Bruno Reichlin ranks among the world's most distinguished architectural theorists. His occupation with protagonists of 20th-century architecture - such as Eileen Gray, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson and, above all, Le Corbusier - and their work is guided by a method that looks at the characteristics of a building as well as at its theoretical foundations. Reichlin's writings and his own built work as a practicing architect is marked by a deep understanding for how buildings materialise signs and symbols and by a referential framework that includes also literature, film and visual art. This book collects Reichlin's 13 essays on Le Corbusier, written over the period of four decades. Taking as examples the villas La Roche, Mandrot, and Savoye; Harvard University's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts; the Petite Maison on Lake Geneva; and the project for a hospital in Venice, he explores aspects of Le Corbusier's creativity to reveal underlying principles and their manifestation in the realised buildings. Rich archival materials as well as analytical plans and diagrams round out the volume. Text in French.

Through more than 200 works, the representation and pictorial meaning of the window in the Western Art Since the Renaissance, the window has been both a metaphor and an essential conceptual tool in Western painting. A Window on the World seeks to thoroughly analyze the gradual changes which have occurred in the representation and pictorial meaning of the window, in particular in the course of the twentieth century. It explores the radical change in perspective whereby artists developed and offered us a "global vision", a formal perception freed from the need to imitate the objective world. The catalogue is structured into four main sections: Historical introduction, Seeing through, Grids, From the Window to the Screen. These sections include specific analysis consecrated to artists who have chosen the window as the privileged means of their artistic research or to recurrent themes such as the fascinating relationship between window and still life.

For more than 20 years, Swiss architect Martino Pedrozzi has been working on the partial reconstruction of derelict dwellings on alpine pastures in the mountains of southern Switzerland. His interventions in Valle di Blenio and Val Malvaglia, at altitudes around 6,500 ft in the canton of Ticino, are part of a scheme to protect and preserve the cultivated landscape shaped by generations of local farmers grazing their cattle. Pedrozzi collected and put in place again stones that had been used as building materials for the ancient dry-stone walled structures, which have been abandoned in recent decades. This recomposition is meant to reconstruct a public space and to retain landmarks in the barren alpine landscape, and to form a monument for the civilisation that has been sustained by it for centuries. This book documents Pedrozzi's work and highlights the problem of rural exodus: a constant phenomenon in the history of human life, caused by conflict, economic change, natural disasters, and climate change. Here it is about mountain dwellings no longer used because alpine agriculture has been given up in favour of better opportunities and more comfortable ways of life. Text in English and Italian.