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 Lahuerta draws on first-hand documents, many previously unpublished, to show that Gaudi, far from being the isolated eccentric seen in other accounts, was keenly aware of the major theories and works of his time and cleverly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.

Columns of Smoke is a two-volume collection. The first volume includes "Photography or Life" and "Popular Mies," which illuminate overlooked aspects of modern architecture and photography and reveal a more nuanced-and plausible-conception of the modern world. In "Photography or Life," Juan Jose Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent-it involves deliberate and telling decisions. His analysis of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, for example, suggests irreconcilable differences between the two architects that represent radically opposed approaches to architecture and life. Furthermore, a close study of snapshots of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus building taken by teachers and students leads to new ways of understanding the myths associated with the Dessau school. Using the same method in "Popular Mies," Lahuerts looks at photographs of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work and shows that Mies was influenced not only by Stieglitz and Camera Work, but also a mass culture that enjoyed zeppelins, music halls, x-rays, and phantasmagorical gadgets. At the same time, in their portrayals of Mies' work, the press and anonymous photographers situated it in a popular context that stands as a counterpoint to the notion of a heroic modern era. This first volume of Columns of Smoke is a brilliant treatment of modern visual culture that will redefine our concept of modernity.