Aesthetics and Technology in Building: The Twenty-First-Century Edition introduces Nervi's ideas about architecture and engineering to a new generation of students and admirers. More than 200 photographs, details, drawings, and plans show how Nervi put his ideas into practice. Expanding on the seminal 1961 Norton Lectures at Harvard, Nervi analyzes various functional and construction problems. He also explains how precast and cast-in-place concrete can answer demands for economy, technical and functional soundness, and aesthetic perfection. Throughout, he uses his major projects to show how these now-iconic buildings emerged from structural truths and far-sighted construction processes.
This new edition features dozens of added images, a new introduction, and essays by Joseph Abram, Roberto Einaudi, Alberto Bologna, Gabriele Neri, and Hans-Christian Schink on Nervi's life, work, and legacy.
Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas. Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed.
The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.
Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.
Beauty's Rigor offers a comprehensive overview of Nervi's long career. Drawing on the Nervi archives and a wealth of photographs and architectural drawings, Thomas Leslie explores celebrated buildings like Palazetto dello Sport built for the 1960 Rome Olympics, St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He also sheds new light on unbuilt projects such as the Pavilion of Italian Civilization for the Universal Exposition of Rome E42. What emerges is the first complete account of Nervi's contributions to modern architecture and his essential role in a revolution that realized concrete's potential to match grace with strength.
In a suburb just north of Philadelphia stands Beth Sholom Synagogue, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue and among his finest religious buildings. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007, Beth Sholom was one of Wright’s last completed projects, and for years it has been considered one of his greatest masterpieces.
Praise for the previous edition:
“In order to acquaint a new generation with Fuller, his former architectural partner, Zung, gathers selections [from Fuller’s writings] on topics ranging from education and environment to engineering and the Lord’s Prayer. Admirers of Fuller—such as actress Valerie Harper, author Arthur C. Clarke, and entrepreneur Steve Forbes—introduce each selection. Zung’s anthology traces the development of Fuller’s intellectual life and provides an excellent introduction for a new generation to the life and work of this brilliant thinker.”—Publishers Weekly
“Stimulating and provocative. . . . Like a Francis Bacon charting the course for future generations to pursue, Fuller anticipates the need for the ‘comprehensive designer,’ who would be a ‘synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.’ Such a [person], he says, would be an initiator of design, able to anticipate all of man’s needs and provide new and advanced standards of living for a steadily increasing percentage of the world’s population.”—Chicago Tribune
Recipient of 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, Foundation for Landscape Studies
2021 On the Brinck Book Award Winner
“Burle Marx created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design.”
—Lauro Cavalcanti, quoted in the New York Times
“The real creator of the modern garden.”
—American Institute of Architects
Presenting the first English translation of Burle Marx’s “depositions,” this volume highlights the environmental advocacy of a preeminent Brazilian landscape architect who advised and challenged the country’s military dictatorship.
Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) is internationally known as one of the preeminent modernist landscape architects. He designed renowned public landscapes in Brazil, beginning with small plazas in Recife in the 1930s and culminating with large public parks in the early 1960s, most significantly the Parque do Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro. Depositions explores a pivotal moment in Burle Marx’s career—the years in which he served as a member of the Federal Cultural Council created by the military dictatorship in the mid-1960s. Despite the inherent conflict and risk in working with the military regime, Burle Marx boldly used his position to advocate for the protection of the unique Brazilian landscape, becoming a prophetic voice of caution against the regime’s policies of rapid development and resource exploitation.
Depositions presents the first English translation of eighteen environmental position pieces that Burle Marx wrote for the journal Cultura , a publication of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture, from 1967 through 1973. Catherine Seavitt Nordenson introduces and contextualizes the depositions by analyzing their historical and political contexts, as well as by presenting pertinent examples of Burle Marx’s earlier public projects, which enables a comprehensive reading of the texts. Addressing deforestation, the establishment of national parks, the place of commemorative sculpture, and the unique history of the Brazilian cultural landscape, Depositions offers new insight into Burle Marx’s outstanding landscape oeuvre and elucidates his transition from prolific designer to prescient counselor.
The Wisconsin-born Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is recognized worldwide as an iconic architectural genius. In 1911 he designed Taliesin to use as his personal residence, architectural studio, and working farm. A century later Randolph C. Henning has assembled a splendid collection of rare vintage postcards, some never before published, that provides a revealing and visually unique journey through Wright’s work at Taliesin. Included are intimate images of Taliesin at various stages and views of the building just after the tragic 1914 fire. The postcards also depict nearby buildings designed by Wright, including the Romeo and Juliet windmill and two buildings for the Hillside Home School. Henning provides useful explanations that highlight relevant details and accompany each image. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin documents and celebrates Wright’s 100-year-old masterpiece.
“This is an absolute triumph—ideas, lives, and the dramas of the twentieth century are woven together in a feat of storytelling. A masterpiece.”
—Edmund de Waal, ceramic artist and author of The White Road
The impact of Walter Gropius can be measured in his buildings—Fagus Factory, Bauhaus Dessau, Pan Am—but no less in his students. I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, Anni Albers, Philip Johnson, Fumihiko Maki: countless masters were once disciples at the Bauhaus in Berlin and at Harvard. Between 1910 and 1930, Gropius was at the center of European modernism and avant-garde society glamor, only to be exiled to the antimodernist United Kingdom during the Nazi years. Later, under the democratizing influence of American universities, Gropius became an advocate of public art and cemented a starring role in twentieth-century architecture and design.
Fiona MacCarthy challenges the image of Gropius as a doctrinaire architectural rationalist, bringing out the visionary philosophy and courage that carried him through a politically hostile age. Pilloried by Tom Wolfe as inventor of the monolithic high-rise, Gropius is better remembered as inventor of a form of art education that influenced schools worldwide. He viewed argument as intrinsic to creativity. Unusually for one in his position, Gropius encouraged women’s artistic endeavors and sought equal romantic partners. Though a traveler in elite circles, he objected to the cloistering of beauty as “a special privilege for the aesthetically initiated.”
Gropius offers a poignant and personal story—and a fascinating reexamination of the urges that drove European and American modernism.
When championing the commercial buildings and homes that made the Windy City famous, one can’t help but mention the brilliant names of their architects—Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. But few people are aware of Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931), the man responsible for an extraordinarily rich chapter in the city’s turn-of-the-century building boom, and fewer still realize Cobb’s lasting importance as a designer of the private and public institutions that continue to enrich Chicago’s exceptional architectural heritage.
Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is the first book about this distinguished architect and the magnificent buildings he created, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Athletic Association, the Fisheries Building for the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Chicago Federal Building. Cobb filled a huge institutional void with his inventive Romanesque and Gothic buildings—something that the other architect-giants, occupied largely with residential and commercial work, did not do. Edward W. Wolner argues that these constructions and the enterprises they housed—including the first buildings and master plan for the University of Chicago—signaled that the city had come of age, that its leaders were finally pursuing the highest ambitions in the realms of culture and intellect.
Assembling a cast of colorful characters from a free-wheeling age gone by, and including over 140 images of Cobb’s most creative buildings, Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is a rare achievement: a dynamic portrait of an architect whose institutional designs decisively changed the city’s identity during its most critical phase of development.
Though he garnered global praise at the peak of his career from 1960 to 1990, Australian architect John Andrews faced waning fame as postmodern cultural transformations challenged modernist design values, and wider social and economic changes led to a withdrawal of government-funded institutional commissions. Yet his body of work is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be better known.
Following a path from Australia to the United States and Canada and back again, John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense examines his most important buildings and reveals how the internationalization of architecture during this period was an unexpectedly dispersed geographical phenomenon, following more complex flows and localized progressions than earlier modernist ideas that travelled from center to periphery, metropole to outpost. Andrews negotiated the advent of postmodernism not by ignoring it, but by cultivating approaches that this new era foregrounded—identity, history, place—within the formal vocabularies of modernism. As Andrews assumed wider public roles and took appointments that allowed him to shape architectural education, he influenced design culture beyond his own personal portfolio. This book presents his legacy traversing local and international scenes and exemplifying late-modern developments of architecture while offering both generational continuities and discontinuities with what came after.
John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense features essays from Paul Walker, Mary Lou Lobsinger, Peter Scriver and Antony Moulis, Philip Goad, and Paolo Scrivano, along with nearly 100 new photographs from visual artist Noritaka Minami of existing buildings designed by Andrews in North America and Australia.
Complex, controversial, and prolific, Howard Barnstone was a central figure in the world of twentieth-century modern architecture. Recognized as Houston’s foremost modern architect in the 1950s, Barnstone came to prominence for his designs with partner Preston M. Bolton, which transposed the rigorous and austere architectural practices of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the hot, steamy coastal plain of Texas. Barnstone was a man of contradictions—charming and witty but also self-centered, caustic, and abusive—who shaped new settings that were imbued, at once, with spatial calm and emotional intensity.
Making Houston Modern explores the provocative architect’s life and work, not only through the lens of his architectural practice but also by delving into his personal life, class identity, and connections to the artists, critics, collectors, and museum directors who forged Houston’s distinctive culture in the postwar era. Edited by three renowned voices in the architecture world, this volume situates Barnstone within the contexts of American architecture, modernism, and Jewish culture to unravel the legacy of a charismatic personality whose imaginative work as an architect, author, teacher, and civic commentator helped redefine architecture in Texas.
Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961) was an American architect and artist, one of the first licensed female architects in the world, designer for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Chicago studio, and an original member of the Prairie School of architecture. Largely heralded for her exquisite presentation drawings for both Wright and her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, Mahony was an adventurous designer in her own right, whose independent and highly original work attracted attention at a moment when architectural drawing and graphic illustration were becoming integral to the design process.
This book examines new research into Mahony’s life and paints a vivid portrait of a woman’s place among the lives and productions of some of our most noted American architects. The essays included take us on an ambitious journey from Mahony’s origins in the Chicago suburbs, through her years as Wright’s right-hand woman and her bohemian life with her husband in Australia—whose new capital city, Canberra, she helped to plan—up until her golden years in the middle of the twentieth century. Filled with richly detailed analyses of Mahony’s works and including and populated by an international cast of characters, Marion Mahony Reconsidered greatly expands our knowledge of this talented, complex, and enigmatic modern architect.
Honored with the 1990 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for a lifetime of outstanding achievement, Fay Jones is an Arkansas original. In receiving the medal from Prince Charles of Great Britain, Jones was hailed as a “powerful and special genius who embodies nearly all the qualities we admire in an architect” and as an artist who used his vision to craft “mysterious and magical places” not only in Arkansas but all over the world.
This book accompanied a special museum exhibit of Jones’s life and work at the Old State House in Little Rock. It traces Jones’s development from his early years as a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff, to the culmination of his ability in such arresting structures as Pinecote Pavilion in Picayune, Mississippi; Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Chapman University Chapel in Orange, California. Through the black-and-white photographs of the homes, chapels, and other buildings that Jones has created and the accompanying captions and interviews of the architect, the reader is allowed a view into this man’s remarkable talent.
Designing structures that fuse architecture and landscape, the organic and the man-made, Jones has created special places which touch their viewers with the power and subtlety of poetry. Herein we learn why.
From the Foreword by Robert Adams Ivy Jr.:
“Fay Jones’s architecture begins in order and ends in mystery. . . . His role can perhaps best be understood as mediator, a human consciousness that has arisen from the Arkansas soil and scoured the cosmos, then spoken through the voices of stone and wood, steel and glass. Art, philosophy, craft, and human aspiration coalesce in his masterworks, transformed from acts of will into harmonies: Jones lets space sing.”
Winner, 2017 Ned Shank Award for Outstanding Preservation Publication from Preserve Arkansas
Shadow Patterns: Reflections on Fay Jones and His Architecture is a collection of critical essays and personal accounts of the man the American Institute of Architects honored with its highest award, the Gold Medal, in 1990.
The essays range from the academic, with appreciations and observations by Juhanni Palaasma and Robert McCarter and Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, to personal reflections by clients and friends. Two of Arkansas’s most accomplished writers, Roy Reed and Ellen Gilchrist, who each live in Fay Jones houses, have provided intimate portrayals of what it’s like to live in, and manage the quirks of, a “house built by a genius,” where “light is everywhere. . . . Everything is quiet, and everything is a surprise,” as Gilchrist says.
Through this compendium of perspectives, readers will learn about Jones’s personal qualities, including his strong will, his ability to convince other people of the rightness of his ideas, and yet his willingness, at times, to change his mind. We also enter into the work: powerful architecture like Stoneflower and Thorncrown Chapel and Pinecote Pavilion, along with private residences ranging from the modest to the monumental. And we learn about his relationship with his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Shadow Patterns broadens and enriches our understanding of this major figure in American architecture of the twentieth century.
William Strickland (1788–1854) was, in his day, among the most notable architects in the United States. An erstwhile student of Benjamin Henry Latrobe and a contemporary of Robert Mills, Strickland first entered the world of architecture at a young age in Philadelphia. But given that many of Strickland’s buildings have not survived, and considering the sparse and dispersed collection of primary sources Strickland left upon his death, little contemporary scholarship has appeared concerning Strickland’s significant contributions to the built environment of the early nineteenth century.
In William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture, Robert Russell does much to rectify this underrepresentation of Strickland’s notable architectural contributions in contemporary scholarship. In this first monograph detailing Strickland’s life and works since 1950 Russell examines the architectural production of Strickland during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Russell begins with the well-known Second Bank of the United States (Philadelphia)—the project that launched Strickland onto the national stage—eventually bringing his analysis to the south with an examination of the Tennessee State Capitol Building (Nashville). These two monuments bookended the American Greek Revival of the nineteenth century. Russell’s careful descriptions and insightful analyses of William Strickland’s work highlight the architect’s artistic skills and contributions to American material culture over the course of fifty years.
Ornamenting his examination with more than one hundred illustrations, Russell takes readers on a comprehensive journey through Strickland’s architecture. Part biography, part architectural history, William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture is an invaluable resource for scholars and artists alike, illustrating Strickland’s critical role in American architectural history and celebrating the icon behind buildings in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and beyond that are still admired and appreciated today.
This inaugural issue is devoted to studies of Taliesin I. Designed and constructed in 1911 upon Wright’s return to Wisconsin from Europe, Taliesin I burned in August 1914. It thus became the most difficult Wright residence for Wright scholars to examine.
In this volume’s critical essays, Neil Levine offers a view of the different layers of meaning of Taliesin I; Scott Gartner explains the legend of the Welsh bard Taliesin and its meaning for Wright; Anthony Alofsin considers the influence of the playwright Richard Hovey and the feminist Ellen Key on Wright’s and Cheney’s thought of the period; and Narciso G. Menocal suggests that the Gilmore and O’Shea houses in Madison, Wisconsin, are a collective antecedent to Taliesin I.
To conclude the volume, Anthony Alofsin has written what amounts to a catalogue raisonné of the drawings and photographs of Taliesin I. Surprisingly, he finds no photographs of the living area and argues that those that have been published are in fact of Taliesin II.
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