Why did the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, and art collectors and curators such as Katherine Dreier and Alfred Barr, collect modern German art in the first half of the twentieth century? And why did certain works of art belong to the canon while others did not? In this book, Gregor Langfeld argues that National Socialism played a crucial role in the canonization of movements such as Expressionism and the Bauhaus. A role which undermined the post-1945 reputations of many artists associated with classical and figurative trends. Langfeld offers important new insights into the political and ideological motivations behind the New York art world's fluctuations in opinion, fashion, and price.

Bar, surface, body, and space are the fundamental elements of the design process. Every form, however complex, may be understood as a variation of them. And underlying every concrete design is a design methodology that can be analyzed, taught, and learned as a transformation of these four categories.

In this sense, Transformation represents a foundational work for architects, designers, and lay people with an interest in cultural history: the unrivaled grammar of design. With a systematic aim and progressively increasing complexity, it unfolds the creative potential of these categories with succinct texts, uniform drawings, and a broad array of examples from architecture, design, and art.

But Transformation also occupies an exceptional position as a physical book: the layout makes it especially easy to compare and combine different design steps, and the separate binding of individual groups of pages makes doing so even easier. The result is a kind of construction set that invites the reader to play as well as research. By generating new a oelinksa, he or she is able to use a limited set of fundamental elements to discover an unlimited and ever-changing array of new design possibilities.