Results by title

22 books match the query 'Architecture, Modern'

Sort by

Architecture after Richardson

Regionalism before Modernism--Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow in Boston and Pittsburgh

Margaret Henderson Floyd

University of Chicago Press, 1994

Most histories of American architecture after H. H. Richardson have emphasized the work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in the Middle West. By examining instead the legacy of three highly successful architects who were in practice simultaneously in New England and Western Pennsylvania from 1886 into the 1920s, Margaret Henderson Floyd underscores the architectural significance of another part of the nation.

Floyd critically' assesses the careers, works, and patronage of Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Frank Ellis Alden, and Alfred Branch Harlow. Longfellow and Alden were senior draftsmen in H. H. Richardson's office, and Harlow worked with McKim, Mead & White in New York, Newport, and Boston. After Richardson's death, the three set up their own practice with offices in Boston and Pittsburgh, and these offices eventually became two separate practices. Over the years, their commissions included scores of city and country residences for the elite of both regions as well as major institutional and business buildings such as those at Harvard and Radcliffe, the Cambridge City Hall, and Pittsburgh's Duquesne Club and Carnegie Institute.

Placing these architects in a broader context of American architectural and landscape history, Floyd uncovers a strong cultural affinity between turn-of-the-century Boston and Pittsburgh. She also reveals an unsuspected link between the path of modernism from Richardson to Wright and the evolution of anti-modern imagery manifested in regionalism. Floyd thus combines her analysis of the work of Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow with a critique of mid-twentieth-century historiography to expose connections between New England regionalism, the arts and crafts movement, and such innovators as Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller.

[more]

Automatic Architecture

Motivating Form after Modernism

Sean Keller

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In the 1960s and ’70s, architects, influenced by recent developments in computing and the rise of structuralist and poststructuralist thinking, began to radically rethink how architecture could be created. Though various new approaches gained favor, they had one thing in common: they advocated moving away from the traditional reliance on an individual architect’s knowledge and instincts and toward the use of external tools and processes that were considered objective, logical, or natural. Automatic architecture was born.

The quixotic attempts to formulate such design processes extended modernist principles and tried to draw architecture closer to mathematics and the sciences. By focusing on design methods, and by examining evidence at a range of scales—from institutions to individual buildings—Automatic Architecture offers an alternative to narratives of this period that have presented postmodernism as a question of style, as the methods and techniques traced here have been more deeply consequential than the many stylistic shifts of the past half century. Sean Keller closes the book with an analysis of the contemporary condition, suggesting future paths for architectural practice that work through, but also beyond, the merely automatic.

[more]

Carson Pirie Scott

Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store

Joseph M. Siry

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Long recognized as a Chicago landmark, the Carson Pirie Scott Building also represents a milestone in the development of architecture. The last large commercial structure designed by Louis Sullivan, the Carson building reflected the culmination of the famed architect's career as a creator of tall steel buildings. In this study, Joseph Siry traces the origins of the building's design and analyzes its role in commercial, urban, and architectural history.

[more]

Chicago's North Michigan Avenue

Planning and Development, 1900-1930

John W. Stamper

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Since its opening in the 1920s, Chicago's North Michigan Avenue has been one of the city's most prestigious commerical corridors, lined by some of its most architecturally distinctive business, residential, and hotel buildings. Planned by Daniel Burnham in 1909, the avenue became the principal connecting link between downtown and the wealthy, residential "Gold Coast" north of the Loop. Some thirty buildings were constructed along its path in the ten-year period before the Depression, an urban expansion comparable in significance to that of Pennsylvania and Park Avenues.

John W. Stamper traces the complex development of North Michigan Avenue from the 1880s to the 1920s building boom that solidified its character and economic base, describing the initiation of the planning process by private interests to its execution aided by the city's powerful condemnation and taxation proceedings. He focuses on individual buildings constructed on the avenue, including the Renaissance- and Gothic-inspired Wrigley Building, Tribune Tower, and Drake Hotel, and places them within the context of factors governing their construction—property ownership, financing, zoning laws, design theory, and advertising.

Stamper compares this stylistically diverse mixture of low- and high-rise structures with earlier, rejected planning proposals, all of which had prescribed a uniformly designed, European-like avenue of continuous cornice heights, consistent facade widths, and complementary stylistic features. He analyzes the drastically different character the avenue took by 1930, with high-rise towers reaching thirty stories and beyond, in terms of the clash among economic, political, and architectural interests. His argument—that the discrepancies between the rejected plans and reality illustrate the developers' choice of economic return on their investment over aesthetic community—is extended through to the present avenue and the virtual disregard of the urban qualities proposed at its inception. Generously illustrated, with an epilogue condensing the avenue's history between the end of World War II and the present, this is an exhaustive account of an important topic in the history of modern architecture and city planning.

[more]

Concrete Century

Julius Kahn and the Construction Revolution

Michael G. Smith

University of Michigan Press, 2024

At the turn of the 20th century, industrial manufacturing was expanding dramatically while factory buildings remained fire-prone relics of an earlier age. That is, until a 28-year-old civil engineer finally achieved what engineers around the world had unsuccessfully attempted. Working in his brother’s basement in Detroit, Julius Kahn invented the first practical and scientific method of reinforcing concrete with steel bars, which finally made it possible to construct strong, fireproof buildings. After Kahn founded a company in 1903 to manufacture and sell his reinforcement bars, his system of construction became the most widely used throughout the world.

Drawing upon Kahn’s personal correspondence, architectural drawings, company records, and contemporary news and journal articles, Michael G. Smith reveals how this man—whose family had immigrated to the US to escape antisemitism in Germany—played an important role in the rise of concrete. Concrete not only turned the tide against widespread destruction of buildings by fire, it also paved the way for our modern economy. Concrete Century will delight readers intrigued by architecture and construction technology alike with the true origin story of modern concrete buildings.

[more]

Depositions

Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship

By Catherine Seavitt Nordenson

University of Texas Press, 2018

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.

[more]

Eugenics in the Garden

Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity

By Fabiola López-Durán

University of Texas Press, 2018

Winner, Robert Motherwell Book Award, Outstanding Book on Modernism in the Arts, The Dedalus Foundation, 2019

As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress.

Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban planning, becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity in the new Latin world. Journeying back and forth between France, Brazil, and Argentina, Fabiola López-Durán uncovers the complicity of physicians and architects on both sides of the Atlantic, who participated in a global strategy of social engineering, legitimized by the authority of science. In doing so, she reveals the ideological trajectory of one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, who deployed architecture in what he saw as the perfecting and whitening of man. The first in-depth interrogation of eugenics’ influence on the construction of the modern built environment, Eugenics in the Garden convincingly demonstrates that race was the main tool in the geopolitics of space, and that racism was, and remains, an ideology of progress.

[more]

Inland Empire

Settler Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Southern California

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió

Duke University Press, 2026

In Inland Empire, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió examines how modernist architecture and urban design structured US settler colonialism and capitalist hegemony in the twentieth century. Focusing on Palm Springs’s settlement upon the Agua Caliente Reservation and other reservations in inland Southern California, he shows how architecture became a key technology for governing empire at the height of the state’s drive to terminate Native American sovereignty. Through extensive archival research and dialogue with Cahuilla, Kumeyaay, and other Tribal community members, Shvartzberg Carrió offers a new architectural history of modernism. Carefully placing the work of seminal California architects within the genealogy of manifest destiny, he demonstrates how their designs over settler and Native housing, prefabrication technologies, the logistics of migrant construction labor, community development plans, and environmental infrastructures offered new ways of managing Indigenous resistance—a spatial turn in Native American administration that constituted a veritable workshop for neoliberalization policies later sponsored globally by the United States. Charting Indigenous nations’ responses to these momentous challenges, Inland Empire details how they deployed novel modes of resistance grounded in Native architectural histories, spatial practices, and epistemologies of land.

[more]

Managing Energy Use in Modern Buildings

Case Studies in Conservation Practice

Bernard Flaman

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

This timely volume brings together case studies that address the urgent need to manage energy use and improve thermal comfort in modern buildings while preserving their historic significance and character.

This collection of ten case studies addresses the issues surrounding the improvement of energy consumption and thermal comfort in modern buildings built between 1928 and 1969 and offers valuable lessons for other structures facing similar issues. These buildings, international in scope and diverse in type, style, and size, range from the Shulman House, a small residence in Los Angeles, to the TD Bank Tower, a skyscraper complex in Toronto, and from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a cultural venue in Lisbon, to the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam, now an office building. Showing ingenuity and sensitivity, the case studies consider improvements to such systems as heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, and controls. They provide examples that demonstrate best practices in conservation and show ways to reduce carbon footprints, minimize impacts to historic materials and features, and introduce renewable energy sources, in compliance with energy codes and green-building rating systems.

The Conserving Modern Heritage series, launched in 2019, is written by architects, engineers, conservators, scholars, and allied professionals. The books in this series provide well-vetted case studies that address the challenges of conserving twentieth-century heritage.

[more]

Mediterranean Crossroads

Marseille and Modern Architecture

Sheila Crane

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Marseille was a booming Mediterranean port. Positioned at the very edge of France, the city functioned as a critical fulcrum between the metropolitan center and its overseas empire. A notoriously dangerous and cosmopolitan city, Marseille became the focus of the extraordinary energies of some of the most remarkable architects and theorists of urban modernity.

Drawing together a cast of both world-renowned and less familiar architects, photographers, and cultural theorists, including Le Corbusier, Sigfried Giedion, Walter Benjamin, and László Moholy-Nagy, Mediterranean Crossroads examines how mythic ideas about Marseille helped to shape its urban landscape. Tracing successive planning proposals in tandem with shifting representations of the city in photographs, film, guidebooks, and postcards, Sheila Crane reconstructs the history and politics of architecture in Marseille from the 1920s through the years of rebuilding after World War II.

By exploring how architects and planners negotiated highly localized pressures, evolving imperial visions, and transnational aspirations at the borders of Europe and the Mediterranean region, Mediterranean Crossroads brings to life a lost chapter in the history of modern architecture.

[more]

Mies van der Rohe

A Critical Biography, New and Revised Edition

Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography is a major rewriting and expansion of Franz Schulze’s acclaimed 1985 biography, the first full treatment of the master German-American modern architect. Coauthored with architect Edward Windhorst, this revised edition, three times the length of the original text, features extensive new research and commentary and draws on the best recent work of American and German scholars. The authors’ major new discoveries include the massive transcript of the early-1950s Farnsworth House court case, which discloses for the first time the facts about Mies’s epic battle with his client Edith Farnsworth. Giving voice to dozens of architects who knew and worked with (and sometimes against) Mies, this comprehensive biography tells the compelling story of how Mies and his students and followers created some of the most significant buildings of the twentieth century.

[more]

Millennials in Architecture

Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession

Darius Sollohub

University of Texas Press, 2019

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosive population growth, climate change, and the density of cities, Millennials in Architecture embraces the digitally savvy disruptors who are joining the field at a crucial time as it grapples with the best ways to respond to a changing physical world.

Taking a clear-eyed look at the new generation in the context of the design professions, Darius Sollohub begins by situating Millennials in a line of generations stretching back to early Modernism, exploring how each generation negotiates the ones before and after. He then considers the present moment, closely evaluating the significance of Millennial behaviors and characteristics (from civic-mindedness to collaboration, and time management in a 24/7 culture), all underpinned by fluency in the digital world. The book concludes with an assessment of the profound changes and opportunities that Millennial disruption will bring to education, licensure, and firm management. Encouraging new alliances, Millennials in Architecture is an essential resource for the architectural community and its stakeholders.

[more]

Modernism at Mid-Century

The Architecture of the United States Air Force Academy

Edited by Robert Bruegmann

University of Chicago Press, 1994

One of the country's largest and most important postwar architectural projects, the United States Air Force Academy opened in 1958. With its spectacular natural setting and stunning Modernist design, the Academy was quickly hailed as a national landmark and attracts over a million visitors each year.

The contributors to this volume (Jory Johnson, Robert Nauman, Sheri Olson, James Russell, and Kristen Schaffer) and editor Robert Bruegmann chronicle the complex history of the planning, design, and construction of the Air Force Academy. As the most conspicuous commission of the American military at the height of the Cold War, the design of the Academy generated intense popular interest and was a lightning rod for conflicting values in postwar society. The design, by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has been hailed as the final triumph of the International Style and as a monument to military bureaucracy.

[more]

Morality and Architecture Revisited

David Watkin

University of Chicago Press, 2001

When Morality and Architecture was first published in 1977, it received passionate praise and equally passionate criticism. An editorial in Apollo, entitled "The Time Bomb," claimed that "it deserved to become a set book in art school and University art history departments," and the Times Literary Supplement savaged it as an example of "that kind of vindictiveness of which only Christians seem capable."

Here, for the first time, is the story of the book's impact. In writing his groundbreaking polemic, David Watkin had taken on the entire modernist establishment, tracing it back to Pugin, Viollet-le-Duc, Corbusier, and others who claimed that their chosen style had to be truthful and rational, reflecting society's needs. Any critic of this style was considered antisocial and immoral. Only covertly did the giants of the architectural establishment support the author. Watkin gives an overview of what has happened since the book's publication, arguing that many of the old fallacies still persist. This return to the attack is a revelation for anyone concerned architecture's past and future.

Morality and Architecture Revisited contains the entire text of the book Morality and Architecture , plus additonal material by David Wakin on the controversy that the the book created.

[more]

Non-Design

Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market

Anthony Fontenot

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Anthony Fontenot’s staggeringly ambitious book uncovers the surprisingly libertarian heart of the most influential British and American architectural and urbanist discourses of the postwar period, expressed as a critique of central design and a support of spontaneous order. Non-Design illuminates the unexpected philosophical common ground between enemies of state support, most prominently the economist Friedrich Hayek, and numerous notable postwar architects and urbanists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jane Jacobs. These thinkers espoused a distinctive concept of "non-design,"characterized by a rejection of conscious design and an embrace of various phenomenon that emerge without intention or deliberate human guidance. This diffuse and complex body of theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of the time, shunning the traditions of modern design in favor of the wisdom, freedom, and self-organizing capacity of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known commonalities between the aesthetic deregulation sought by ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek’s more controversial conception of state power, detailing what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture and urbanism, as well as liberal and libertarian philosophies.

[more]

Nothing Permanent

Modern Architecture in California

Todd Cronan

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements

Although “mid-century modern” has evolved into a highly popular and ubiquitous architectural style, this term obscures the varied perspectives and approaches of its original practitioners. In Nothing Permanent, Todd Cronan displaces generalizations with a nuanced intellectual history of architectural innovation in California between 1920 and 1970, uncovering the conflicting intentions that would go on to reshape the future of American domestic life.

Focusing on four primary figures—R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames—Nothing Permanent demonstrates how this prolific era of modern architecture in California, rather than constituting a homogenous movement, was propelled by disparate approaches and aims. Exemplified by the twin pillars of Schindler and Neutra and their respective ideological factions, these two groups of architects represent opposing poles of architectural intentionality, embodying divergent views about the dynamic between interior and exterior, the idea of permanence, and the extent to which architects could exercise control over the inhabitants of their structures.

Looking past California modernism’s surface-level idealization in present-day style guides, home decor publications, films, and television shows, Nothing Permanent details the intellectual, aesthetic, and practical debates that lie at the roots of this complex architectural moment. Extracting this period from its diffusion into visual culture, Cronan argues that mid-century architecture in California raised questions about the meaning of architecture and design that remain urgent today.

[more]

Old Capitol

Portrait of an Iowa Landmark

Margaret N. Keyes

University of Iowa Press, 1988

Built between 1839 and 1842, the domed structure of Iowa City's Old Capitol served as the third territorial capitol and the first state capitol of Iowa. In 1857, when the state government was moved to Des Moines, Old Capitol became the first building of the new University of Iowa. It remains today the centerpiece of this handsome campus. The story of its history and restoration, told in this elegantly illustrated book, is an intriguing account of historical architectural detection.

Using primary sources, including manuscripts, vouchers, account books, newspaper stories, correspondence, and documents from the National Archives and Iowa repositories, Margaret Keyes portrays the major events of the total history of Old Capitol since its site was determined.

[more]

Relearning from Las Vegas

Aron Vinegar

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Evaluates for the first time one of the foundational works in architecture criticism

Immediately on its publication in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, was hailed as a transformative work in the history and theory of architecture, liberating those in architecture who were trying to find a way out of the straitjacket of architectural orthodoxies. Resonating far beyond the professional and institutional boundaries of the field, the book contributed to a thorough rethinking of modernism and was subsequently taken up as an early manifestation and progenitor of postmodernism.

Going beyond analyzing the original text, the essays provide insights into the issues surrounding architecture, culture, and philosophy that have been influenced by Learning from Las Vegas. For the contributors, as for scholars in an array of fields, the pioneering book is as relevant to architectural debates today as it was when it was first published.Contributors: Ritu Bhatt, Karsten Harries, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, John McMorrough, Katherine Smith, Dell Upton, Nigel Whitely.

[more]