mind, dissonant allegiances. He believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity and could only realize a free future together. Rene Guenoun called himself a Semite, a word that he felt united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin. He also believed that Algerians had the same political rights as Frenchmen. Although his Jewish family was rooted in Algeria, he inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycee in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. His steadfast belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity led him into trouble, including prison and exile, yet his failures as an activist never shook his faith in a rational, generous future. Rene Guenoun was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East during World War II. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria, he was sent home to Oran, and in 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents did their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of work and family. The Guenouns had little interest in Israel and considered themselves at home in Algeria; yet because he supported Algerian independence, Rene Guenoun outraged his French neighbors and was expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armee Secrete. He spent his final years in Marseille. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, Denis Guenoun re-creates an Algerian past that proved lovely, intellectually provocative, and dangerous.