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Juan Jose Lahuerta's Columns of Smoke series offers bold new
readings of modernity and its key figures while redefining the
connections between architecture, ornamentation, and the portrayal
of both in print media. The third volume focuses on the Spanish
architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), whose spectacular fin-de-siecle
bohemian modernism stood in revolutionary contrast to the leading
approaches of the day. With the rise of Le Corbusier's modern style
of architecture in the early twentieth century, architects who
favored ornamentation and a strong bond with nature, like Gaudi,
were relegated to the sidelines. Lahuerta draws on first-hand
documents, many previously unpublished, to show that Gaudi, far
from being the isolated eccentric seen in other accounts, was
keenly aware of the major theories and works of his time and
cleverly used industrial processes to produce ornamental details
that appear today to be almost handmade. Equally impressive was
Gaudi's ability to capitalize on his fame once in the public eye,
as both the architect and his buildings appeared in illustrations
in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like
Salvador Dali, who admired the edible appearance of Gaudi's Casa
Mila in Barcelona, and Pablo Picasso, who was fascinated by the
eroticism of the Casa Batllo, attests to the architect's impact far
beyond his field. Richly illustrated with rare images from a
variety of sources, this highly visual take on Gaudi is also a
spirited commentary on the roots of modernism more generally.
Entertaining and perceptive, Antoni Gaudi challenges us to
reconsider what we thought we knew about this pioneering architect
and his distinctive work.
In his Columns of Smoke series, Juan Jose Lahuerta takes on the
enormously ambitious task of re-reading modernity, offering us
fresh ways of looking at it while drawing new links between the
ideas of architecture and ornamentation, with a special focus on
how they have been treated in print. While the first volume of
Columns of Smoke considered epoch-making architect Adolf Loos's
relationship with photography, here Lahuerta turns to the Classical
strand in Loos's architecture and to his written work-and
specifically his engagement with architectural and artistic theory.
Lahuerta pays particular attention to Loos's seminal "Ornament and
Crime," the essay that established disornamentation as the signal
feature of twentieth-century architecture. Through close analysis
of that essay he unearths the racially charged, pseudoscientific
ideas from early anthropology that underpin Loos's thinking. Sure
to be controversial, this new reading of Loos's landmark writings
calls the whole disornamentation project into question, and in the
process, it reveals a radically new perspective on a major turn in
modern design and culture.
The expert contributors to this lavishly illustrated volume,
devoted entirely to Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion of 1929,
address here for the first time the forgotten contexts of the
Pavilion's genesis. Habitually thought of as an abstract,
unpolluted, and splendidly isolated building--a precursor of Mies's
American period--the Pavilion is revealed here as a thoroughly
European work, perhaps less pristine but more authentic. Mies and
Lilly Reich were commissioned to design not only the Pavilion but
also more than one hundred thousand square feet of German stands
spread throughout the Exposition. By examining that work in
addition to the Pavilion itself, the contributors present a
farreaching reinterpretation of the whole. They also explore
connections with the mass media, highlight the work's antecedents
and meaning in the history of architecture, and analyze the current
pavilion, a reconstruction of the original built in 1986. No other
critical study offers a comparable overview of Mies's work in
Barcelona.
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